In 1943, the family settled in Monroe, the seat of Union County, Noah’s assigned sales territory. The position afforded the Manns a comfortable living, and they were one of the few black families in town who owned a car, a Pontiac Hydramatic, which Christine’s father used to go collect premiums from customers. Every day after work, Noah wheeled the big automobile into the driveway and asked his youngest daughter, “What did you learn today?” Sometimes Christine accompanied him on his rounds. When she was barely old enough to see over the windshield, Noah gave Christine driving lessons on quiet country roads. She loved it when her father taught her the tricks like priming the carburetor that would keep the temperamental machine on the road. Bold and curious, Christine learned to ride a bike by rolling at top speed down one of Monroe’s many hills, flying off in one direction like a daredevil at the bottom of the hill while the bicycle went banging off in another. Patching tires and adjusting the bike’s brakes with a coat hanger became important parts of her mechanical repertoire. Dolls interested her mainly for what was inside them; her mother would catch her tearing out their stuffing so that she could see what was making them talk.
Younger than her closest sibling by eight years, and nearly thirteen years younger than her oldest brother, Christine’s early life revolved around the routines of the grown-up world. Shortly after Christine’s birth, Desma Mann returned to teaching. Christine stayed home with a babysitter until she was old enough to accompany her mother each day to her job in a two-room elementary school out in surrounding Union County. Across the street from the school stretched acres of cotton fields, the raw material for Monroe’s mill and the source of income for many county residents. The school year followed the picking season. Students sweltered in the desks throughout the North Carolina summer before being released in time for the harvest in September and October. With all potential playmates either in school or working in the fields, Christine entertained herself by joining in the lessons in her mother’s classroom. By the time she turned five, Desma Mann’s youngest daughter was a second-grade student, ready to attend the consolidated Winchester Avenue School in Monroe.
Christine became best friends with the principal’s daughter, Julia. The two were inseparable and went everywhere together. “Julia’s parents said she could go. Can I go too?” was Christine’s constant query to her parents. But with the onset of adolescence, as requests turned from afternoons riding bikes to dances and socializing with the kids in her class who were two years older, Christine’s parents decided to send their daughter to Allen to eliminate the possibility that she might be distracted from her studies.
The Allen School was founded in 1887 by white United Methodist missionaries, with the goal of providing talented Negro girls from Appalachian North Carolina with the best possible start in life. All the girls had “duty work assignments,” like Christine’s post at the library, a practical way to teach them responsibility and discipline. Many students came from working-class or poor families; Christine was one of the few at the school who did not receive assistance to cover the costs of tuition and board. Despite the economic circumstances of the student body, Allen was considered one of the best Negro high schools in the country. Parents from as far away as New York sent their children to Allen for its rigorous liberal arts curriculum, its religious teaching, and its insistence on imparting social graces to its students. Band leader Cab Calloway’s niece attended in the 1940s. A 1950 graduate named Eunice Waymon had made her way from North Carolina to New York and was already in the process of transforming herself into the singer, pianist, and civil rights activist Nina Simone.
Waves of homesickness washed over Christine in the fall of 1956, her first semester away from home. She phoned her parents every chance she could, begging them to let her return to the familiarity of Monroe. As the months rolled by, though, Christine came to love boarding school life. She opened herself to new friends, the stern but doting Methodist faculty, and the school’s routine and rituals. A charismatic eleventh-grade geometry teacher stoked her interest in math, and for the first time, she entertained the idea of a future that took advantage of her knack for numbers and all things analytical.
College, of course, wasn’t a matter of if, but where. Most Allen graduates went on to higher education, some to prestigious northern schools like Vassar and Smith. In 1956, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Virginia Tucker’s alma mater, admitted its first black students, Bettye Tillman and JoAnne Smart. In contrast to its neighbor’s militant position on segregation, North Carolina made cautious moves to comply with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. “After careful deliberation, it is my opinion that desegregation is an idea whose hour has arrived,” said Benjamin Lee Smith, the superintendent of the Greensboro public school system.
Christine, however, decided to follow in the family tradition of attending a black college, but she had long known that she didn’t want to walk a path previously worn by her older sisters and brothers. Two of her siblings had attended Johnson C. Smith, in Charlotte; one had graduated from Tennessee State, and another from Fisk, in Nashville. Two years away from home, away from the shelter of her parents and the model of her older siblings, had given Christine the desire, and the confidence, to strike out on her own.
The summer before her senior year, Christine accompanied her friend Julia’s family to attend Julia’s older sister’s graduation from Hampton Institute. Christine didn’t know much about the school; she had barely heard the name, but during her visit, she was taken by the elegant campus and green lawns, the balmy breezes of Hampton Roads in May, and the open expanses of coast and ocean. Hampton’s student body ranged from youngsters taking their family’s first step onto the ladder of social mobility to the scions of the Talented Tenth. The school’s strict environment—mandatory chapel, study halls, evening curfew, and a dress code—were so similar to Allen’s that Christine would need no adjustment.
Living in Monroe, Christine had always been someone’s little sister. At Hampton, she thought, she would become her own woman. In the fall, she applied to the school, with Fisk as her backup plan. Hampton responded with an offer letter and a scholarship covered by the United Negro College Fund.
“I’ve been accepted at Hampton,” Christine wrote her mother in a letter in early 1958. “I have a scholarship at Hampton, and so there is no reason why you shouldn’t let me go.” Desma Mann fretted at the idea of her baby going off so far away, all alone, but she had always known that day would come. One by one, she had encouraged her children to leave Monroe. There was nothing for them there—no job, no future. Only by leaving home would her children have the chance to reach the potential she and Noah had worked hard to cultivate in them.
Christine graduated from Allen in May 1958. From the time Sputnik took flight in October 1957 until she addressed her classmates as valedictorian, the Soviets launched two more satellites, Sputnik II, carrying the space dog Laika, and Sputnik III. The United States, playing catch-up, managed to put satellites Explorer I and Vanguard I into orbit, though eight of the eleven Vanguard launches failed. The post-Sputnik lament over the lack of American scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists moved President Eisenhower to initiate the National Defense Education Act, a measure designed to cultivate the intellectual talent required to generate successes—short and longer term—in space.