Grasping Mysteries Read online

but guided by the math Katherine worked on,

  it now spins safely into the sea.

  Waves lap around the bobbing capsule

  as John Glenn opens the door and grins.

  Katherine adds her voice to the room loud with cheers.

  For the first time all year, she leaves work

  before sundown. She drives to the coast

  to face earth’s shadow, a blue band that briefly widens

  as an edge of the world slips into beautiful darkness.

  Reaching Higher

  Now that an American has soared around the world,

  President Kennedy wants one to fly to the moon.

  Katherine calculates the speed and direction

  of both a rocket and the earth’s spin.

  She analyzes how much force will be made by the rocket,

  how momentum will build as it pushes past the pull

  of the earth’s gravity. She and colleagues write long reports,

  including pages that begin with What if…?

  She charts the stars in case the electricity or computers fail

  and the astronauts must find their way back

  the way sailors once did, guided by constellations.

  Reaching the moon seems impossible.

  But every day, Katherine works with people

  who mean to make that happen. One number at a time.

  Dreams

  Filled with her mother’s faith in her, Joylette goes to college

  across town at Hampton, famous for the old oak tree

  where President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation

  was read for the first time in the South,

  declaring that all held as slaves

  be henceforward forever free.

  Soon a school for them was founded by the tree.

  For about a hundred years the Hampton campus

  has been quiet, but now students march through town,

  demanding that promises of equality finally be kept.

  Friends from church tell Katherine about students

  who bring homework to the five-and-dime store,

  open books on the lunch counter, and pretend to study.

  Some are shoved from their seats.

  Angry white people knock cups and plates off the counter.

  The students get up, wipe up spilled mustard and coffee,

  return to their task. Others stage sit-ins at libraries.

  When Joylette talks about joining a march for justice,

  Katherine shakes her head. I just want you to be safe.

  If they put you in jail,

  you won’t ever get that job you want at NASA.

  It won’t matter that you were marching peacefully.

  Joylette touches the corner of her mouth,

  which had been cut when she was a child turned away

  from a hospital with blood on her brown face.

  She won’t promise she won’t protest,

  but stands strong as the oak tree

  where people gather again with new hope.

  Borderless

  With math as powerful and soundless as the hands

  of a choir director silently shaping music,

  Katherine measures arcs between a spot on the moon

  that’s eleven miles long and three miles wide

  and what was Cape Canaveral,

  renamed Cape Kennedy after the death of a president

  whose dreams shape their work.

  While one astronaut pilots around the moon,

  two others will take a smaller craft to the surface,

  which looks pockmarked and silver-gray.

  Katherine works out the crucial part

  where the two vehicles meet at just the right time.

  After years of work, she and millions of others

  watch television to see Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin,

  and Michael Collins fly to the moon.

  Two astronauts ride the Eagle module to the surface.

  They stir dust as they lumber and bob,

  taking close-up photos of craters and long-distance photos

  of the blue-marbled world, whole and undivided as the sky.

  Unhidden

  After the astronauts fly safely home,

  Katherine works on ways to reach Mars, a journey

  that may uncover more history hidden in darkness.

  After thirty-three years at Langley, she retires,

  but she doesn’t stop asking questions.

  She’s proud of her daughters’ work teaching

  and raising children,

  Joylette’s career as a NASA mathematician.

  Katherine adds photographs of her grandchildren,

  then her great-grandchildren, on a table by a phone

  she answers one afternoon. Margot Lee Shetterly

  tells her that her father was a research scientist at Langley.

  She speaks of her childhood singing in a church

  filled with mathematicians, reciting Bible verses

  to a Sunday school teacher who was retired from Langley.

  Now Margot is a writer and back

  in Hampton with questions.

  Did you love math as a child? she asks Katherine.

  Who helped you along? Who stood in your way?

  Katherine talks about herself, insists, I just did my share.

  She speaks of how she worked with Dorothy Vaughan,

  Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden,

  all Black women who once taught math.

  Katherine checked her work against computer programs

  written by Dr. Evelyn Boyd Granville, one of the first

  African American women to earn a PhD in mathematics.

  Katherine used NASA’s planetary flight handbook,

  partially written by Mary Golda Ross, a Cherokee woman

  who became the first woman engineer at Lockheed,

  where she designed satellites and rockets.

  Working around the same time, Amy Gonzales,

  a Mexican American, calculated rocket trajectories.

  Sometimes alone, often together,

  women opened doors to mystery. None expected

  to be celebrated beyond the walls where they worked.

