When home from the hotel circuit, Howard’s longings were for the simplicities of small-town life: spending time with family and friends and working in the family’s poolroom. Dorothy, on the other hand, filled every spare hour of her week with activity, from NAACP meetings to piano rehearsals at the church. Howard was satisfied with his high school diploma, but years after she chose teaching over a master’s degree from Howard University, Dorothy had decided to travel to the Virginia State College for Negroes near Richmond, Virginia, once a week for a semester to take an evening extension course in education.
Dorothy, who knew the call of the open road so well, could certainly understand some of the appeal of Howard’s unusual and itinerant career, and she supported it as best she could. In 1942, the entire family accompanied him to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, renting a house in town that was close enough for Howard to walk to his job as a bellman at the Greenbrier. Warned by their parents not to even think about setting foot on the hotel grounds, the Vaughan children got as close as they could to the enormous white-columned resort from the periphery, peering through the shrubbery-covered iron fence from the outside so that they might steal a glance at the German and Japanese detainees interned at a makeshift prisoner-of-war camp on the premises.
Their rented house was across the street from the home of an older Negro couple, Joshua and Joylette Coleman. Joshua and Howard shared bellman duties at the front desk of the Greenbrier. While the men worked, Dorothy and the children passed the day with Joylette, a retired schoolteacher. The Vaughan children came to love the Colemans; it was like having another set of grandparents. Dorothy, who had spent seven years of her youth in West Virginia, told stories of living in the state and listened to the Colemans’ proud tales of their children’s exploits, particularly those of their youngest daughter, Katherine.
Charles, Margaret, Horace, and Katherine Coleman had grown up right there in town. Twenty-four-year-old Katherine lived in Marion, Virginia, a speck of a town in the state’s rural southwest. Until settling down and starting a family, Katherine had also worked as a math teacher. Like Dorothy, Katherine’s intellectual gifts particularly her talent for math had skipped her ahead in school. She graduated from high school at fourteen and enrolled at West Virginia State Institute, a black college located just outside of Charleston, the state capital. By her junior year, Katherine had tackled every math course in the school’s catalog and had been taken under the wing of a gifted young math professor named William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, who created advanced math classes just for her. Claytor, who earned a PhD in math from the University of Pennsylvania in 1933, was only the third Negro in the country to obtain the credential. He had graduated from Howard University in 1929 and took a seat in the school’s inaugural one-year master’s degree program in mathematics—the same offer Dorothy had been unable to accept.
Whether or not Dorothy and Katherine ever realized that the brilliant Claytor was one of their shared connections—Dorothy almost never discussed her Howard admittance—Katherine’s path following her graduation from the college, with a summa cum laude degree in math and French, must have felt to Dorothy like an alternate version of her own story. In 1936, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, led by Charles Hamilton Houston, successfully argued the Supreme Court case Murray v. Pearson, ending graduate school admission policies that explicitly barred black students. Building on that victory, the organization scored again at the high court with 1938’s Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, requiring states either to provide their black students with separate (but “equal”) graduate and professional school programs or to allow them to integrate the white schools. Some states, like Virginia, simply refused to comply: in 1936, a black student from Richmond named Alice Jackson Houston applied to the University of Virginia to study French, but she was denied admission. The NAACP sued on her behalf, and in response, the state of Virginia set up a tuition reimbursement fund, subsidizing the graduate educations of black students in any place but Virginia, a policy that continued until 1950.
West Virginia, however, decided to integrate. Quietly, quickly, and without protest, three “unusually capable” Negro students began graduate studies at West Virginia University in Morgantown in the summer of 1940. The Colemans’ daughter Katherine was one of them, a testament to both her academic talent and a strength of character that could stand up to the isolation and scrutiny that came along with being a black student on the front lines of desegregation. But a master’s degree in math would elude Katherine just as it had Dorothy. After the summer session, Katherine decided to leave WVU’s graduate program for a life as a full-time wife and mother, the call of domestic life winning out over career ambition.
Katherine’s parents loved their son-in-law, Jimmy, a chemistry teacher whom Katherine met at her first teaching assignment, and they doted on their three granddaughters. Her choice to prioritize family life did nothing to dampen her parents’ pride in her academic achievements. Did she, like Dorothy, ever wonder about where the opportunity might have taken her? Did she imagine what her talent might look like if it were pushed to the limit? Katherine had made her choice only two years earlier. Dorothy’s first big chance was now fifteen years in the past, long enough ago to assume that the die of her life had been irrevocably cast.
And yet at the end of November 1943, at thirty-two years old, a second chance—one that might finally unleash her professional potential—found Dorothy Vaughan. It was disguised as a temporary furlough from her life as a teacher, a stint expected to end and deposit her back in the familiarity of Farmville when her country’s long and bloody conflict was over. The Colemans’ youngest daughter would eventually find the same second chance years in the future, following Dorothy Vaughan down the road to Newport News, turning the happenstance of a meeting during the Greenbrier summer into something that looked a lot more like destiny.
Out the window of the Greyhound bus, the gentle hills of the Piedmont flattened and broadened and the state capital came and went, and as the coastal plain of the Tidewater region advanced toward Dorothy at forty miles per hour, one of the country’s busiest war boomtowns opened its arms to receive its newest resident.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Double V