Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race

The West Computers watched their colleague remove the sign and banish it to the recesses of her purse, her small act of defiance inspiring both anxiety and a sense of empowerment. The ritual played itself out with absurd regularity. The sign, placed by an unseen hand, made the unspoken rules of the cafeteria explicit. When Miriam snatched the sign, it took its leave for a few days, perhaps a week, maybe longer, before it was replaced with an identical twin, the letters of the new sign just as blankly menacing as its predecessor’s.

The signs and their removal were a regular topic of conversation among the women of West Computing, who debated the prudence of the action. As the sign drama played itself out in the Langley cafeteria, an incident that would have national repercussions took place in Gloucester County, just twenty miles away. Irene Morgan worked at the Baltimore-based aircraft manufacturer Glenn L. Martin Company, assigned to the production line of the B-26 Marauder. In the summer of 1944 she came home to Virginia on the Greyhound bus to visit her mother, but was arrested on the return trip to Baltimore for refusing to move to the Colored section. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund took the case and planned to use it to challenge segregation rules on interstate transportation. In 1946, the Supreme Court, in Morgan v. Virginia, held that segregation on interstate buses was illegal. But what hope had the West Computers of making a federal case out of something so banal as a cafeteria sign? More likely, whoever kept the table stocked with signs would just decide that it was time to get rid of the troublemakers. “They are going to fire you over that sign, Miriam,” her husband, William, told her at night over dinner. Negro life in America was a never-ending series of negotiations: when to fight and when to concede. This, Miriam had decided, was one to fight. “Then they’re just going to have to do it,” she would retort.

The Manns lived on Hampton Institute’s campus. Though the student body was predominantly black, the school’s president and much of the faculty were white. Malcolm MacLean, a former administrator from the University of Minnesota, had taken the helm of the school in 1940, and was determined that the school’s fully committed participation in the war effort would be his legacy. As the aeronautical laboratory expanded west to meet the demands of the war, its twin, Langley Field, sought to grow in order to accommodate the Army Air Corps’ booming operation. A Boston philanthropist had deeded to Hampton Institute a former plantation named Shellbanks Farm, which served as an agricultural laboratory for Negro and Indian students at the school. In 1941, MacLean oversaw the sale of the 770-acre property to the federal government for use by Langley Field, making it one of the largest air bases in the world.

Under MacLean’s direction, the college also established a US naval training school, effectively turning the campus into an active military base. Military police manned all campus entrances, patrolling the comings and goings of everyone on the grounds. From around the country, more than a thousand black naval recruits were sent to the school to receive instruction in the repair of airplane and boat engines. The graduates then headed off to stateside service at bases like Maryland’s Naval Air Station Patuxent River, ground zero for the navy’s flight test activity. And Hampton was determined to be the leader of all black colleges in providing the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training (ESMWT) programs that had graduated West Computing’s first members. Men and women crowded into Hampton Institute classrooms offering instruction in everything from radio science to chemistry. At a war labor conference that Hampton Institute hosted in 1942, MacLean told attendees that the war could be “the greatest break in history for minority groups.”

Many local whites considered MacLean distastefully progressive, dangerous even, with his strident calls to boost Negro participation in the war. But it was his comfort with racial mixing in social situations that really fanned the flames. In speeches, he urged white colleges to employ Negro professors. He entertained both white and black guests at the president’s residence (called the Mansion House), even allowing them to smoke. He went so far as to dance with a Hampton coed at a campus mixer, scandalizing the local gentry (and scoring points with the Hampton students). He seemed to be a true believer in the need for the Negro to advance in American society, a true champion of the tenets of the Double V.

Henry Reid, the engineer in charge of the Langley laboratory, was anything but a firebrand. An understated electrical engineering graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, Reid served as an able ambassador for the Yankee-heavy laboratory, replying to invitations to attend local bridge openings with the same care and promptness he used in corresponding with Orville Wright. He embraced the Hampton and Newport News Kiwanis Club set that MacLean spurned. And yet, in some ways the two men were cut from the same cloth: passionate about their particular fields, pragmatic by nature, come-heres with interests and responsibilities that extended beyond the southern sensibilities and social obligations of the town in which they worked. Almost certainly at some point they found themselves in the same place at the same time, in their hurried efforts to push their respective institutions to keep up with the rhythm of the war. Neither left fingerprints on Langley’s decision to hire black women mathematicians. Keeping a public distance from the matter might have been a strategic decision on the part of both men: if the approval process took place quietly, through the “color-blind” bureaucratic gears of the US Civil Service Commission, there was less chance of derailing an advance that served both their missions. The word about the Colored Computers made the round in the community, naturally, and there were those who saw in their employment evidence that the world was coming to an end. Even among the local gentry who attended concerts and theater at Hampton Institute’s grand concert auditorium, Ogden Hall, there were those who expected to be seated at the front of the hall, apart even from the school’s black faculty and administrators.

