In the first few days, Katherine caught on to the routine of filling in data sheets according to equations that had been laid out by Dorothy Vaughan or one of the engineers, who made regular appearances in the office throughout the day. Two weeks after Katherine arrived, when a white man in shirtsleeves came into the office and approached Dorothy Vaughan’s station, initiating a quiet conversation, Vaughan nodded her head and scanned the array of desks, scrutinizing their occupants as she listened. After he left, Vaughan called Katherine Goble and another woman, Erma Tynes, to her desk. “The Flight Research Division is requesting two new computers,” Vaughan said. “I’m sending you two. You’re going to 1244.”
For Katherine, being selected to rotate through Building 1244, the kingdom of the fresh-air engineers, felt like an unexpected bit of fortune, however temporary the assignment might prove to be. She had been elated simply to sit in the pool and calculate her way through the data sheets assigned by Mrs. Vaughan. But being sent to sit with the brain trust located on the second floor of the building meant getting a close look at one of the most important and powerful groups at the laboratory. Just prior to Katherine’s arrival, the men who would be her new deskmates, John Mayer, Carl Huss, and Harold Hamer, had presented their research on the control of fighter airplanes in front of an audience of top researchers, who had convened at Langley for a two-day conference on the latest thinking in the specialty of aircraft loads.
With just her lunch bag and her pocketbook to take along, Katherine “picked up and went right over” to the gigantic hangar, a short walk from the West Computing office. She slipped in its side door, climbed the stairs, and walked down a dim cinderblock hallway until she reached the door labeled Flight Research Laboratory. Inside, the air reeked of coffee and cigarettes. Like West Computing, the office was set up classroom-style. There were desks for twenty. Most of the people in the space were men, but interspersed among them a few women consulted their adding machines or peered intently at slides in film viewers. Along one wall was the office of the division chief, Henry Pearson, with a station for his secretary just in front. The room hummed with pre-lunch activity as Katherine surveyed it for a place to wait for her new bosses. She made a beeline for an empty cube, sitting down next to an engineer, resting her belongings on the desk and offering the man her winning smile. As she sat, and before she could issue a greeting in her gentle southern cadence, the man gave her a silent sideways glance, got up, and walked away.
Katherine watched the engineer disappear. Had she broken some unspoken rule? Could her mere presence have driven him away? It was a private and unobtrusive moment, one that failed to dent the rhythm of the office. But Katherine’s interpretation of that moment would both depend on the events in her past and herald her future.
Bemused, Katherine considered the engineer’s sudden departure. The moment that passed between them could have been because she was black and he was white. But then again, it could have been because she was a woman and he was a man. Or maybe the moment was an interaction between a professional and a subprofessional, an engineer and a girl.
Outside the gates, the caste rules were clear. Blacks and whites lived separately, ate separately, studied separately, socialized separately, worshipped separately, and, for the most part, worked separately. At Langley, the boundaries were fuzzier. Blacks were ghettoed into separate bathrooms, but they had also been given an unprecedented entrée into the professional world. Some of Goble’s colleagues were Yankees or foreigners who’d never so much as met a black person before arriving at Langley. Others were folks from the Deep South with calcified attitudes about racial mixing. It was all a part of the racial relations laboratory that was Langley, and it meant that both blacks and whites were treading new ground together. The vicious and easily identifiable demons that had haunted black Americans for three centuries were shape-shifting as segregation began to yield under pressure from social and legal forces. Sometimes the demons still presented themselves in the form of racism and blatant discrimination. Sometimes they took on the softer cast of ignorance or thoughtless prejudice. But these days, there was also a new culprit: the insecurity that plagued black people as they code-shifted through the unfamiliar language and customs of an integrated life.
Katherine understood that the attitudes of the hard-line racists were beyond her control. Against ignorance, she and others like her mounted a day-in, day-out charm offensive: impeccably dressed, well-spoken, patriotic, and upright, they were racial synecdoches, keenly aware that the interactions that individual blacks had with whites could have implications for the entire black community. But the insecurities, those most insidious and stubborn of all the demons, were hers alone. They operated in the shadows of fear and suspicion, and they served at her command. They would entice her to see the engineer as an arrogant chauvinist and racist if she let them. They could taunt her into a self-doubting downward spiral, causing her to withdraw from the opportunity that Dr. Claytor had so meticulously prepared her for.
But Katherine Goble had been raised not just to command equal treatment for herself but also to extend it to others. She had a choice: either she could decide it was her presence that provoked the engineer to leave, or she could assume that the fellow had simply finished his work and moved on. Katherine was her father’s daughter, after all. She exiled the demons to a place where they could do no harm, then she opened her brown bag and enjoyed lunch at her new desk, her mind focusing on the good fortune that had befallen her.
Within two weeks, the original intent of the engineer who walked away from her, whatever it might have been, was moot. The man discovered that his new office mate was a fellow transplant from West Virginia, and the two became fast friends. West Virginia never left Katherine’s heart, but Virginia was her destiny.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Turbulence
At six months and counting, Katherine Goble’s temporary assignment in the Flight Research Division was starting to look terribly permanent. So at the beginning of 1954, Dorothy Vaughan made her way to Building 1244 for a sit-down with Henry Pearson, the head of the branch that had “borrowed” her computer and forgotten to return her.
Katherine’s offer to begin work at Langley in 1953 had come with a six-month probational appointment. Successful completion of the trial period would make her eligible for promotion from the entry level of SP-3 to SP-5, with the raise that accompanied it. Though Katherine had spent only two weeks physically in the West Area Computing office, she was still Dorothy’s responsibility. Katherine could have been classified as a permanent member of West Computing, like the rest of the women who reported to Dorothy, available to rotate through other groups on temporary assignments. Or Henry Pearson could make Katherine an offer to officially join his group, as Kazimierz Czarnecki had done with Mary Jackson. One way or the other, however, Dorothy Vaughan and Henry Pearson needed to resolve Katherine Goble’s situation.