Dedication
To my husband and parents, who were always a great source of inspiration and support, and to young people seeking to make a better world through the field of science
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword by Dr. Yvonne Darlene Cagle
Introduction: An Unimaginable Century
1. Nobody Else Is Better Than You
2. Education Matters
3. A Time for Everything
4. The Blessing of Help
5. Be Ready
6. Ask Brave Questions
7. Tomorrow Comes
8. Love What You Do
9. Shoot for the Moon
10. Finish Strong
11. Land on a Firm Foundation
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photo Section
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
I knew about Dr. Katherine Johnson more than two decades ago, but I didn’t know I knew her. A few years ago, in 2016, I went to the first reunion of black astronauts. During one part of the evening, Joylette Hylick, Dr. Johnson’s daughter, was a speaker, and she was telling this amazing story about her mother. I wanted to meet Dr. Johnson. Everybody did. And so I tried to get to Joylette after the talk, but I couldn’t. Just about the time that I was ready to give up, and she was about to walk away, she turned to me and said, “Dr. Cagle?”
And I said, “Yes, I have this picture that I signed for your mother.” I told her that even if I’m never able to meet her, it would mean everything if she would take this picture to her. Joylette looked at me said, “Dr. Cagle, you’ve already met mom.”
And I was thinking, no, I would have known. I thought she must have confused me with someone else. But Joylette insisted, “No, you have met mom! As a matter of fact, you’ve taken a picture with her.” She saw the doubt in my mind and knew I wasn’t fully convinced yet, so she said, “I’ll tell you what. I’m going to prove it to you.”
About two weeks later, I got a text message, and it said, “I told you so!” I opened it, and the first thing I saw was this picture of me in 1997, decades ago, and I was blown away. And all of a sudden my eyes dropped down, and I saw this woman who looked very familiar. It was an awards picture, and I was one of the award recipients. Sitting directly in front of me . . . oh my gosh, when it hit me, I was just floored. It was Dr. Katherine Johnson! And it all came back to me. It had been my first astronaut appearance ever. I had just finished my astronaut candidacy training, and this was the first event they allowed me to attend. It was in Philadelphia for the National Technology Association’s annual convention. The NTA was established as a black engineering association before black engineers were allowed to join other groups. Dr. Johnson at one time had been the organization’s treasurer. There was an awards ceremony later that night, and the organization recognized a few people, including Dr. Johnson and me.
I remember the presenter mentioning an African American woman, an African American mathematician from NASA, and I remember thinking, why don’t we know about each other? I was in my blue astronaut suit, and I remember thinking that we need to connect. I wanted to go afterwards to meet her, but there were so many people surrounding the astronaut blue suit that I never got to her. I figured we would meet somewhere again, but it never happened—at least not for nearly two decades.
When I met Dr. Johnson face to face a short time after that encounter with her daughter, it was such a seminal moment for me. But one of the things I have a hard time reconciling is knowing there was so much lost time. This woman became my real heroine. She could’ve been my mentor years before. Who I would have been and what I could have done under her mentorship, I just think was a gift that I can’t regain. But it makes the time that I had with her that much more precious and impactful.
It begs the question: why didn’t I know about her even before 1997? Why didn’t all little girls know, especially little girls of color? Why did I have to go through so much hurt and heartache in life when I could have looked at her and held my head high and stepped through with such poise, comportment, and grace? Why couldn’t I have had that voice that spoke, not just to the world, but to my heart, to my resolve? I cannot find consolation, reconciliation, or any rational reason why that had to be so.
That’s why after I did get to know her, she became more than a mission in my mind. She became a movement, an entire movement. I got to know her and her story. And I was more present than I might have been if I had not felt the headwind, the cold, the sorts of barriers I had to encounter on my own. As I learned about her story, it became my story, and we became one. Her words became my words. Her voice largely became my voice. I actually found my voice in sitting at her feet, learning from her, and hearing her voice about how she stepped through it. When she stepped through the barriers, her steps were hidden. They were silent. But when she was given voice, she spoke about it with such uncompromising grace. Whether there were barriers or bands or badges, it didn’t matter to her. It was all the same. She was going to do her best. She was just doing her job. And that’s what she said, “Always do your best.”
The family invited me to go to NASA’s screening at Langley of the movie, Hidden Figures, and there were many other events. We ended up going to the New York screening, the Smithsonian, and the White House. We did a number of interviews together. But to me, you take away the red carpet and the cameras, and it was always just she and I having a conversation. After about a year or two, that eventually turned into our Sunday conversations, Sunday chats. We just continued to have these Sunday chats back and forth, where we let our hair down and talked about absolutely everything. We started out talking about the science, the math, and the engineering, but there came a point where we talked about everything from her life, my life. I know what it’s like to be that hidden figure. That’s why it affects me so deeply. She never made me feel hidden. That’s why those Sundays were so important.