Some of Langley’s white employees openly defied southern conventions. Head computer Margery Hannah went out of her way to treat the West Area women as equals, and had even invited some of them to work-related social affairs at her apartment. This was nearly unheard of, and made Marge a pariah as far as some white colleagues were concerned.

One of the most brilliant engineers on the laboratory’s staff took an active interest in standing up to the prejudice he saw around town. Robert “R. T.” Jones, whose theory on triangular delta-shaped airplane wings would revolutionize the discipline, was walking through the streets of Hampton one evening when he came upon a group of Hampton police officers harassing a black man. The cops were on the verge of beating the man up when Jones shouted at them to stop. They left the man alone and allowed him to leave, deciding instead to take Jones into custody. He spent the night in the city hoosegow for his trouble. Another engineer, Arthur Kantrowitz, bailed Jones out the next morning.

Engineers from the northern and western states were probably of mixed minds on the issue of race mixing. While it may have been unthinkable for most to extend their social circles to include black colleagues, within the circumscribed atmosphere of the office, they were cordial, even friendly. They got to know the women by their work, requesting their favorites for projects, open to giving a smart person—black or white, male or female—the chance to work hard and get the numbers right. That pragmatic majority, the West Computers knew, were the ones who had the power to break down the barriers that existed at Langley.

Their facilities might be separate, but as far as the West Computers were concerned, they would prove themselves equal or better, having internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far. They wore their professional clothes like armor. They wielded their work like weapons, warding off the presumption of inferiority because they were Negro or female. They corrected each other’s work and policed their ranks like soldiers against tardiness, sloppy appearance, and the perception of loose morals. They warded off the negative stereotypes that haunted Negroes like shadows, using tough love to protect both the errant individual and the group from her failings. And each time the laboratory passed the collection plate for Uncle Sam, the West Computers reached into their purses as they had when they were teachers, so that West Computing could claim 100 percent participation in the purchase of war bonds.

At some point during the war, the COLORED COMPUTERS sign disappeared into Miriam Mann’s purse and never came back. The separate office remained, as did the segregated bathrooms, but in the Battle of the West Area Cafeteria, the unseen hand had been forced to concede victory to its petite but relentless adversary. Not that the West Computers were hatching plans to invade a neighboring table; they just wanted dominion over their table in the back corner. Miriam Mann’s insistence on sending the humiliating sign to oblivion gave her and the other women of West Computing just a little more room for dignity and the confidence that the laboratory might belong to them as well.

Perhaps the unseen hand and its collaborators had come to the conclusion that the quiet endurance of the West Computers was a force better engaged than antagonized, for if there was one thing the war had required over the last three years, and one thing Negroes had in abundance, it was endurance. Those forecasting a swift and tidy end to the war had been numerous but wrong. The fight slogged on, requiring more people, more money, more planes and technology. Someday the war would end, but it didn’t look to be happening tomorrow. The tide of the war might be turning, but there were many battles ahead to win, and victory would require perseverance.

Not everyone could take the long hours and high stakes of working at Langley, but most of the women in West Computing felt that if they didn’t stand up to the pressure, they’d forfeit their opportunity, and maybe opportunity for the women who would come after them. They had more riding on the jobs at Langley than most. The relationships begun in those early days in West Computing would blossom into friendships that extended throughout the women’s lifetimes and beyond, into the lives of their children. Dorothy Vaughan, Miriam Mann, and Kathryn Peddrew were becoming a band of sisters in and out of work, each day bringing them closer to each other and tethering them to the place that was transforming them as they helped to transform it.

Dorothy listened carefully as Marge Hannah took her through the ropes of the job, taking care to note the expectations with the same exacting eye she herself had applied to grading her students at Moton: Accuracy of operations. Skill in the application of techniques and procedures. Accuracy of judgments or decisions. Dependability. Initiative. Even if the job lasted only six months, she was going to make the most of this chance. For an ambitious young mathematical mind—or even one not so young—there wasn’t a better seat in the world.

