Grasping Mysteries Page 9
in a backyard talking about people they used to know.
I heard Miss Turner got married, Margaret says.
She moved north for a while to finish her PhD.
I’m happy for her. Katherine doesn’t want
to be jealous, a rare pang.
She glances at her girls wearing crisp blue dresses.
Their folded white socks slip under their shiny black shoes
as they jump rope with cousins by the garage.
She takes Jimmie’s elbow. They stroll
to the table with desserts. As he hands her
a slice of cake on a paper plate,
his brother-in-law joins them. Eric runs a community center
and knows a lot of people in and around Hampton,
where he says there are good jobs. Some over at Langley
by the air base are open to women with math degrees.
Katherine holds her fork over a slice of cake,
listens for her daughters jumping rope.
The two spinning and swishing ropes sound like many.
She says, Moving might be hard on the girls.
Our life is blessed the way it is.
Finish that cake. Jimmie scrapes up a dab of frosting
he holds to her lips. It’s time to take another chance.
Another Road
Katherine and Jimmie pack the car.
The children bump against one another in the back.
Katherine remembers her father saying,
The world is bigger than this town. She turns
to Joylette, Constance, and Katherine,
asks, Can you see the moon?
Second Chances
HAMPTON, VIRGINIA, 1953
The girls go to Sunday school
at Carver Presbyterian Church, where Katherine joins
the choir. Jimmie takes a job
painting in the shipyard, which pays more than teaching.
Before leaving their new house, Katherine pulls on
cotton gloves and her church hat, twists around to check
that the seams in her stockings are straight.
Katherine is qualified for the job. After a desk opens
in the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, she’s welcomed
by Mrs. Dorothy Vaughan, who’s worked here
since jobs opened to Black women during the war.
Now she’s in charge of a dozen women called computers
who sit before clicking calculators
that cover almost half of each desk.
The women cheerfully check one another’s math
and manners. No one must be late or untidy.
The hems of their skirts should be a proper length,
their hair smoothed or pinned down. Katherine knows
that if fault is found with one, they’ll all look bad.
Changing Course
Katherine’s work is fast and flawless.
Soon Dorothy tells her, The director of the flight research
division asked me to send my best mathematician
for a job that will take two weeks.
I haven’t been here much longer than that.
Katherine glances around at the women she talks
with at lunch about the new shirts that need
less ironing, what each plans to cook for supper.
I’ve never seen anyone work through numbers as quickly
as you, Dorothy says. And we’ve got a superior group here,
all with college math degrees. The white women
can keep data straight, but those computers don’t have
the education to see past what they’re told.
The research scientists come to our room for help.
Katherine picks up her handbag, says good-bye,
walks to another building. At the door to a big room,
she counts fifteen white men, three white women,
and one woman the same color as her.
On the chalkboard, she spots an equation grown too long
for paper. She swiftly follows its length and turns,
hears a quiet call to what’s yet to be known.
An Invitation
Men wearing rumpled white shirts hand Katherine
equations to solve, some stretching ten pages deep.
She charts a plane’s speed and height over the course
of a flight, figuring in gusts and vibrations,
particularly during dangerous descents, looking
for ways to keep planes in the air during wild winds.
She bends into work she was meant to do.
The men around her seem to recognize the posture.
Most care about math’s certainty, not looking back,
but forward to a time of faster flights.
She goes to the hall, walks past rooms of white researchers.
A bathroom door with a sign
that says WOMEN implies white women.
It’s meant to keep her out, the way Virginia laws
ban her from libraries, parts of buses,
lunch counters, and movie theaters.
Katherine doesn’t see a COLORED WOMEN sign in this building
where she has work to do and no time to waste looking
for a bathroom when there’s one right here for women.
Unsaid
Late one afternoon, the man with a desk by Katherine’s
asks where she came from. She and Ted Skopinksi talk
about the West Virginia mountains they both miss.
After she’s been there three months, they start work
together on a paper. He lends her copies of Aviation Week.
Overhead lights whir, bright on men too intent
on their work to pay much mind to their own skin and hair,
never mind hers. They care about her equations,
which explore what happens as a plane’s
particular shape and weight roughen the air.
As planes fly faster, the math gets more complicated.
Katherine prepares charts
for meetings women aren’t allowed to attend.