When asked how she dealt with the discrimination and segregation at NASA during her era, she said she was always aware of it but that when she passed through those gates, she had a job to do. And no matter what was going on, she always did her best. She didn’t have perspective on the impact of what she did. And so she genuinely didn’t understand all the attention she was getting after the book and the movie. “I was just doing my job,” she said. The way she saw it, she was doing the work that the men wouldn’t do because they were doing more important things.
In 2018, the whole world was celebrating when it was announced that NASA was planning to go back to the moon. It had been several weeks, and no one from NASA had thought to tell Dr. Mom (that’s what I began calling her), and so I told Joylette that I would love the honor of letting her know we were going back. When I told her over the phone, I was sitting at my kitchen table in California, and she was in Virginia. And she was so excited. She said, “That’s just wonderful. Now, this is what you need to do.” She immediately went to work. She said, “The first thing you need to do is plant a garden.” I thought I had misheard. In my mind, I’m thinking it’s a wonderful, beautiful idea, but at one hundred years old, you can envision whatever you want. Turns out, she knew exactly what she was talking about. Right after that, she said, “You can’t just plant a garden. You have to make sure the soil content is correct because if you don’t have enough nitrogen in the soil, nothing is going to grow, and it’s primarily carbon dioxide you’ve got to look at. You’ve got to figure out how to make the carbon dioxide-oxygen ratio just right so you can grow the plants, and the plants can give off the oxygen.” Then I realized she was engineering, and
she was ahead of me. I needed to get on board and catch up to her. And so instead of trying to question, correct, or whatever I might want to do, I got a piece of paper and started writing furiously. And thirty-five minutes later, I had a recipe for planting a garden on the moon. I knew it was precise and correct because I am a biochemist and a physician, and I knew those are the compounds that you need to make sure are in the right concentrations and ratios. I was just writing and thinking, “One hundred years old, I can’t believe it.” Her mind was so sharp all the way to the day before she passed on. I say passed on, not passed away, because she is still with us.
I rarely give a speech now without mentioning her. In all my speeches, I always say the launch speed of a space craft is 17,500 miles per hour. There’s a scene in the Hidden Figures movie where the character playing Dr. Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) is writing on the board what that velocity needs to be for the space vehicle to make it into orbit. So that number, 17,500 miles per hour, was emblazoned in my mind. I was so impressed that the movie got it right. And then in that scene Taraji keeps writing out many, many more decimal places. And that’s just how it was with Dr. Johnson. Even if I got the right answer or represented something correctly, I always had to catch up to her because she could take it many more decimal points out.
I asked her what she thought of the movie. She said the movie was wonderful, but they got two things wrong. First of all, she didn’t wear glasses until much later in life, and secondly, she said the movie made it seem like she was really anxious at that first moon launch. Well, she had already launched Alan Shepard. She had orbited John Glenn. And then there was the moon landing, and she knew her numbers were right.
She also put the first antennae up in space, and she continued to work with NASA even into projecting going into Mars. And she did so much more that is never talked about. I know this because it is written in an old NASA evaluation. The first time I flew to Virginia to meet her, Joylette and I were talking in her room until two in the morning and going through all these pictures and things of her history. I wanted to know everything. There were so many awards and papers, and Joylette was trying to figure out what to keep. She pulled out this one thing. It was a full sheet of paper, and she wasn’t sure what it was. I looked at it and start reading it, and it was a NASA work evaluation of Dr. Johnson from 1986. There was a whole page about her work. I read every line, and as I was reading these things, I was blown away. That evaluation was pure gold.
So, when it was time for the Oscars, the producers called me after talking to the family and said they’d like to have Katherine Johnson at the Oscars since Hidden Figures had been nominated in a number of categories, including “Best Picture.” She was ninety-eight years old at the time, and I was thinking most ninety-eight year olds don’t even get in a cab by themselves, and they’re talking about putting her on a plane and flying her across the country. As a physician, I knew what the answer was. But I also knew Dr. Katherine Johnson. She always wanted to speak for herself. And so I said to them—I didn’t want to be the spoiler of the party—I said, as a physician, there were some things we had to take into consideration, but I couldn’t speak for Dr. Johnson and that they would have to speak to her. I knew she would want that. They said, “Well, will you ask her and see what she says?” I talked to Joylette and Kathy, her youngest daughter, and they talked to Dr. Mom, and her response was, “You’re not going to do this without me!”
Well then, I was on the hook. I was counting on her to say it was too far and too much. I knew she was going to need a medical person on the plane, a physician, because of her age and the travel. I knew it had to be somebody who knew aviation medicine and someone who knew her well enough to recognize early on if she was in any kind of distress. I knew I had to do it, even though I knew what a daunting task it would be and even though I knew that if she had asked me, I would have probably discouraged her. But I had turned the option over to her, and she had made the call. I couldn’t think of anyone else I could recommend who met all of the criteria and would make her the priority. I told the family and the producers that I wanted to do it. It was a journey of love, and I brought my “A game.” I flew in my flight suit because I was a flight surgeon for twenty-two years.
