Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  The Flight Research Division was a den of high-energy, free-thinking, aggressive, and very smart engineers. They and their brethren in the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD), a group specializing in the aerodynamics of rockets and missiles, spent their time not in the confines of the wind tunnels but in the company of live, fire-breathing, ear-splitting, temperamental metal projectiles. The “black-haired, leather-faced, crew-haircutted human cyclone” head of the Flight Research Division, Langley’s chief test pilot, Melvin Gough, early in his engineering career had decided to take his life in his hands to train as a test pilot in order to improve the quality of his research reports. Testosterone filtered up from the hangar along with the jet-fuel fumes. It wasn’t the kind of place that would exhibit particular patience for anyone, male or female, who took too long to scale the learning curve. Timidity in the Flight Research Division would get a girl nowhere.

  Fortunately, Katherine Goble’s confidence in her own mathematical abilities, and her innate curiosity, pushed her to pepper the engineers with questions, just as she had as a child with her parents and teachers. They fielded her inquiries with gusto: they could, and did, spend most of their lives talking and thinking about flight and would never run out of patience for the topic.

  The Maneuver Loads Branch conducted research on the forces on an airplane as it moved out of stable, steady flight or tried to return to stable, steady flight. A sister branch, Stability and Control, developed the systems that would provide a plane with a smooth ride through rough air. The vehicles at the extreme experimental end of the aeronautical spectrum were the ones that made the romantic aeronautical engineer’s heart beat faster—supersonic planes, hypersonic planes, planes capable of brushing the limits of space—but the transportation revolution fostered in no small part by Langley engineers like Henry Pearson had created a demand for research on vehicles designed for much more pedestrian pursuits. One of the tasks of the Maneuver Loads Branch was to examine safety concerns provoked by increasingly crowded skies.

  One of the first assignments to land on Katherine’s desk involved getting to the bottom of an accident involving a small Piper propeller plane. The plane, which was flying along in otherwise unremarkable fashion, literally fell out of the clear blue sky and crashed to the ground. The NACA received the plane’s flight recorder, and the engineers assigned Katherine to analyze the photographic film record of the flight’s vital signs, the first step in the search for answers as to what might have befallen the plane. For hours upon hours, day after day, she sat in a dark room and peered through a film reader, noting and writing down the airspeed, acceleration, altitude, and other metrics of the flight that were measured in regular time intervals over the course of the flight. The engineers specified any conversions to be applied to the raw data—converting, for example, miles per hour to feet per second—and supplied Katherine with the equations to be used to analyze the converted data. As a final step, Katherine plotted the data in order to give engineers a visual snapshot of the plane’s disrupted flight.

  Then the engineers set up an experiment re-creating the circumstances of the accident, flying a test plane into the trailing wake of a larger plane. The data from that, too, washed onto Katherine Goble’s desk: seemingly endless hours, days, weeks, months of the same thing. It was typical eye-straining, monotonous computing work—and Katherine loved every moment of it.

  When the engineers analyzed Katherine’s reduced data, they were fascinated, realizing they were uncovering something they had not quite seen before. It turned out that the Piper had flown perpendicularly across the flight path of a jet plane that had just passed through the area. A disturbance caused by a plane could trouble the air for as long as half an hour after it flew through. The wake vortex of the larger plane had acted like an invisible trip wire: upon crossing the rough river of air left behind by the jet, the propeller plane stumbled in midair and tumbled out of the sky. That research, and other investigations like it, led to changes in air traffic regulations, mandating minimum distances between flight paths so as to prevent that kind of wake turbulence accident.

  When Katherine Goble read the report, she found it “one of the most interesting things she had ever read,” and felt tremendous satisfaction to have participated in something that would have positive, real-world results. Her enthusiasm for the work, even the parts that others considered drudgery, was irrepressible. She couldn’t believe her good fortune, getting paid to do math, the thing that came most naturally to her in the world.

  She took a genuine liking to her new colleagues as well. The West Virginia engineer she had met on day one played oboe in a local symphony. Members of the Brain Busters Club convened after work and on weekends to build elaborate model airplanes by hand. Many of the men and women at Langley joined softball or basketball teams and played in local amateur leagues. Langley’s “Skychicks” competed against a team fielded by the power company, the Kilowatt Cuties; over time, the black employees joined teams as well. And then there was the lunchtime bridge game. The game’s requirement of both analytical and people-reading skills made it a favorite of the engineers, and they spent many a lunch hour in fierce competition. They were an opinionated, high-energy bunch, and best of all, as far as Katherine was concerned, they were all as smart as whips. There was nothing Katherine Goble loved more than brains.

  From the very beginning, Katherine felt completely at home at Langley. Nothing about the culture of the laboratory or her new office rattled her—not even the persistent racial segregation. At the beginning, in fact, she didn’t even realize the bathrooms were segregated. Not every building had a Colored bathroom, a fact that Mary Jackson had discovered so painfully during her rotation on the East Side. Though bathrooms for the black employees were clearly marked, most of the bathrooms—the ones implicitly designated for white employees—were unmarked. As far as Katherine was concerned, there was no reason why she shouldn’t use those as well. It would be a couple of years before she was confronted with the whole rigmarole of separate bathrooms. By then, she simply refused to change her habits—refused to so much as enter the Colored bathrooms. And that was that. No one ever said another word to her about it.

