In 1946, Mimosa Crescent had expanded from its original twenty-two parcels to a total of fifty-one, slowly but surely over the next ten years attracting families who filled in the empty lots with comfortable three-and four-bedroom brick houses. What a thrill, not just to imagine a dream house but to plan the color of the tile in its bathrooms, the wood of the cabinets in the kitchen, the size of the floorboards in the living room! Joylette, as the eldest daughter, would even get her own bedroom, the kind of luxury that most girls—of any color—only got to see in the movies or between the pages of a Nancy Drew mystery. The subdivision’s proud residents seeded their lawns and planted trees for shade, hosting patio parties and many a club meeting at their homesteads. The Goble family was soon to join them.
It was the perfect plan . . . until over the course of 1955, Jimmy started to feel sick, first with headaches that kept getting worse, then weakness. But unlike the undulant fever that had afflicted him more than a decade prior, he didn’t get better. It took months for doctors to diagnose his ailment. They finally discovered a tumor, awkwardly located at the base of his skull, and declared it inoperable. He took to his bed, eventually so enervated that he was forced to take an indefinite leave from his job at the shipyard. His health declined slowly but inexorably for more than a year, much of that time spent in the hospital. Katherine and her daughters visited him as often as they could at his sick bed, holding vigil for the most important man in their lives.
James Francis Goble died on a Thursday, just five days before Christmas 1956. Three days later, Carver Memorial Presbyterian Church filled with mourners, the community offering its condolences and support to the young widow and her three adolescent daughters. Joylette, Kathy, and Connie would never again be able to experience the joy of the holiday season without also reliving the ache that came from their father’s death. Both Jimmy’s parents and Katherine’s parents stayed in town through the end of the year. Katherine’s in-laws and their families, particularly the Eppses and the Kanes, who lived in Newport News, shared the burden of grief. Jimmy’s Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brothers and Katherine’s Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters kept watch over them, bringing food and running errands and taking care of the mundane necessities that seemed impossible to deal with in the face of such a profound loss.
The Goble girls were as devoted to their father as Katherine was to hers. The loss of Jimmy’s protective arms and ready smile, the instability that came from the abrupt, premature end of the partnership between their parents, turned their safe world inside out and forced them to shed the fuzzy comforts of childhood for the hard realities of the adult world.
But Katherine would not yield to loss and chaos. She had made a solemn promise to her husband that she would do everything in her power to keep their bright, lively daughters on the path they had so carefully paved for them from the beginning of their lives. Katherine allowed herself and her girls until the end of the year to give themselves over completely to bereavement. On the first day of school in January 1957, following the Christmas holidays, she accompanied her daughters to a meeting with the school principal. “It is very important that you don’t show the girls any special treatment, or let up on them in any way,” Katherine said to the principal. “They are going to college, and they need to be prepared.” With her daughters, she established the new rules of a household run by a single mother: “You will have my clothes ironed and ready in the morning, and dinner ready when I come home,” she instructed. Katherine was now the mother and father, the love and the discipline, the carrot and the stick, and the sole breadwinner.
Katherine and Jimmy shared great ambitions for their children. The Goble sisters excelled in school and took piano and violin lessons and practiced diligently. They were good-natured, outgoing, and respectful, and they always rose to the high standards their parents had set for them. In her children, Katherine saw the legacy of her parents and Jimmy’s parents and all their generations past, each pushing their energy and resources to the limits to lift their progeny toward the American dream, to a life that would surpass their own in material and emotional richness and access to the long-promised blessings of democracy. Everything depended on Katherine’s ability to hold her family together; she could not fall apart. Or perhaps she would not fall apart. There was, and always had been, about Katherine Goble a certain gravity, a preternatural self-possession that had made it the most logical thing in the world that she would teach Roman numerals to the president’s brother or converse in French with visiting aristocrats. She seemed to absorb the short-term oscillations of life without being dislodged by them, as though she were actually standing back observing that both travail and elation were merely part of a much larger, much smoother curve.
Certainly much of Katherine’s equipoise came from her father, Joshua. Family lore had it that he possessed unexplained skills and senses, that his nimble hands could spirit away afflictions in both humans and animals. Even after he went to work for the Greenbrier, neighbors black and white would call on him to see sick horses through a period of crisis. Years later, Joshua Coleman’s granddaughters would recall their grandfather saying that from their first meeting, he had a premonition that Jimmy Goble would not live a long life. Perhaps Katherine, with some intuition of her father’s vision, drew strength from the knowledge that her husband’s premature death was part of a way of things, however painful.
Or maybe it was her father’s pragmatic dictum—“You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you”—that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing. With her father’s words to buoy her, Katherine Goble observed the manifestations of segregation at Langley, decried the injustice they represented, yet did not feel their weight on her own shoulders. Once she crossed the threshold of Building 1244, she entered a world of equals, and she refused to behave in any way that would contradict that belief.
It was a part of her nature that some of the other black employees at Langley found mysterious, even vexing. How could she be so dismissive of the racism in their workplace, however passive, when her very entry to the laboratory had been under segregated circumstances? Katherine Goble’s genuine comfort with the white men she worked with allowed her to be herself with them, no mask required. When the Supreme Court announced the Brown v. Board of Education verdict ending legalized school segregation in 1954, she and the engineers had a long conversation about it, talking about the matter forthrightly rather than avoiding it the way a driver swerves to keep from hitting a fallen tree in the road. (“We decided we were all for it,” she remembered.) Perhaps as much as Katherine’s expectation that she should be treated as the equal of the engineers she worked with was her willingness to treat them as equals—to acknowledge that their intellect and curiosity matched hers, that they were bringing to the professional relationship the same sense of fairness and respect and goodwill that she was—that paved the way for her ultimate success.
Jimmy Goble’s death cleaved Katherine’s life in two parts. They had walked side by side through graduate school and marriage, children and the move to Newport News. Now, at just thirty-eight years old, she found herself a widow and a mother, but also a professional still in the early days of realizing her long-held dream. Jimmy wouldn’t be there to see it come to its fruition, but with love, support, and a belief in her talent, he had escorted her to the threshold, and she would carry his spirit and their memories forward. And so Jimmy Goble’s death at the end of 1956 wasn’t so much an end as an intermission. All that had come before would connect to all that was to come. In January 1957, Katherine’s daughters went back to school, and she went back to work: the second act of her life was about to begin.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN