My Remarkable Journey

by Katherine Johnson

  The girls and I moved to Bluefield with Jimmie, and I got a job teaching French, math, and music at the same Tazewell County school where he taught. Each of us made sixty-five dollars a month, which was a decent salary at the time, though not as much as the white teachers were paid. The school was a two-story brick building with the high school classrooms upstairs, where Jimmie and I taught. Our two older daughters’ classrooms were on the bottom level, where the first through fifth grades were housed. Joylette was entering the fourth grade; Connie, the first. Kathy, the baby, was not yet old enough to attend school and was supposed to stay home with a sitter. But when she noticed me dressing Connie to go somewhere without her, she whined, “I want to go!” Our “Irish twins” had done practically everything else together for most of their lives, so I brought her along. When we got to school, the principal allowed me to sit Kathy in the first-grade classroom, next to Connie. That became our daily routine. Kathy wasn’t officially enrolled in the class, but at the end of the school year, she got a report card and was promoted to second grade. From then on, Kathy and Connie went through school in the same grade.

  Our family fit right into Bluefield, a tiny town of about four thousand residents and eight square miles, along the Bluestone River. Some of the world’s largest deposits of high-quality black coal could be found there. Just across the state line on the West Virginia side is another Bluefield, with about five times the population. The Norfolk and Western Railway located its headquarters on the West Virginia side in the late 1880s, causing a population explosion. Large numbers of European immigrants and Negroes from the South flocked there via the railroads in search of work in the coalfields. As a result, Bluefield, West Virginia, also had a much larger Negro population—a quarter of the people who lived there at the time. The Bluefield Colored Institute, founded there in 1895, became a popular training ground for Negro teachers, and it was later renamed Bluefield State College.

  Though the Negro population on the Virginia side was tiny by comparison, it was a closely knit community. Teachers were respected, and because Jimmie and I were both teachers, everyone loved us and our girls. We never had to worry about finding babysitters. Mothers and teenagers in the community often asked us if they could babysit our girls. There were times, though, when being the child of teachers wasn’t much fun. Occasionally the girls had to put up with a bit of teasing. “Gobble, gobble, gobble,” one of their peers would blurt, making fun of our last name with turkey noises as the girls walked past a giggling crowd. But we taught our girls to ignore unkind words (“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!”). When one of them came home from school in tears because a schoolmate had ridiculed her father’s bald head, I wasn’t the least bit sympathetic. My response was quite matter-of-fact: “Well, he is bald, isn’t he?” I wanted my girls to be tough.

  Our daughters also learned the hard way that their father and I didn’t play favorites with them in school, and very little escaped our eyes and ears. One day, when it was time for me to go downstairs to teach music to the elementary classes, my eyes immediately fell on the empty seat beside Connie. “Where’s Kathy?” I asked the teacher. Well, she said, my baby girl had been caught chewing gum in class and was serving her punishment, facing the wall behind the door. Kathy probably wanted to climb through that wall because I didn’t say another word about it during class and left her standing there, missing out on my entire music lesson.

  Another time, Jimmie and I gave the girls specific instructions not to follow other kids from the school to a little mom-and-pop store across the street, where the students liked to buy penny candies and cookies during recess and then head down a steep hill to enjoy them. One day, as Jimmie peered out the window of his upstairs classroom, he spotted Connie, midway down the snow-covered hill with her baby sister in tow. He promptly made his way over to the hill, escorted his two girls back to school, and found an empty classroom, where he dispensed some corporal punishment. (That was allowed at the time, by the way.) Some of their schoolmates stood on their tiptoes to peer into the classroom from the hallway through a single clear windowpane on the door. They beckoned Joylette to come and see, too, but when she learned what was going on inside, she kept walking, lest she get spotted and called into the room with her sisters. As far as I know, the girls never tried those little sneaky tactics again.

  At work and home, Jimmie and I were a team, and our students were like part of our family. The girls and I rode with Jimmie and his boys on the bus to many football and basketball games, and the boys looked after them in a protective manner, like their baby sisters. I even made the uniforms for the fifteen or so majorettes because the hand-me-downs from the white schools were in such bad condition. For the Homecoming parade through town, our band was quite a sight with about five horn players and a drummer on the back of a pickup truck. There were twice as many majorettes, marching in front. Jimmie and I always worked with what we had. Likewise, he supported my choir performances with whatever I needed him to do. At home both of us pitched in with the cooking and cleaning.