  She also made the decision to bring a bag lunch and eat at her desk, something many of the employees did. Why should she spend the extra money on lunch? It was more convenient as well; the cafeteria was just far enough from her building to have to drive, and who wanted to do that? And it was healthier too, what with the temptation of the ice cream that the cafeteria sold for dessert. Of course, for Katherine Goble, eating at her desk also had the benefit of removing the segregated cafeteria from her daily routine, another reminder of the caste system that would have circumscribed her movements and thoughts. Those unevolved, backward rules were the flies in the Langley buttermilk. So she simply determined to pluck them out, willing into existence a work environment that conformed to her sense of herself and her place in the world.

  As the months passed, Katherine stretched out into the office, as at ease as if she had never been anyplace else. Erma Tynes, the other black computer who had been assigned with Katherine, was “by the book”: at her desk and working at 7:59:59, barely removing her eyes from the task at hand until the end of the day at 4:30. Katherine, on the other hand, like the engineers around her, got into the habit of reading newspapers and magazines for the first few minutes of the day. She perused Aviation Week, trying to connect the dots between the latest industry advance and the torrent of numbers flowing through her calculating machine.

  Katherine’s confidence and the bright flame of her mind were irresistible to the guys in the Flight Research Division. There was nothing they liked more than brains, and they could see that Katherine Goble had them in abundance. As much as anything, they responded to her exuberance for the work. They loved their jobs, and they saw their own absorption reflected back at them in Katherine’s questions and her interest that went so far beyond just running the numbers.

  With h
er fair skin and dulcet West Virginia accent, Katherine might have occupied a fluid racial middle ground, easing her acceptance at the center. Even some of the black employees weren’t always sure upon meeting her if she was black. On one occasion, when her mother was visiting from West Virginia, she’d had to take her to the hospital. After an unusually long wait, a doctor had to step in to get her mother put into a room: the admitting desk was moving slowly because they couldn’t figure out if she should have a black or a white roommate. One time Katherine’s boss, Al Schy, was asked if his group had any black mathematicians. Even with Katherine sitting within earshot, he’d had to think before coming up with a yes. To her colleagues, she had become simply “Katherine.”

  For any number of reasons, concrete and ineffable, there was something about Katherine Goble that made her as comfortable in the office in 1244 as she was in the choir loft at Carver Presbyterian. She didn’t close her eyes to the racism that existed; she knew just as well as any other black person the tax levied upon them because of their color. But she didn’t feel it in the same way. She wished it away, willed it out of existence inasmuch as her daily life was concerned. She had taken the long road to Langley’s Flight Research Division, but she knew with a confidence approaching 100 percent that she had arrived at the right destination.

  “I want to move our girls out of the projects,” Jimmy Goble said to Katherine after two years in Newport News.

  Moving to Newsome Park had made it possible for Katherine and her family to adapt quickly to life in Hampton Roads. The neighborhood, with its ties to the shipyard and to Langley, with residents who were connected to virtually every aspect of black life in the region, had provided them and their family with a ready-made community. In defiance of the newspaper headlines, Newsome Park had managed to persevere against the ever-present specter of demolition: with the flare-up of military tensions in Korea in 1950, the federal Housing and Home Finance Agency again decided that Newsome Park and all similar housing projects were necessary to the country’s ongoing defense effort. The residents of the neighborhood heaved a collective sigh of relief.

  More than matters of international law at the 38th parallel, which divided Russian-allied North Korea from US-friendly South Korea, it was the local law of supply and demand that was really keeping Newsome Park off the chopping block. Years after the end of the war, the shortage of adequate housing for the area’s Negro residents was still the reality. If the government decided to demolish Newsome Park tomorrow, there simply would be no place for the residents to go.

  But the number of houses in smaller neighborhoods had continued to increase, drawing the attention of upwardly mobile families who, like their white counterparts, had a vision of postwar success that included home ownership. Gayle Street, a cul-de-sac not far from the Buckroe section of town, was an attractive new neighborhood where Chubby Peddrew and her husband bought a house. Aberdeen Gardens, the sprawling development built on former Hampton Institute farmland, was another desirable location, its wide streets with grassy medians and surrounding forests drawing many active-duty and retired military families.

  Katherine and Jimmy decided to buy a lot in Mimosa Crescent, the World War II–era neighborhood in Hampton that had been built for middle-class families. The developers of the subdivision had jumped every hurdle the Federal Housing Administration could throw at them, making assurances as to the quality of the neighborhood’s homeowners and even putting in place restrictive covenants so that the buyers would not be disqualified from receiving federally insured bank loans, as was the case for many—perhaps most—black neighborhoods around the country. Thomas Villa, one development in Hampton that could not secure financing from local banks, pointed its buyers to the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, at the time the largest black-owned business in the United States, for home loans.