  But at ninety-eight, Katherine Johnson,

  resplendent in silver and pearls

  at a premiere of the movie Hidden Figures,

  graciously nods as people stand to applaud her.

  Fame is built with math, rides on an arc.

  Shine on one point shows up others.

  Katherine won’t forget those who didn’t live to see

  their own brilliance praised. She cares more

  about getting things right

  than clapping, which goes on and on.

  The world has long waited to cheer

  for a woman who did her best, and was extraordinary.

  MAKING CHANGE WITH CHARTS, PART II

  EDNA LEE PAISANO

  (1948–2014)

  Beginnings

  NEZ PERCE COUNTY, IDAHO, 1955

  Pretending to be a wild horse, Edna runs

  past canyons and camas flowers blue as the sky.

  She picks huckleberries and swims in the river

  with cousins. They warm up by a campfire,

  where their grandfather fries fish he caught.

  Grandmother layers a pit with hot stones

  to roast camas bulbs tucked in cloth and leaves.

  The smallest cousin rolls on her back,

  clutching a bag of marshmallows, laughing

  as she doles them out to toast over the fire.

  Edna counts stars until the sky is filled

  with almost as much shine as darkness.

  Art and Math

  Trust me, Grandmother says, demanding precision

  as Edna counts colored beads for moccasins.

  Stitch by stich, the single beads shape themselves

  into triangles, rectangles, trapezoids,
and rhombuses.

  Some rows are jagged at the top, like the bar graphs

  she loves making to compare sales

  of milk or baskets of corn, radishes, and hot peppers

  from one year to the next.

  Edna asks, Did your grandmother teach you how to sew?

  No. Grandmother tells her about the government school

  she attended far from home. Children were forbidden

  to use their first language, ordered to speak only English.

  Lessons were meant to whittle away memory

  or respect for their family’s customs.

  But I came back here and taught your mother and aunts.

  When Edna vows never to leave, Grandmother says,

  Not until you go to college, like your parents.

  Edna knows they met in one. Her mother returned

  with her father, who still misses

  the Pueblo of Laguna foothills.

  Edna sorts blue, yellow, and red beads, stitches

  so lightning bolts and wild roses rise into view.

  A Girl’s Education

  Wooden rulers clatter as students draw

  straight lines for words to ride on.

  Edna stacks numbers as carefully as kindling.

  Sometimes they flicker like sparks that can’t be caught,

  but snag in the airy net of guessing.

  In this school, no language is called wrong, but math,

  with its bent toward equality, is Edna’s favorite.

  Math shows no favor for the past or future,

  but builds a home where she breathes.

  A bell rings. Small children spray from the shut door,

  shriek and sprint across the playground.

  Edna is also gleeful that she can work inside or out.

  Near home, she draws crisscrossing lines in the dirt.

  Her cousins toss stones over the grid.

  If a stone falls in one square, she wonders,

  what are the chances it will land there again?

  Estimates and probability are also her subjects

  as she counts clouds, watches grasses bend,

  looks for birds and listens to insects to predict weather

  later in the day. One small sign can stretch far.

  Sold

  Edna’s mother teaches school. Her father works

  in the lumberyard. They’re both busy at their farm

  on weekends, when Edna and her grandmother

  arrange beaded bags and moccasins

  on a table in town. Vans and station wagons

  with out-of-state license plates stop.

  Grandmother seems smaller here than at home.

  When asked questions, the corners of her eyes and mouth

  pinch tight as the end of a pulled thread.

  Edna’s face warms, slightly embarrassed

  by her grandmother’s polite but short replies,

  her refusal to put at ease tourists who look

  as if they expect more than moccasins.

  Maybe forgiveness, though Grandmother told Edna

  not to blame the living for the invisible borders that

  drivers passed on their way into the reservation.

  One woman asks Edna, Do you go to school?

  Yes. Edna smiles though the question seems silly.

  Doesn’t she know today is Saturday?

  When asked, What’s your favorite subject?

  Edna says, Math. She’s twelve now

  but remembers the thrill when she first opened a book

  with that word on the cover, replacing arithmetic.

  She’s always ready to talk about her love for breaking

  equations into parts, putting them back together,

  but the woman has turned away.

  Maybe Grandmother is right.

  Strangers don’t want their stories.

  Seventeen

  Edna runs her hand over her damp dark hair,

  which smells of the clear river that rolls around rocks.

  Has the water already forgotten the shape

  she makes when swimming?

  Life here is hard, Grandmother says.