  Most summers we supplemented our income by traveling out of town to work for wealthy white families as a live-in maid and chauffeur. One of our jobs was in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where we worked for the Belcher Family, who had made a fortune in the lumber industry. They lived on a fabulous ranch, and our family stayed in the servants’ quarters, a basic apartment on top of their garage. Jimmie and I cooked for them, served their meals, cleaned, and drove them to and from their appointments during the day. These were the kinds of jobs that Negroes took in those days to make ends meet, so I didn’t spend any time meditating on the fact that Jimmie and I probably had as much or more education than both of our employers. We did what we needed to do for our family, and kept our peace. The Belchers were kind to us, and sometimes our girls and their girls played together. Once, Mr. Belcher was showing Joylette how to ride a horse, but when he hoisted her on top of the animal and began walking, the horse took off in a full gallop. Joylette, who was about five, slid off right away near a tree and hit the ground hard enough to split open the corner of her mouth. I’m usually pretty calm, but when Mr. Belcher rushed my child inside, her screams and the blood gushing from her lip unnerved me. We grabbed old towels and ice to stop the bleeding, but the cut needed medical attention. The closest hospital was for whites only, and despite Mr. Belcher’s efforts, he could not get hospital workers to consent to seeing Joylette that day. Even though Mr. Belcher was able to use his influence to get the hospital to treat her the next day, I was angry. My child was denied medical treatment because of her race. If she had been more seriously injured, what would have happened to her? To this day, Joylette has a faint scar on her lip from that accident. I always appreciated that the Belchers treated us with respect, but at the same time, we understood that we were the help. And we didn’t confuse that for a deeper relationship. Nevertheless, when Mr. Belcher’s life later ended tragically in a car accident, the news saddened us, especially Jimmie, who had spent more time with him as his primary chauffeur.

  About a year or so after moving to Bluefield, Jimmie and I rented a two-room suite in an old mansion that sat so high on a hill that there were probably three dozen steps with landings between to get to the front porch. The place had been owned previously by a rich white family, but a Negro family, the Carsons, had bought the property and lived there with several family members. The house was so large that they took in boarders for most of the second floor. The owners lived on the first floor, with a master bedroom and the living areas—the parlor, living room, dining room, and kitchen. The grandfather of the family had his own bedroom and bathroom on the second floor, where my family’s bedroom and bathroom also were located. Our room was spacious, and Jimmie and I slept in a full-size bed on one side of the room, while the girls slept on a three-quarter-size fold-up bed on the other side. The five of us also shared the second floor with another family that lived in a five-room apartment, but we rarely even
crossed paths with them. I have beautiful memories of the girls playing outside on the lawn and rolling down that long hill in the autumn-colored leaves. This was a happy time, but two things happened that would change the world as I knew it.

  By early 1950, my brother Horace had developed a mysterious illness. He had been home from overseas a few years since the end of the war, and he began losing weight, feeling extremely tired, and experiencing chills, night sweats, and other symptoms. Horace was always healthy and strong, and it was difficult to imagine him so sick. I was hopeful that Horace would bounce back, the way Jimmie had from the fever, but my brother just kept getting sicker. He was taken to the segregated Veterans Administration Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia, so he could get top medical care. Doctors diagnosed him with leukemia, a blood cell cancer that can be caused by radiation. The news was shocking. No disease was more feared in 1950 than cancer, and with few available treatments at the time, the diagnosis amounted to a death sentence. My family would come to suspect that Horace was exposed to dangerous levels of radiation during the war. Tens of thousands of World War II veterans would develop leukemia and other cancers that appeared to be related to their radiation exposure while serving in the war. They would become known unofficially as the “atomic veterans,” and the US Department of Veterans Affairs would develop specific guidelines to determine whether those veterans were eligible for various benefits. Their eligibility was based on where they served and their potential level of exposure. But Horace never got to go through that process. He died on November 7, 1950, at just thirty-eight years old. So much of his life seemed unfinished. My brother had spent some of his prime years as a young man, fighting heroically overseas for his country, yet in some places back home he couldn’t ride on the front of the bus or drink from a public water fountain of his choice. Horace had married a wonderful woman named Juhretta, who was from Wyandanch, New York, and at one point worked as a nurse at Freedman’s Hospital (now Howard University Hospital) in Washington, DC. But they never had children, and he never got to see the great racial strides this nation would make. He was gone forever. I had never known this kind of pain. I had never lost someone so close, and it all felt surreal. But this was the first of many losses to teach me that even in the worst of times, life goes on. And to keep going with it, you just put one foot in front of the other.

  It seems that the ground under my feet had barely settled a couple of years later when one winter evening much of my life went up in flames. Jimmie and I were across town at a wedding reception when we saw people huddled together talking about something. Someone in the group mentioned that the old Carson mansion was on fire. I froze, and my mind began racing: The Carson mansion? The house where we lived? Our babies were at home! Jimmie and I looked at one another and dashed out of there. We didn’t even stop to get our car. Panicked, we ran the short distance home. As we drew closer, we saw a fire truck parked in front and plumes of thick, black smoke rushing from the windows on our side of the house. Neighbors, including some of Jimmie’s football players, were gathered in the yard. Jimmie and I ran frantically toward the house, and I screamed the girls’ names. Someone stopped us and told us the girls were safe and waiting for us at a neighbor’s house. Jimmie’s football players had heard the news, rushed to the scene before we arrived, and rescued the girls from the burning house. The football players had carried our daughters down all those steps to a house a few doors down. Jimmie and I couldn’t get to our neighbor’s house fast enough. As soon as the girls spotted us, they darted into our arms. I couldn’t stop hugging and kissing them.

  “Are you okay?” I asked again and again.