  In 1946, Mimosa Crescent had expanded from its original twenty-two parcels to a total of fifty-one, slowly but surely over the next ten years attracting families who filled in the empty lots with comfortable three- and four-bedroom brick houses. What a thrill, not just to imagine a dream house but to plan the color of the tile in its bathrooms, the wood of the cabinets in the kitchen, the size of the floorboards in the living room! Joylette, as the eldest daughter, would even get her own bedroom, the kind of luxury that most girls—of any color—only got to see in the movies or between the pages of a Nancy Drew mystery. The subdivision’s proud residents seeded their lawns and planted trees for shade, hosting patio parties and many a club meeting at their homesteads. The Goble family was soon to join them.

  It was the perfect plan . . . until over the course of 1955, Jimmy started to feel sick, first with headaches that kept getting worse, then weakness. But unlike the undulant fever that had afflicted him more than a decade prior, he didn’t get better. It took months for doctors to diagnose his ailment. They finally discovered a tumor, awkwardly located at the base of his skull, and declared it inoperable. He took to his bed, eventually so enervated that he was forced to take an indefinite leave from his job at the shipyard. His health declined slowly but inexorably for more than a year, much of that time spent in the hospital. Katherine and her daughters visited him as often as they could at his sick bed, holding vigil for the most important man in their lives.

  James Francis Goble died on a Thursday, just five days before Christmas 1956. Three days later, Carver Memorial Presbyterian Church filled with mourners, the community offering its condolences and support to the young widow and her three adolescent daughters. Joylette, Kathy, and Connie would never again be able to experience the joy of the holiday season without also reliving the ache that came from their father’s death. Both Jimmy’s parents and Katherine’s parents stayed in town through the end of the year. Katherine’s in-laws and their families, particularly the Eppses and the Kanes, who lived in Newport News, shared the burden of grief. Jimmy’s Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brothers and Katherine’s Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters kept watch over them, bringing food and running errands and taking care of the mundane necessities that seemed impossible to deal with in the face of such a profound loss.

  The Goble girls were as devoted to their father as Katherine was to hers. The loss of Jimmy’s protective arms and ready smile, the instability that came from the abrupt, premature end of the partnership between their parents, turned their safe world inside out and forced them to shed the fuzzy comforts of childhood for the hard realities of the adult world.

  But Katherine would not yield to loss and chaos. She had made a solemn promise to her husband that she would do everything in her power to keep their bright, lively daughters on the path they had so carefully paved for them from the beginning of their lives. Katherine allowed herself and her girls until the end of the year to give themselves over completely to bereavement. On the first day of school in January 1957, following the Christmas holidays, she accompanied her daughters to a meeting with the school principal. “It is very important that you don’t show the girls any special treatment, or let up on them in any way,” Katherine said to the principal. “They are going to college, and they need to be prepared.” With her daughters, she established the new rules of a household run by a single mother: “You will have my clothes ironed and ready in the morning, and dinner ready when I come home,” she instructed. Katherine was now the mother and father, the love and the discipline, the carrot and the stick, and the sole breadwinner.

  Katherine and Jimmy shared great ambitions for their children. The Goble sisters excelled in school and took piano and violin lessons and practiced diligently. They were good-natured, outgoing, and respectful, and they always rose to the high standards their parents had set for them. In her children, Katherine saw the legacy of her parents and Jimmy’s parents and all their generations past, each pushing their energy and resources to the limits to lift their progeny toward the American dream, to a life that would surpass their own in material and emotional richness and access to the long-promised blessings of dem
ocracy. Everything depended on Katherine’s ability to hold her family together; she could not fall apart. Or perhaps she would not fall apart. There was, and always had been, about Katherine Goble a certain gravity, a preternatural self-possession that had made it the most logical thing in the world that she would teach Roman numerals to the president’s brother or converse in French with visiting aristocrats. She seemed to absorb the short-term oscillations of life without being dislodged by them, as though she were actually standing back observing that both travail and elation were merely part of a much larger, much smoother curve.

  Certainly much of Katherine’s equipoise came from her father, Joshua. Family lore had it that he possessed unexplained skills and senses, that his nimble hands could spirit away afflictions in both humans and animals. Even after he went to work for the Greenbrier, neighbors black and white would call on him to see sick horses through a period of crisis. Years later, Joshua Coleman’s granddaughters would recall their grandfather saying that from their first meeting, he had a premonition that Jimmy Goble would not live a long life. Perhaps Katherine, with some intuition of her father’s vision, drew strength from the knowledge that her husband’s premature death was part of a way of things, however painful.

  Or maybe it was her father’s pragmatic dictum—“You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you”—that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing. With her father’s words to buoy her, Katherine Goble observed the manifestations of segregation at Langley, decried the injustice they represented, yet did not feel their weight on her own shoulders. Once she crossed the threshold of Building 1244, she entered a world of equals, and she refused to behave in any way that would contradict that belief.