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 her 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.