  We need more and better jobs. Not everyone

  comes back. She gives Edna a dress she sewed

  with fringe and tassels, like those worn by ancestors.

  Edna won’t wear it at college or maybe anywhere,

  but the deerskin is a promise that she belongs.

  Here and Beyond

  BOISE, IDAHO, AND SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  Mathematics is a mirror. In college,

  equations make Edna certain of who she is.

  But she’d be ashamed to just follow

  what she loves and not give back. She’s here

  thanks to money from her parents, grandparents,

  tribe, and country. She can’t return

  to the reservation and say, I’m a mathematician.

  She puts away her slide rule, protractor,

  the compass she used to draw and measure circles,

  along with her beading.

  Training to be a teacher, she reads books,

  passes out pencils and paper, helps children

  stack blocks into buildings and bridges.

  Each hurt and hungry child who gathers around her knees

  teaches her about the needs of those beyond this circle.

  One day she takes out her tools again.

  Earning a master’s in social work in Seattle,

  she translates stories of people in peril to numbers,

  then unfolds these back to words.

  She studies laws that, like multiplication,

  could make changes not just for one child but many.

  She draws rose diagrams, coxcomb graphs,

  and charts that compare children who eat healthy food

  to those who are hungry. She contrasts the chances

  of children who have books in their homes with those

  likely to hear fewer words or know the shapes of stories,

  factoring in how not all stories come from paper.

  Those deprived of food and books have a hard time

  in school and are less likely to go to college.

  Math works out ways to give everyone a fair chance,

  nudges one example to fan out past paper.

  Multiplication

  WASHINGTON, DC, 1972

  Three years ago, intricate math helped two astronauts walk

  on the moon and get safely back to Earth.

  Now Edna works with a calculator that fits in her hand,

  hears talk of computers that might fit on a lap

  instead of a floor.

  This seems far-fetched, but it’s a time of change and hope.

  The nation’s capital is often alive with protests,

  including marches for equality in schools

  no longer segregated, but not yet fair.

  New laws are passed.

  Title IX brings new chances for girls and women.

  Still, the people who first lived on this continent

  often seem forgotten. Some celebrate Native Americans

  of long ago, while looking past the living.

  We’re here, Edna wants to say with her work,

  and crosses the country for a job with Head Start.

  She means to make sure that Native American children

  have breakfasts, blocks, and good books,

  not in just one home or school, but across the nation.

  She works hard, tries to ignore the way aches

  in her shoulders and legs come, go, then last longer.

  Her ankles swell and stiffen, making it hard to walk to work.

  She misses the canyons and big sky,

  but likes the capital’s white buildings,

  with straight and unbending pillars,

  doorways and windows symmetrical as sunflowers.

  Stone stairs are numbered with intention.


  Challenges

  Edna fights a fever and deep fatigue to finish work.

  Her pencil falls from her hands.

  She wills pain to stay in one place,

  like the point of her compass. But illness sets its own course.

  As she pushes herself up from a green wicker chair,

  her knees feel like knots that refuse to loosen.

  Her doctor says she has rheumatoid arthritis

  and must find ways to cope with pain

  that will always be her partner.

  The future is like a river bound to shift to different speeds.

  Edna makes plans while bracing for surprises.

  Washington, DC, gives her ways to live with less walking.

  The Potomac River is murky, but her shoulders are soothed

  at a gym, where she swims laps in a turquoise-colored pool.

  Silences

  Edna’s grace with numbers lands her a job at the

  US Census Bureau, where she’s the first Native American

  to work full-time. She studies measurements

  of people’s strength, health, and wealth,

  balances ratios of true and false,

  subtracts because paring shows patterns.

  Numbers trim toward truth. She lays them like bricks,

  straight and side by side. Starting with certainty,

  she moves through the unpredictable,

  then lands on a certain but wider space.

  Edna makes records of the present

  to learn what will be wanted in coming years.

  She doesn’t need all the information,

  but the right information, and to recognize

  when more is crucial and then find it.

  Numbers can show stories hidden like knots under cloth.

  Seeing some meant to show

  the population of Idaho towns,

  she’s stunned to find listed only about half of those

  who live in her old town. She tells colleagues,

  Many citizens of the Nez Perce nation

  are missing from these papers.

  That may be true in other reservations.

  A man at the desk by hers nods. We just mean to help,

  but some American Indians won’t answer

  our questions and get left out.

  Edna looks down at her shoes, remembers

  her grandmother’s butter-thick silences