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_5afcec29-8d07-5ce0-a0f2-48dcdb48eac8)

War Birds (#ulink_5afcec29-8d07-5ce0-a0f2-48dcdb48eac8)

Readers of black newspapers around the country followed the exploits of the Tuskegee airmen with an intensity that bordered on the obsessive. Who said a Negro couldn’t fly! Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. and the 332nd Fighter Group took the war to the Axis powers from thirty thousand feet. The papers sent special correspondents to shadow the pilots as they served in the skies over Europe, each dispatch from the European front producing shivers of delight. Flyers Help Smash Nazis! Negro Pilots Sink Nazi Warship! 332nd Bags 25 Enemy Planes, Breaks Record in Weekend Victories! No radio serial could compete with the real-life exploits of the men who were the very embodiment of the Double V.

The “Tan Yanks,” as the black press dubbed the black GIs fighting overseas, loved their planes as passionately as any other American pilots. Their lives, and those of the bomber crews they escorted, depended on knowing the plane’s every strength and weakness, its peccadillos and eccentricities, on coaxing it and coercing it and waltzing with it through the sky. Initially serving in Bell P-39 Airacobras, they moved on to Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, and by the summer of 1944 the 332nd was flying North American P-51 Mustangs. “The assignment of the terrific P-51 Mustang plane to all of the Negro pilots foreshadows important missions and sweeps ahead for them as the war enters its decisive stage,” wrote the Norfolk Journal and Guide.

“It’s best described as a ‘pilot’s airplane,’ ” said an American military official in a front-page article in the Washington Post. “It’s very fast and handles beautifully at high speeds. Fliers feel that they have always known how to fly the plane after they’ve been in it only a few moments.” With a big four-blade propeller and a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, the Mustang sped into the sky like a champion racehorse. Once aloft, it soared for an eternity, pushing up against 400 miles per hour with the ease of a family sedan out for a Sunday drive. And it was a damn fierce contender in a dogfight. As far as the Tuskegee airmen were concerned, it was the best plane in the world.

“I will get you up in the air, let you do your job, and bring you back to earth safely,” promised the Mustang, and it delivered. Exactly how it did that wasn’t the pilot’s concern, but making good on that pledge was now Dorothy Vaughan’s full-time job.

“Laboratories at war!” shouted Air Scoop. The NACA sought nothing less than to crush Germany by air, destroying its production machine and interrupting the technological developments that could hand it a military advantage. Langley was one of the United States’ most powerful offensive weapons—a secret weapon, or nearly secret, hidden in plain sight in a small southern town.

Certainly the Tan Yanks would have marveled to know that supporting the performance of their beloved Mustang was a group of Colored Computers. But whereas every maneuver executed by the 332nd in their red-tailed Mustangs fed the headlines, the daily work of the West Computers and the rest of the laboratory employees was sensitive, confidential, or secret. Henry Reid advised employees to stay on the lookout for spies disguised as Langley Field soldiers and warned of fifth column plants who might coax valuable research from unwitting laboratory employees. Managers upbraided a group of messenger boys overheard dishing office dirt at a local diner, and engineers caught having a loud, detailed work conversation at the Industrial USO were called on the carpet. Air Scoop sounded the alarm: “You tell it to someone who repeats it to someone who’s overheard by someone in Axis pay, so SOMEONE you know … may die!” Employees learned to keep mum on the work front even at the family dinner table. But even if they wanted to share the particulars of the day’s toil, finding someone outside of Langley who understood what they were talking about would have been well nigh impossible.

In the twenty-four years since the Langley laboratory had started operation, the glitterati of the aeronautical world had made pilgrimages to Hampton. Orville Wright and Charles Lindbergh served on the NACA’s executive committee. Amelia Earhart nearly lost her raccoon coat to a wind tunnel’s giant turbine while touring the lab. Tycoon Howard Hughes made an appearance at the lab’s 1934 research conference, and Hollywood showed up at the airfield to shoot the 1938 movie Test Pilot, starring Clark Gable, Spencer Tracey, and Myrna Loy. The people the famous came to see—Eastman Jacobs, Max Munk, Robert Jones, Theodore Theodorsen—were the best minds in a thrilling new discipline. Even so, most locals were oblivious to how they and their colleagues spent their days; and to be frank, they found them more than a little peculiar. Their ways and accents often marked them as Californians, Europeans, Yankees, even, God forbid, “New York Jews.” They donned rumpled shirts with no ties and wore sandals; some of them sported beards. Locals dubbed them “brain busters” or “NACA nuts”; the less polite called them “weirdos.”