She signs papers to keep her work secret,
though she can’t think of anyone outside this building
who would care about her charts.
When she goes to the grocery store or church,
friends ask, How’s your family? not, How is work?
She eats lunch at her desk, which saves time, money,
and worry about what table at the cafeteria to sit at.
Often the men eat sandwiches too, playing cards
or talking with her about equations that start small,
then sprawl to show how far someone may go.
No one mentions how their children go to different schools
or asks, How’s Jimmie? She’s glad because the sound
of his name might unstitch her composed face.
She’s taken on enough firsts,
doesn’t want to be the first to cry in this room.
She won’t use words like “headaches” or “hospital.”
Or confide how Jimmie has recently missed
work in the shipyard, stopped telling jokes,
though he can work up a grin for their daughters.
She doesn’t want to talk about neighbors and cousins
who quietly bring casseroles and care.
She’d rather talk about flight, turbulence,
waves of wind behind wings.
Clouds
Every Sunday morning, Katherine stands and sways
with the choir. She sings Glory, glory, glory,
stretches the syllables of Hallelujah.
But one day she sits in a front pew instead of with the choir,
as they sing about rain, rivers, and going home.
The preacher speaks of Jimmie’s pride in his wife
and the three girls who lean against her,
smelling of starch. Katherine can’t remember
who ironed their dresses and ribbons, braided their hair,
polished their patent leather shoes. Had she managed?
The preacher calls out words the congregation calls back.
Then Katherine leaves the pew with people’s eyes on her,
like a bride walking the wrong way.
Friends gather around outside. One hands her
a cup of coffee she doesn’t want, but finally sips.
It’s cold. She touches her daughters’ hair. Tomorrow,
as impossible as it seems, she’ll fix them breakfast.
Chesapeake Bay
That Christmas, crumpled tissues are strewn
among the gift wrap.
But after the holidays, Katherine says it’s time
to get back to work and school as usual.
After supper one night, the girls gather around
the linoleum-topped table
under a bright lamp that hums like bees.
Joylette slams shut her math book. I can’t do this.
Everybody says that. It’s almost never true, Katherine says.
If you work hard, you can do whatever you want.
Mom, that doesn’t always happen.
You’re right. Katherine touches Joylette’s hand.
Tomorrow, let’s go walk by the water.
She packs supper in a basket and drives to the bay.
Her youngest girl tosses stones to see how far
they’ll skip. Above them, dark birds soar, wings wide.
Opening a Door
When Langley becomes part of NASA, the workers
focus less on trying to increase the speed
and safety of jet planes and more on a mission
to send a spacecraft around the earth.
Katherine works with Ted Skopinksi until he’s needed
elsewhere. She keeps on exploring the angles formed
by a point on the rotating earth, the North Pole,
and land that might be just below a moving spacecraft.
Euler’s formula guides her as she fills in distances
between the known points of slopes and possibilities.
She writes papers, but her name is taken off the top.
When men return from meetings, she asks
questions that could take her deeper into problems
they can’t answer. She asks, Why can’t I go to the meetings?
Her boss sighs. It’s just how it’s done.
Is there a law against it?
He shakes his head.
She doesn’t stop asking
until he finally says,
All right. Go.
Turn Around
Katherine meets Jim Johnson in the choir loft.
His river-deep voice joins hers singing,
“His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” After services they talk,
then more at church suppers and a picnic,
where he tells her about his past. I fixed navy planes
to make sure pilots were safe in the sky.
Then I signed on for the war in Korea.
I got to see a lot of the world,
but now I’m ready to stay in one place.
I’m glad for a good job at the post office and joined
the army reserves. But tell me about your work.
They stroll to a field where friends play baseball.
Watching someone swing a bat,
the ball rising and curving back down,
Katherine explains how she’s trying to figure out
how a spacecraft might soar past the atmosphere.
Before long she invites Jim to join her family at suppers.
He doesn’t tell jokes the way the girls’ father had,
but they appreciate his tender attention to their tastes
in music and meals. Just as he was content to repair planes
rather than fly them, he wants to fit in here: watching,
listening, seeing what’s needed but not pushing change.
Sometimes Jim meets Katherine at work,
bringing sandwiches they share on the steps,
watching the moon rise.
