My Remarkable Journey

by Katherine Johnson

I sat up, wondering what he meant.

  He’d seen all of this the first time he laid eyes on Jimmie, Daddy explained. Early death for the man who wanted to be his son-in-law. And pain for his baby girl.

  It finally made sense to me why Daddy had refused to give his blessing for me to marry the man I loved all those years ago. I had pleaded with him back then to tell me why. Who knows if knowing would have changed anything. I thought about the wonderful life I’d shared with Jimmie and our three beautiful girls. I was grateful that Daddy had done the right thing and kept the heartbreaking answer to my question to himself.

  But I knew, too, that I had done the right thing when I followed my heart to Jimmie.

  Chapter 7

  Tomorrow Comes

  For the last eight days of December 1956, I hit the pause button on my life. I took time away from work to grieve the loss of my life partner. But I knew that I could not allow myself or my girls to stay locked in the same sad place. Tomorrow kept coming.

  When school resumed in January, I escorted Joylette, Connie, and Kathy to Carver High, thanked the staff for their tremendous support, and told the principal that the girls were not to get any pity or special treatment in the days ahead. Jimmie and I had been preparing them for college, and our high expectations would not change. I wanted our daughters to understand that sometimes life hurts, but we have to keep moving forward.

  The girls already had chores, but they pitched in even more, helping me with the cooking, cleaning, and ironing at home. They insisted that I must have calculated the exact time it took them to do every chore on their lists to the moment that I walked back into our door each evening. Of course, that is an exaggeration, but I make no apologies. Staying busy is good, and all three of them stayed busy with school and church activities. At school, Joylette was a member of New Homemakers of America, a Negro girls’ home economics club that would merge years later with the all-white Future Homemakers of America. She had served as a state officer of the club in the ninth grade and even forged lifelong friendships with some of the other officers. Joylette also was a band member and accompanist for the school choir; Kathy was a cheerleader; and Connie, who had asthma and could not overexert herself, signed up as cheerleader team manager so she could travel with Kathy to the games. All three of the girls attended monthly Presbyterian Youth Fellowship group meetings, led by our pastor’s wife, Mrs. Alice Rollins, in the basement of our church. Though the girls sometimes complained that the group was more like an extension of school than a fun fellowship, the young people who participated were exceptional, and they would accomplish great things in the years ahead. Among them were Dr. Carolyn Winstead Meyers, former president of Jackson State University and Norfolk State University, who had been an engineering major at Howard University and was one of the students I mentored; Barbara Starks Favazza, a physician; Cynthia Davis, a jazz singer in Cancún; Eugene Butts, a minister who is now deceased; and a number of educators and other dynamic people.

  Since Jimmie and I both were musicians, music was a big part of our girls’ lives as well. In addition to playing in the orchestra at school, the three of them also sang in the youth choir at church. The choir director was the musical director at Huntington High School in Newport News, and he taught Connie and Kathy piano in private lessons for a brief while at his home. Joylette had demonstrated an interest and aptitude for the piano as early as five years old, so I began teaching her at home. Jimmie and I also had arranged for her to take lessons from a pianist who performed at the Greenbrier. When we moved to Newport News, we bought a piano our first Christmas there, and by the end of seventh grade at Newsome Park Elementary School, Joylette was accompanying the school choir. The music teacher at Carver High School, Margaret “Peggy” Davis, was so impressed after attending one of the concerts that she walked up to Joylette afterward and said excitedly, “Little girl, I’ll see you next year!”

  Mrs. Davis saw Joylette’s potential and became her “musical parent,” nurturing her gifts and pushing her to be better. She was a resourceful teacher, and she exemplified the kind of care and attention that many teachers in the Negro schools gave to schoolchildren to ensure they did not lack cultural and arts exposure and opportunities. Mrs. Davis enlisted Joylette to accompany the Glee Club and the choir and to serve as a student conductor. When Joylette was in the eighth grade, Mrs. Davis signed her up for her first piano competition at Carver High. Joylette made a strong impression on the judges, who awarded her second place, instead of first, simply because they figured she had more years than the others to compete. Afterward one of the white judges, Mrs. Mary Nelson, asked Mrs. Davis about Joylette’s training. Upon learning that my talented daughter was not taking private lessons, Mrs. Nelson offered to train her, and she worked with Jimmie and me to arrange a fee that we could manage. Mrs. Nelson lived on Hampton Institute’s campus with her husband, who was a German professor there, and Joylette took lessons in their home for the next four years. When Jimmie died, Mrs. Nelson returned to me as a gift every penny that Jimmie and I had paid her for piano lessons. It was such a kind, generous act.

  The dedicated Negro teachers didn’t let segregation, inferior buildings, and secondhand equipment get in the way of providing our children a top-notch education. They just worked harder to make up for the lack. For example, since Negro children were not allowed to join the Peninsula Youth Orchestra, Mrs. Davis came up with a plan to create her own. In Joylette’s eighth-grade year, Mrs. Davis gave an aptitude test to about ten of her top students and formed a string instruments class. She then taught those students over the years how to play the violin, viola, cello, and contrabass. The next two years, she added six to eight more students to play strings and finally added the needed band students who played wind instruments, brass, and percussion. By Joylette’s junior year, Mrs. Davis had a sizable group of musicians, which by then also included Connie and Kathy. Jimmie and I couldn’t afford to buy the instruments, so Mrs. Davis allowed us to borrow them from her or the school. Just as she had planned, Mrs. Davis had created the first school orchestra—Negro or white—on the peninsula.