Asked about their jobs, they demurred. Around town, they confused and horrified residents by doing things like dismantling a toaster with a screwdriver at the local department store to make sure the heating coil would toast the bread just so. One employee brought a pressure gauge from the lab into a store to test the suction capabilities of a vacuum cleaner model. Local car salesmen wanted to roll over and play dead when one of the Langley fellas pulled into the lot, fearing a barrage of nonsensical and unanswerable technical questions. They drove to work with books on their steering wheels. The NACA nuts always thought they had a better way to do anything—everything—and didn’t hesitate to tell the locals so. Eastman Jacobs’ legendary attempt to launch a car attached to a glider plane using Hampton’s tony Chesapeake Avenue as a runway only confirmed the Hamptonians’ feelings that the good Lord didn’t always see fit to give book sense and common sense to the same individual.

But Langley was a conclave of the world’s best aerodynamicists, the leading edge of the technology that was transforming not only the nature of war but civilian transportation and the economy. The distance between the NACA’s discovery of new aerodynamic concepts and their application to pressing engineering problems was so short, and the pace of their research and development so constant, that an entry-level position at the laboratory was the best engineering graduate school program in the world. Eager front-row boys from the lecture halls of MIT and Michigan and Purdue and Virginia Tech angled for a shot at getting in the door where Dorothy now sat.

With the goal of turning lady math teachers into crack junior engineers, the laboratory sponsored a crash course in engineering physics for new computers, an advanced version of the class offered at Hampton Institute. Two days a week after work, Dorothy and the other new girls filed into a makeshift classroom at the laboratory for a full immersion in the fundamental theory of aerodynamics. They also attended a weekly two-hour laboratory session for hands-on training in one of the wind tunnels, shouldering an average of four hours of homework on top of a six-day workweek. Their teachers were the laboratory’s most promising young talents, men such as Arthur Kantrowitz, who was simultaneously an NACA physicist and a Cornell PhD candidate under the supervision of atomic physicist Edward Teller.

After twelve years at the head of the classroom, the tables had turned, and for the first time since graduating from Wilberforce University, Dorothy Vaughan gave herself fully to the discipline that had most engaged her youthful mind. She had come full circle and then some, as she tried to attune her ear to the argot that flew back and forth between the inhabitants of the laboratory, all seeking to answer the fundamental question “What makes things fly?” Dorothy, like most Americans, had never flown on a plane, and in all likelihood, before landing at Langley, she had never given the question more than a passing consideration.

The first courses imparted the basics of aerodynamics. For a wing moving through the air, the slower-moving air on the bottom of the wing exerts a greater force than the faster-moving air on the top. This difference in pressure creates lift, the almost magical force that causes the wing, and the plane (or animal) attached to it, to ascend into the sky. Smooth air flowing around the wing means the plane can slip through the sky with minimum friction, the way the most efficient swimmers cut through the water. Turbulent flows, like the swirl and churn of rapids in the water, resist the plane, slowing it down and making it harder to maneuver. One of the NACA’s great contributions to aerodynamics was a series of laminar flow airfoils, wing shapes designed to maximize the flow of smooth air around the wing. Aircraft manufacturers could outfit planes with wings based on a variety of NACA specifications, like choosing kitchen appliances from a catalog for a new house. The P-51 Mustang was the first production plane to use one of the NACA’s laminar airfoils, a factor that contributed to its superior performance.

Future generations would take the advances for granted, but in the early days the mechanical birds yielded their secrets slowly, pressed by disciplined experimentation, rigorous mathematics, insight, and luck. In the heyday of the Wright brothers and the laboratory’s namesake, inventor and researcher Samuel Langley, those with a vision for a flying machine took a “cut and try” approach: make some assumptions, build a plane, try to fly it, and, if you didn’t die in the process, implement what you learned on your next attempt. Aeronautics’ evolution from a wobbly infancy to a strapping adolescence gave rise to the professions of aeronautical engineer and test pilot. Daring men—and with the exception of Ann Baumgartner Carl at Ohio’s Wright Field, they were all men—the test pilots did the “damn fool’s job” of flying an airplane directly into its weak spot. Each time the pilot pushed the aircraft to the limit, identifying how to make a good plane better and a bad plane nonexistent, he risked his own life and the loss of a very expensive piece of equipment.