He says, I’m a lucky guy to find a beautiful, smart woman
and three girls as great as their mother.
We’re set in our ways, she says, but smiles.
Good ways. I’d be honored to be part of them.
From his pocket, he pulls a ring
she doesn’t hesitate to slip on.
Her Name
After she marries and becomes Katherine Johnson,
she calculates a flight path from liftoff, around the earth,
to splashdown. She works backward,
starting with the part of the ocean where the capsule
is meant to land. She hands her boss a report
thick with charts, tables, and references
she checked and checked again.
She says, My name belongs on this paper.
The thirty-four-page report with twenty-two crucial
equations becomes the first paper in her division
with a woman’s name at the top.
Seen and Unseen
Katherine flips through newspapers and magazines
that show pictures of seven men who each hope
to be the first American to soar into space.
They work at Cape Canaveral in Florida,
where rockets will launch,
but come to Langley to take engineering classes
and train in models of capsules.
Katherine sees them pass through the corridors
with their close-cut hair and pale pink faces,
their pace swingier than most here.
All were military test pilots, used to danger,
taking orders, and making decisions
at a moment’s notice. The aspiring astronauts
are strong and serene, but when one goes into space,
he will be as vulnerable as a baby, packed
into a capsule with barely room to move his elbows.
Katherine’s data sheets grow longer and wider.
Some of the smallest numbers
stand for the biggest possibilities.
How will the rocket rise to the edge of the atmosphere
and release a capsule that escapes the pull of gravity?
Can it withstand the heat made by friction
moving at eighteen thousand miles per hour.
Her calculations must guide the capsule
around the earth, which isn’t a perfect sphere,
but bulges in the middle and turns a bit differently each day.
She honors both change and the way the world
reminds her of the glory of repetition.
“Hallelujah” is rarely sung just once.
Trust
John Glenn, who treats the flag, his family, and women
with respect, is chosen for this space voyage.
Shortly before liftoff, he learns that the course
of his flight comes from electronic computers.
He’s long flown airplanes and loves machines,
but there was always a person at the controls.
In space he could live or die, and can’t trust
a noisy machine the way he can a human
with a heart and mind. He says,
Get the girl to check the numbers.
The printouts from a new electronic computer
that fills and heats up a room are rushed to Katherine.
She stays up late, grips her pencil hard, reaching
far past decimal points to make sure every digit matches
those in long lists shuffled from computers.
She is both as calm and as terrified as a pilot.
Any slight lapse of her attention
might mean the capsule could sink in the sea,
the nation’s hero too far away to be found.
Orbits
Katherine stands with colleague
s between screens,
charts, and maps. On February 20, 1962, the results
of their work will astonish
more than a hundred million viewers.
Her heart flutters as they watch the rocket tremble
and soar past smoke. Godspeed, John Glenn.
Katherine says a silent prayer.
Her eyes stay on the television showing
the suited-up astronaut surrounded by switches,
gauges, and panels knit with steel and math.
As the capsule begins to orbit, John Glenn’s voice
breaks over the radio. He marvels at the curving line
of the African coast, wind blowing desert sand into waves,
snow-covered mountains, a view he could cover
with his hand. He speaks of the deep green sea,
the spit and spark of a thunderstorm,
says the state of Florida looks just like it does on a map.
After the first orbit, the capsule wobbles.
John Glenn overrules the computers to keep
the spacecraft steady and on course.
Then a safety light clicks on.
The heat shield is loose. A scientist chokes on his words.
No one around Katherine needs to say what they all know:
If that shield tears off, the Friendship 7
could burn almost as hot as the sun,
turn to flame as it falls back to earth.
Meanwhile, John Glenn circles the earth again
and again, seeing the sun rise and set
three times in less than five hours.
The spacecraft hurtles down as planned.
Katherine breathes easily until screens go blank.
She hears a snap and static
before sounds stop from the capsule.
Whatever is happening isn’t supposed to happen.
Her breath snags. She stands among people
who made decisions about every wire
looped around the man cocooned in the capsule.
Friends hide their faces as the silence
from the falling capsule drags through four minutes
and twenty seconds, enough time for her to hear
a whole song about rivers and rain hum through her mind.
Then everyone looks up at the sound
of static. The astronaut says, That was a real fireball.
Flames flickered around the spacecraft,