It was such an honor to have the opportunity to travel with her and push her onto the Oscars stage in her wheelchair. On the night of the show, the people coordinating the event had told me that the presentations were on a tight schedule. But they said this was such a historic moment, once in a lifetime really, so when the applause started, I shouldn’t step back until it was finished. They told me to let the world recognize her and applaud her for as long as they wanted. And so when the applause started, I didn’t know anyone was going to stand. And they rose, and they rose all the way up, four tiers up. Everyone was standing. Everyone was crying. The applause was resounding, and they weren’t stopping. And finally it started to settle down a little bit, and I started backing away slowly. But I wasn’t sure whether to leave or stay. Denzel Washington was standing right there, and our eyes met, and it was almost as if he knew what I was struggling with. He just gave me the two fingers, like come back for an encore, and they wouldn’t stop applauding. I backed away again, and he nodded, bring her back. And they applauded for a while longer. I was so happy. That was the right thing to do.
So afterwards, I get her back to the room, she’s in bed, and we’re just talking. She was wide awake. And a question came to my mind.
“Dr. Mom, I have a question for you,” I said to her. “If it had been possible, did you ever think about going to space yourself? You being an astronaut?”
Her eyes lit up, and she said, “Ohhh, baby! I would have loved to have gone into space myself!”
In that moment, my heart broke. I didn’t want her to see the tears, but everything just shattered inside of me. It’s one thing to do everything she did to land a human on the moon. It’s a completely different conversation if somewhere deep in your heart you always wanted that person to be you, and you couldn’t even aspire to it. You could dream, but that’s as far as it could go. She had carried that dream with her all that time, from a little girl counting the stars, and here she was still with that yearning.
As an African American woman who could aspire to travel to the moon, I am the embodiment of her dream. And to all those African American girls who will walk on the moon and land on Mars someday, we are her legacy.
Dr. Yvonne Darlene Cagle is an astronaut for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), family physician, and retired colonel in the United States Air Force, where she served as a senior flight surgeon. She has served as a professor at a number of universities, including Stanford, University of California Davis, and University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
Introduction
An Unimaginable Century
One hundred years. Who really expects to live long enough to see an entire century? Few people in this country—less than 1 percent—make it that far. So, one day in 2018, as my centennial birthday approached, I made light of the moment with my oldest daughter, Joylette.
“If I knew I’d live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself,” I whispered, quoting to her a line I’d heard somewhere before.
We both laughed.
The truth is I’m not complaining. I’ve had a wonderful life. Every day that I wake up in my right mind is a blessing, and I’ve been richly blessed to see the world change in miraculous ways. Think about it. I’ve been around longer than sliced bread, which didn’t become one of the century’s great inventions (or at least the thing by which everything good is compared) until 1928. By then I was already ten. When I was born on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the world was a very different place. The First World War was ending, and as soldiers made their way back to their families, a mysterious flu was spreading across the world in a pandemic that would claim an estimated 50 million lives over the next two years; a total of 675,000 people died in t
he United States of the virus, which came to be known as the Spanish flu. The year I was born Ford Motor Company also was selling its popular Model T for about $350. That price tag made cars suddenly affordable for the first time to many middle-class Americans. But the all-black, mass-produced vehicles were still out of reach for most poor and working-class families, particularly in rural communities, like the one where I grew up in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia. Of course, I was too young to know any of this firsthand, but I remember my father transporting our family around throughout my childhood in a horse-drawn buggy. In those years, most of what we needed was within walking distance. When we couldn’t walk, Daddy hitched the horses. My parents never owned a car.
I couldn’t have imagined as a child that someday highways would stretch from one side of the country to the next, zigzagging through the American landscape in all directions. Or that someday vehicles of all colors, shapes, and sizes would fill those roadways with busy people, always in a hurry to get to the next important place. Or that someday vehicles would park themselves. I was born at a time when women couldn’t vote, my people were called colored and treated as second-class citizens, and white lynch mobs terrorized our communities throughout the nation, particularly in the South. So even in my most vivid imagination—and I had a pretty creative one as a child—I could not envision the life I would live.
I have lived through eighteen US presidents and mourned with the nation when two of the great ones died tragically in office. Never have I been prouder of this country than when we elected Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States, number forty-four. My husband, Jim, and I had been so hopeful that we sent a financial contribution to the Obama campaign. Then, on election night in 2008, we watched in astonishment as the poll results rolled in, confirming a victory we never thought we’d witness in our lifetime. America had looked beyond race and perhaps finally was ready to move past the racial fear, hatred, and misunderstanding that had bitterly divided the nation my entire life. I don’t spend much time looking back or dwelling on race, but that night I couldn’t help thinking about my father, who had grown up in the shadows of slavery and had been limited by his race to a sixth-grade education. Yet Daddy recognized the value of education and made great sacrifices to assure that my sister, two brothers, and I were able to graduate from college. Daddy would have been so proud of the articulate, progressive, well-educated African American man and woman about to occupy the White House.
My Remarkable Journey Page 1