A wind tunnel offered many of the research benefits of flight tests but without the danger. The basics of the tool rested on a simple concept, known even to Leonardo da Vinci: air moving at a certain speed over a stationary object was like moving the object through the air at the same speed. At its simplest, a wind tunnel was a big box attached to a big fan. Engineers blasted air over planes, sometimes full-sized vehicles or fractional-scale models, even disembodied wings or fuselages, closely observing how the air flowed around the object in order to extrapolate how the object would fly through the air.

Most of the work done at Langley was of the “compressed-air” persuasion, research conducted in one of the proliferating number of wind tunnels. The names of the tunnels alone—the Variable-Density Tunnel, the Free-Flight Tunnel, the Two-Foot Smoke-Flow Tunnel, the Eleven-Inch High-Speed Tunnel—challenged the uninitiated to imagine the combination of pressure, velocity, and dimension that resided therein. The Full-Scale Tunnel’s thirty-by sixty-foot test section opened wide enough to swallow a full-sized plane. Though the West Area’s Sixteen-Foot High-Speed Tunnel had an exoskeleton the size of a battleship, the test section—the area where engineers, sitting at a control panel, observed the air flowing over the model—was only the size of a rowboat. But in order to accelerate the air to the necessary speed, giant wooden turbines had to accelerate the blast through the entirety of the tunnel’s circuit.

Of course, while moving the air over the object was similar to flying through the air, it wasn’t identical, so one of the first concepts Dorothy had to master was the Reynolds number, a bit of mathematical jujitsu that measured how closely the performance of a wind tunnel came to mimicking actual flight. Mastery of the Reynolds number, and using that knowledge to build wind tunnels that successfully simulated real-world conditions, was the key to the NACA’s success. Running the tunnels during the war presented yet another logistical challenge, as the local power company rationed electricity. The NACAites ran their giant turbines into the wee hours if necessary, engineers pressing the machines for answers to their research questions like night owls on the hunt for mice. Residents who lived near Langley complained about the sleep-disrupting roar of the tunnels. If they’d known more about the nature of the work behind the noise, and the successes being chalked up by the strange folks next door, the neighbors might have asked for a tour.

No organization came close to Langley in terms of the quality and range of wind tunnel research data and analysis. The laboratory also possessed the best flight research engineers, who worked closely with test pilots, sometimes as passengers in the vehicle itself, to capture data from planes in free flight. As Dorothy learned—the West Area Computers received many assignments from the lab’s Flight Research Division—it was not good enough to say that a plane flew well or badly; engineers now quantified a given vehicle’s performance against a nine-page checklist under the three broad categories of longitudinal stability and control (up-and-down motion), lateral stability and control (side-to-side motion), and stalling (sudden loss of lift, flight’s life force). The raw data from the work of these “fresh-air” engineers also found a home on Dorothy’s desk.

What total war and the American production miracle drew into sharp relief—and what Dorothy soon learned—was the fact that an airplane wasn’t one machine for a single purpose: it was a terrifically complex bundle of physics that could be tweaked to serve the needs of different situations. Like Darwin’s finches, the mechanical birds had begun to differentiate themselves, branching into distinct species adapted for success in particular environments. Their designations reflected their use: fighters—also called pursuit planes—were assigned letters F or P: for example, the Chance Vought F4U Corsair or the North American P-51 Mustang. The letter C identified a cargo plane like the Douglas C-47 Skytrain, built to transport military goods and troops and, eventually, commercial passengers. B was for bomber, like the mammoth and perfectly named B-29 Superfortress. And X identified an experimental plane still under development, designed for the purpose of research and testing. Planes lost their X designation—the B-29 was the direct descendant of the XB-29—once they went into production.

The same evolutionary forces prevailed to replicate a particular model’s positive traits and breed out excess drag and instability. The P-51A Mustang was a good plane; the P-51B and P-51C were great planes. After several rounds of refinement in the Langley wind tunnels, the Mustang achieved its apotheosis with the P-51D. Discoveries large and small contributed to the speed, maneuverability, and safety of the machine that symbolized the power and potential of an America that was ascending to a position of unparalleled global dominance. As the war approached its peak, every single American military airplane in production was based fundamentally—and in many cases in specific detail—upon the research results and recommendations of the NACA.