  Every inch of them smelled like smoke, and they were still coughing and shaking. But I’d never felt so grateful to hold my girls and hear their cries. My babies were okay. Thank you, Lord. Thank you. Nothing else mattered in those first moments.

  The fire had been contained to our side of the house, and everyone else also had made it out safely. Another neighbor offered to take my family in for the night, and we appreciated their kindness. We had nothing but the clothes on our backs. We put the girls to bed, but Jimmie and I couldn’t close our eyes. Our lives had changed in an instant, and it was truly God’s grace and the quick actions of our friends and neighbors that had scooped our girls to safety. When the firemen said it was safe to go inside, Jimmie and I realized that just about everything had been destroyed. What the fire didn’t burn, the water and ashes turned into a sooty mess. We had our lives, though. So we picked through the remains and pulled out enough items to fill a couple of boxes and bags. Among the items we salvaged was Kathy’s brown baby doll. She had gotten it for Christmas a few years earlier, when toy stores first began selling beautiful dolls that looked like Negro girls. The heat had cracked the doll’s face, but Kathy held onto that doll for many years afterward. Despite our losses in the fire, Jimmie and I couldn’t feel too sad. It was all just stuff, hard-earned, for sure. Some of the items, especially our pictures, were precious and priceless. But even with our modest teachers’ salaries, we could buy new things, take more pictures, and hold in our hearts those long-gone moments that had been captured in black and white. We walked away from the ashes that day knowing we had all we needed to start anew.

  I’ve long since forgotten the date of the fire, what the authorities said caused it, or where it started. But afterward Jimmie, the kids, and I thanked our neighbors and headed home to White Sulphur Springs. As always, we found open arms and comfort there. Daddy called a white clothing store owner, who opened his business and let us buy some emergency things we needed, and Mamà cranked up her sewing machine. After a few days, Jimmie and I returned to Bluefield, but the girls stayed in White Sulphur Springs, and after recovering from smoke inhalation, they finished the second half of the school year there.

  That summer, in August 1952, Jimmie, the girls, and I drove to Marion to attend the wedding of my youngest sister-in-law, Pat. She had been a fourth-grader in my class when I first taught in Marion, but she had grown into a gorgeous young woman. She had just graduated from Virginia State College and was marrying her college sweetheart. Pat was a freshman when she first caught the eye of a handsome senior, Walter Kane, from Big Stone Gap, Virginia. They dated throughout her college years and his graduation and enlistment in the US Army. He had risen to the rank of corporal. Family and friends from both sides had traveled to Marion for the wedding, and we all stayed with the five Goble siblings who had homes there. None of the hotels in town accepted Negro guests, and there were no Negro hotels nearby. Jimmie, the girls, and I arrived a few days early to help out. While busy preparing for the wedding, I asked Pat, “Where’s your wedding cake?”

  She looked at me sheepishly and said, “Oh, I don’t have one.”

  Being a small town, Marion had no bakeries, and Pat had simply ordered small individual cakes, which was all the local market had to offer. Well, that just wouldn’t do. Every bride has to have a three-tier wedding cake. So I talked to Jimmie, and we came up with a plan. We went to the market and bought two regular-size cakes. We cut one down a bit to make the small top layer. Then we found a round hat- box that was the perfect size for the bottom layer. Back then, all ladies wore hats to church, so we had plenty of options. We covered that hatbox in white icing and then stacked the two cakes one atop the other on the box. I swirled the icing around each layer to make it pretty. And voilà! Our baby sister had her three-tiered wedding cake.

  The wedding was held at the home of the oldest Goble daughter, Helen, and it was decorated splendidly with lots of fresh white flowers and evergreens. Pat and Walter both looked radiant in their traditional white wedding attire. Everyone was in a celebratory mood, and we ate and danced afterward for hours at the reception. Sometime over the next couple of days, Jimmie and I got word that his grandfather had died, so the out-of-town family members ended up staying in Marion for an extra week. We were sitting around talking one day when another of Jimmie’s sisters, Margaret, asked, “Kat, wh
at are you going to do when you get back home?”

  “Nothing,” I responded, given that it was still summer.

  “Well, why don’t you come home with me for a couple of weeks,” she suggested.

  I agreed, and when Margaret’s husband, Eric Epps, walked into the room, she excitedly told him about our plans.

  “Why don’t you bring Snook, too,” Eric added. “I’ll get you both jobs.”

  Eric was the former Lincoln University coach who had helped Jimmie and some of his siblings get financial aid to attend the university. He and Margaret had been living in Newport News, Virginia, for years, and they were transporting the newlyweds back to Virginia to honeymoon at the Bay Shore Beach resort in Hampton. The resort, founded in 1898 by several colored businessmen, featured hotels, restaurants, and an amusement park. It was a popular beach getaway for the region’s colored families. After their honeymoon, the new couple also planned to make their home in the Newport News area. Among his many roles, Eric served as director of the community center for a huge, federally funded housing development called Newsome Park, where he and Margaret lived. He had been a teacher in the Newport News school system, but he had lost that job because of his active involvement in a class action lawsuit to force the state to pay colored teachers the same as white teachers. Eric was unafraid to speak his mind and was very well connected in the community, so what he said carried much weight.