  To expand the students’ musical education, Mrs. Davis required them to attend concerts at Hampton Institute. For one such assignment, students had to attend a five-part concert series, sponsored by the Musical Arts Society. The series was started in 1919 by Robert Nathaniel Dett, a renowned Negro composer, organist, pianist, choral director, and music professor who had been born and raised in Canada. The series included five concerts a year, featuring an array of premier Negro artists, including Duke Ellington, the Alvin Ailey Dancers, and Leontyne Price. The performances were open not just to Hampton Institute students but to the public as well. We paid fifty cents each for our daughters to ride the bus to the Institute for the concerts, and they got to attend performances by operatic tenor George Shirley, who would become the first Negro tenor to perform a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, as well as contralto Marian Anderson, who had been the first Negro to perform at the Met, in 1955. Another famed singer who performed during the series was soprano Adele Addison, who had been a former classmate of Mrs. Nelson, my piano teacher, at the Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey.

  One of Joylette’s favorite activities with Mrs. Davis was the annual bus trip to a weekend music festival at Virginia State College in Ettrick, Virginia. There the students competed against other Negro school bands, orchestras, and choirs from all over the state and then performed in a concert on the final evening.

  When I wasn’t shuttling the girls to their events or attending performances to support them, I was going to choir practice or church, or participating in my AKA sorority functions or other community activities. But I also carved out some fun time with Eunice, my dear sorority sister, fellow church member, co-worker, and friend, to attend the Negro colleges’ annual Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) basketball tournament. Eunice had been one of the first Negro computers hired at Langley in the late 194
0s. She and I were serious basketball fans, and we each used a week of our vacation to travel to the tournament. The event rotated to various cities, Greensboro and Winston-Salem in North Carolina and Norfolk, Richmond, and Hampton in Virginia. The tournament featured sixteen girls’ and boys’ basketball teams, which competed all week. It was a huge, multicollege reunion, and alumni from all of the participating HBCU colleges packed, wall to wall, into the gym for the games and then spilled out into the town for parties and get-togethers. Eunice and I kept up with the names of all the star players and the team scores, and by the semifinals on Fridays, we had compiled a grid. The crowd grew even larger on Saturdays for the finals. We had a blast each year and always looked forward to attending.

  I also made sure the girls and I spent time together. On some weekends we played tennis (or practiced hitting balls across the net) on the courts at a nearby state college. We also made time for sewing, crocheting, and putting together puzzles, and we drove to White Sulphur Springs and Marion to visit my and Jimmie’s families as often as we could. The more moments we filled, the less time we had to focus on the gaping hole in our lives. We got through those first months after losing Jimmie by just pushing ahead with the activities that made us feel almost as if our lives were normal.

  Then my normal at work changed forever on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. Called Sputnik 1, the 22-inch-round aluminum ball weighed 183 pounds and beeped around the Earth every 98 minutes. The launch astonished the world and shattered America’s confidence in our technological dominance. By then, we were a decade into the Cold War, and Sputnik felt like a bloodless but humiliating sneak attack that left our scientific community scrambling to strike back. Fear and uncertainty spread throughout the general population as Americans peered into the dark skies night after night in search of blinking evidence that the Soviets were watching us. They wondered: Were we all just targets in waiting as the Soviets marked their path to send bombs or nuclear missiles our way?

  Roger Launius, former chief historian for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the agency that would emerge from the panic, described the days after the Sputnik launch this way in a piece he wrote decades later:

  The only appropriate characterization that begins to capture the mood on 5 October involves the use of the word hysteria. A collective mental turmoil and soul-searching followed, as American society thrashed around for the answers. . . . Almost immediately, two phrases entered the American lexicon to define time, “pre-Sputnik” and “post-Sputnik.” The other phrase that soon replaced earlier definitions of time was “Space Age.” With the launch of Sputnik 1, the Space Age had been born and the world would be different ever after.

  Before Sputnik, I had never before spent much time thinking about outer space. Even in the Flight Research Division at NACA, the engineers’ projects had been focused on improving flight safety in the earthly realm. But I never again would have the luxury of not thinking about the world beyond the one I knew. And that suited me just fine. We couldn’t allow our enemies to learn more about what was out there than we knew ourselves. As I stood with my daughters in our own yard one October night after the launch, I pointed out the satellite, and we tracked it until it slipped slowly out of view. It looked like a moving star, but I was familiar with its path and knew exactly where to look. Standing there, I felt that competitive American spirit rise in me and thought that we couldn’t let them get away with this. We’ve got to do something. Little did I know then that “we” soon would include me. Nor could I have imagined that the maverick Dr. Claytor actually had been prescient when he said I needed one more class to be ready for what lay ahead. He had created that class just for me, and it was the last one that I studied under him: the Analytic Geometry of Space.