Regardless of whether the engineers conducted a test in a wind tunnel or in free flight, the output was the same: torrents, scads, bundles, reams, masses, mounds, jumbles, piles, and goo-gobs of numbers. Numbers from manometers, measuring the pressures distributed along a wing. Numbers from strain gauges, measuring forces acting on various parts of the plane’s structure. If something needed to be measured and the instrument didn’t exist, the engineers invented it, ran the test, and sent the numbers to the computers, along with instructions for what equations to use to process the data. The only groups that didn’t run numbers based on testing worked in the small Theoretical and Physical Research Division and the Stability Research Division—the “no-air” engineers. Rather than drawing conclusions based on direct observation of a plane’s performance, these engineers used mathematical theorems to model what the compressed-air engineers observed in wind tunnels and what the fresh-air engineers took to the skies to understand. The no-air girls came to think of themselves as “a cut above those that did nothing but work the machines.”

What Marge passed along to Dorothy and the women of West Computing was usually a small portion of a larger task, the work by necessity carved up into smaller pieces and distributed for quick, efficient, and accurate processing. By the time the work trickled down to the computer’s desk, it might be just a set of equations and eye-blearing numbers disembodied from all physical significance. She might not hear another word about the work until a piece appeared in Air Scoop or Aviation or Air Trails. Or never. For many men, a computer was a piece of living hardware, an appliance that inhaled one set of figures and exhaled another. Once a girl finished a particular job, the calculations were whisked away into the shadowy kingdom of the engineers. “Woe unto thee if they shall make thee a computer,” joked a column in Air Scoop. “For the Project Engineer will take credit for whatsoever thou doth that is clever and full of glory. But if he slippeth up, and maketh a wrong calculation, or pulleth a boner of any kind whatsoever, he shall lay the mistake at thy door when he is called to account and he shall say, ‘What can you expect from girl computers anyway?’ ”

Now and again, however, when a NACA achievement was so important that the news made the popular press, as was the case with the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, everyone got to take a victory lap. Newspapers wrote about the Superfortress and its exploits with the kind of fawning adoration accorded movie stars like Cary Grant. It was one of the planes that crossed over from being the love object of flyers and aviation insiders to a broadly known symbol of US technological prowess and bravery. The XB-29 model had logged more than a hundred hours in the laboratory’s Eight-Foot High-Speed Tunnel.

“There is no one in the Laboratory who should feel that he or she did not have a part in the bombing of Japan,” Henry Reid said to the lab’s employees. “The engineers who assisted, the mechanics and modelmakers who did their share, the computers who worked up the data, the secretaries who typed and retyped the results, and the janitors and maids who kept the tunnel clean and suitable for work all made their contribution for the final bombing of Japan.”

For seven months Dorothy Vaughan had apprenticed as a mathematician, growing more confident with the concepts, the numbers, and the people at Langley. Her work was making a difference in the outcome of the war. And the devastation Henry Reid described … she had a part in that as well. Honed to a razor’s edge by the women and men at the laboratory—flying farther, faster, and with a heavier bomb load than any plane in history—B-29s dropped precision bombs over the country of Japan from high in the sky. They brought destruction at close range with incendiary bombs, and they released annihilation—and a new, modern fear—with the atomic bombs they delivered. War, technology, and social progress; it seemed that the second two always came with the first. The NACA’s work—more intense and interesting than she ever would have imagined—would remain her work for the duration. And until the war ended, whenever that might be, Dorothy would be one of the NACA nuts.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_91a4435e-13d9-5173-9e9e-cbb76becbb68)

The Duration (#ulink_91a4435e-13d9-5173-9e9e-cbb76becbb68)

The first time Dorothy Vaughan traveled the road between Farmville and Newport News was far from the last, though the unrelenting pace of research at Langley made anything but the shortest trips home impossible. With the Full-Scale Tunnel running around the clock and the rest of the engineering groups pushing the limits of their capacity, Dorothy became an expert in the eighteen-hour day, when she could find the time, taking the earliest possible bus to Farmville. She lingered over her children as long as she could before a late-night return to her corner of the war machine, the numbers on her data sheets swimming before her tired eyes the next day. Even time off over holidays, which were more flexible but still considered workdays, was hard to come by, particularly as she was still classified as a temporary war service employee.

When and if the laboratory would make her a permanent offer of employment was a matter for the future. But over the July Fourth holiday in 1944, Dorothy Vaughan decided to convert her own status as a temporary resident of Newport News into something much longer lasting. She signed a lease on a new two-bedroom apartment in Newsome Park, picking up the keys to a white dwelling with black shutters, identical to the 1,199 others that had been built there. Protective paper—pink, inexplicably—covered the floors, and long after the apartments themselves ceased to exist, their first occupants would remember that first look at the pink-paper-covered floors. As if she were unwrapping a big present, Dorothy Vaughan pulled it up, making the apartment hers.

Or, more accurately, theirs. Just as she had gone back to visit Farmville, she had, once or twice since coming to Newport News, brought Farmville down to her, arranging for the children to stay with her during a school break. It wasn’t so much that she had devised a plan out of whole cloth, more that the plan had faded into place, like a slow sunrise, as she identified the factors that would tip the balance of her life from an oscillation between Farmville and Newport News to a life fully at rest in the new city.

Finding a suitable place to live hadn’t been easy. There simply wasn’t enough supply to meet the demands of a growing black population, most of whom considered a comfortable and safe place to live at the top of the list of the Four Freedoms that Roosevelt elucidated during the war. Aberdeen Gardens, a Depression-era subdivision built “for blacks by blacks” on 440 acres that included farmland bought from Hampton Institute, had recently been joined by Mimosa Crescent, a “high type suburban community for Negro families” and smaller black neighborhoods like Lassiter Courts, Orcutt Homes, and Harbor Homes.

Reviewing her budget, her needs, and the ongoing demands of her job, Dorothy decided that Newsome Park, more or less in the same neighborhood she had come to know in the last nine months, was the best option. Although originally earmarked for shipyard workers and defense employees like Dorothy, the neighborhood was starting to attract Negroes from all income classes. Domestic workers, laborers, small-business owners, and many of the doctor-lawyer-preacher-teacher class moved in alongside the drillers, riggers, and civil servants. Its eventual demolition had been planned from its inception: both Newsome Park and next-door Copeland Park, for whites, were mandated to last only as long as the war. But the migrants settled in as if their temporary homes were built on bedrock.

Newsome Park was an outsize replica of virtually every Negro community in the South, where racial segregation fostered economic integration. The government outfitted the development with the perks that it felt were key to keeping home-front morale high. The Newsome Park Community Center boasted a kitchen and banquet space, rooms for craft courses and club meetings, basketball and tennis courts, and a baseball diamond for the semipro Newsome Park Dodgers. The center’s director, Eric Epps, a former teacher at one of the Negro high schools whose activism in favor of teacher salary equalization had led to his dismissal, exhorted residents to turn out for chest X-rays and diabetes screenings at the center and solicited local fraternal and civil organizations for funds to support after-school programs.

The tidy green-painted Newsome Park shopping center included a grocery store, a drugstore, a barbershop, a beauty shop, a beer joint, a cleaners, and a TV repair shop. And what wasn’t for sale in the stores came knocking at the front door: the coal man, the milkman, the iceman, the fishmonger, the vegetable man, and more made the rounds, peddling their wares to the neighbors. There was a nursery school for the tiniest tots, a boon to the mothers working six-day weeks during the war. Most importantly for Dorothy, Newsome Park Elementary was walking distance from the new apartment. It was her apartment, her name on the lease for the first time since she had been a young teacher.

Dorothy’s mother-in-law tried to dig in her heels against the growing distance between her son and daughter-in-law that she must have surmised for some time to be inevitable. “You’re not going to take my babies,” she said to Dorothy, struggling against the changes that had been set in motion by Langley’s letter, but which had roots much deeper than that. A year after Dorothy left Farmville, so did her four children, starting the fall 1944 school year at Newsome Park Elementary School. The babysitter, who had come down with them to ease the transition, crowded into the apartment as well. Howard continued his itinerant hotel job. Dorothy had put herself and the children on a separate path forward, whereas the cycle of Howard’s life, despite the extensive travel to the exotic locations, still began and ended in Farmville. He made it down to Newport News when he could: it was too crowded, too noisy, too far away from his now elderly mother for him to convince himself to stay too long. Dorothy would send the children back home for summer vacations, and went back herself as she could, unwilling and unable to sever the ties with the people she loved deeply and would always consider her family. Her marriage with Howard settled into a state of limbo, never together but never completely apart either. It was a stable instability that would endure for the rest of Howard’s life, which was destined to be many decades shorter than Dorothy’s.