  While it was shocking that the Soviets had beaten us into space, scientists all over the world, including the United States, had been working collaboratively toward the same goal as part of a worldwide scientific research effort known as the International Geophysical Year (IGY). The IGY was the designated time frame from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958, which the international science community had determined would be a peak period to study geophysical phenomena. The White House had announced plans as early as July 1955 to launch an Earth-orbiting satellite for the IGY effort and called for proposals. Two months later, the Naval Research Laboratory’s project, Vanguard, was selected to move forward and represent the United States. But by October 4, 1957, Vanguard, whose first satellite was to weigh just 3.5 pounds, was behind schedule, over budget, and had been left in the dust by a significantly bigger Soviet machine.

  Before American scientists could even respond, the Soviets launched again, on November 3, 1957, this time sending an even bigger spacecraft, the 1,120-pound Sputnik 2, into space with a passenger, a dog named Laika. Playing catch-up a month later, the White House announced plans for a December 6 test launch of a Project Vanguard booster, but the rocket rose just three feet before bursting into flames. A second attempted Vanguard launch, on February 5, 1958, made it four miles before exploding. Both launches were humiliating defeats.

  But in the meantime, another unapproved satellite plan that had been developed by a team of US Army researchers for the IGY satellite effort resurfaced and put the United States back in the Space Race. On January 31, 1958, Explorer 1 was launched successfully from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and made a notable scientific discovery. The spacecraft carried a small instrument, built by physicist James A. Van Allen, to measure radiation encircling the Earth. The instrument verified the existence of the Earth’s magnetic field and discovered magnetic radiation belts around the planet. These “Van Allen radiation belts” would thereafter carry his name. A short time later, on March 17, 1958, Vanguard 1 finally launched successfully into orbit and confirmed the findings of Explorer 1.

  The success of these launches helped President Eisenhower’s administration and the general public breathe a bit easier. But to restore our nation’s shattered image as a technological giant, President Eisenhower had to go bigger. He began working with congressional leaders to develop plans for a national agency dedicated to the exploration of space. While there were other proposals, the plan that emerged from the president’s Science Advisory Committee was to rename NACA and expand it into an agency whose mission is “to plan, direct, and conduct aeronautical and space activities.” Congress approved legislation adopting the plan, and on July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed into law the National Aeronautics and Space Act, giving birth to NASA.

  Even as the legislation made its way through Congress, the engineers in my division sensed that this was their moment. They and their fellow brainy colleagues throughout NACA were convinced that they knew more about flight than anyone on the planet. They had dedicated their lives and work to studying every aspect of flight and aircraft, and the latest advances in aerospace technology and safety had risen from their research. They were eager to dive in and guide this nation into the Space Age. Clusters of different agency staffers met constantly, trying to learn from one another as much as they could as fast as they could. My supervisor, Mr. Pearson, head of the Flight Research Division, decided to add some structure to the meetings and information sharing. He set up a series of lectures among the two most central divisions, Flight Research and our counterparts in the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). Various engineers were assigned individual lecture topics. For example, among the five guys on my team, the assignments included Harold “Al” Hamer, rocket propulsion; Carl Huss, the physics of the solar system; John Mayer, orbital mechanics; Alton Mayo, the issues and challenges objects face returning to Earth; and Ted Skopinski, the math equations to figure out the trajectory (flight path) of a spacecraft.

  The seventeen lectures stretched from February to May 1958. I was assigned the task of preparing the data charts and doing the mathematical equations for the lectures. As the engineers prepared for their meetings, they
would go over their research with me, and as usual I asked probing questions to be sure I understood what they were doing and what they wanted me to do. The team soon discovered that I could do the equations quicker than all of them. Of the group, I was the last one who had gone to college, and I knew all of this plane geometry. And, of course, Dr. Claytor had taught me that final class, the Analytic Geometry of Space. You see, normally in geometry you learn how things move on a plane. But when you get into the third dimension, you’re out there in space, and you have rules. The aircraft has six degrees of freedom when it’s out there. So that’s another whole science, and it was important to us in that moment to know how to do it. I was working with engineers who would have to figure out, for example, the conditions in space once an aircraft leaves the Earth’s atmosphere. Well, I knew how to compute it, and I could tell them faster than they could figure it out because that math was still fresh in my mind. So the task of doing those equations just fell to me. I was thrilled to be able to contribute to this important research.

  There was something that bothered me in the beginning, though. It was early 1958, and I knew that the real work of refining, testing, and vetting the engineers’ research took place in their group meetings. By then I was working in the Guidance and Control Branch of the Flight Research Division, and I wanted to be in the room with the engineers, absorbing it all, asking questions in real time, not after the fact, as someone gave me the digest version of what happened. So I did what I do when I want to know something. I verbalized the question residing in my mind:

  “Why can’t I go to your meetings?” I asked the guys.

  Silence.

  Finally one of them responded, “Girls don’t go to the meetings.”

  Girls, meaning the computers, meaning me.

  “Well, is there a law against it?” I shot back.