Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. Margot Shetterly Lee

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       The Duration

      The first time Dorothy Vaughan traveled the road between Farmville and Newport News was far from the last, though the unrelenting pace of research at Langley made anything but the shortest trips home impossible. With the Full-Scale Tunnel running around the clock and the rest of the engineering groups pushing the limits of their capacity, Dorothy became an expert in the eighteen-hour day, when she could find the time, taking the earliest possible bus to Farmville. She lingered over her children as long as she could before a late-night return to her corner of the war machine, the numbers on her data sheets swimming before her tired eyes the next day. Even time off over holidays, which were more flexible but still considered workdays, was hard to come by, particularly as she was still classified as a temporary war service employee.

      When and if the laboratory would make her a permanent offer of employment was a matter for the future. But over the July Fourth holiday in 1944, Dorothy Vaughan decided to convert her own status as a temporary resident of Newport News into something much longer lasting. She signed a lease on a new two-bedroom apartment in Newsome Park, picking up the keys to a white dwelling with black shutters, identical to the 1,199 others that had been built there. Protective paper—pink, inexplicably—covered the floors, and long after the apartments themselves ceased to exist, their first occupants would remember that first look at the pink-paper-covered floors. As if she were unwrapping a big present, Dorothy Vaughan pulled it up, making the apartment hers.

      Or, more accurately, theirs. Just as she had gone back to visit Farmville, she had, once or twice since coming to Newport News, brought Farmville down to her, arranging for the children to stay with her during a school break. It wasn’t so much that she had devised a plan out of whole cloth, more that the plan had faded into place, like a slow sunrise, as she identified the factors that would tip the balance of her life from an oscillation between Farmville and Newport News to a life fully at rest in the new city.

      Finding a suitable place to live hadn’t been easy. There simply wasn’t enough supply to meet the demands of a growing black population, most of whom considered a comfortable and safe place to live at the top of the list of the Four Freedoms that Roosevelt elucidated during the war. Aberdeen Gardens, a Depression-era subdivision built “for blacks by blacks” on 440 acres that included farmland bought from Hampton Institute, had recently been joined by Mimosa Crescent, a “high type suburban community for Negro families” and smaller black neighborhoods like Lassiter Courts, Orcutt Homes, and Harbor Homes.

      Reviewing her budget, her needs, and the ongoing demands of her job, Dorothy decided that Newsome Park, more or less in the same neighborhood she had come to know in the last nine months, was the best option. Although originally earmarked for shipyard workers and defense employees like Dorothy, the neighborhood was starting to attract Negroes from all income classes. Domestic workers, laborers, small-business owners, and many of the doctor-lawyer-preacher-teacher class moved in alongside the drillers, riggers, and civil servants. Its eventual demolition had been planned from its inception: both Newsome Park and next-door Copeland Park, for whites, were mandated to last only as long as the war. But the migrants settled in as if their temporary homes were built on bedrock.

      Newsome Park was an outsize replica of virtually every Negro community in the South, where racial segregation fostered economic integration. The government outfitted the development with the perks that it felt were key to keeping home-front morale high. The Newsome Park Community Center boasted a kitchen and banquet space, rooms for craft courses and club meetings, basketball and tennis courts, and a baseball diamond for the semipro Newsome Park Dodgers. The center’s director, Eric Epps, a former teacher at one of the Negro high schools whose activism in favor of teacher salary equalization had led to his dismissal, exhorted residents to turn out for chest X-rays and diabetes screenings at the center and solicited local fraternal and civil organizations for funds to support after-school programs.

      The tidy green-painted Newsome Park shopping center included a grocery store, a drugstore, a barbershop, a beauty shop, a beer joint, a cleaners, and a TV repair shop. And what wasn’t for sale in the stores came knocking at the front door: the coal man, the milkman, the iceman, the fishmonger, the vegetable man, and more made the rounds, peddling their wares to the neighbors. There was a nursery school for the tiniest tots, a boon to the mothers working six-day weeks during the war. Most importantly for Dorothy, Newsome Park Elementary was walking distance from the new apartment. It was her apartment, her name on the lease for the first time since she had been a young teacher.

      Dorothy’s mother-in-law tried to dig in her heels against the growing distance between her son and daughter-in-law that she must have surmised for some time to be inevitable. “You’re not going to take my babies,” she said to Dorothy, struggling against the changes that had been set in motion by Langley’s letter, but which had roots much deeper than that. A year after Dorothy left Farmville, so did her four children, starting the fall 1944 school year at Newsome Park Elementary School. The babysitter, who had come down with them to ease the transition, crowded into the apartment as well. Howard continued his itinerant hotel job. Dorothy had put herself and the children on a separate path forward, whereas the cycle of Howard’s life, despite the extensive travel to the exotic locations, still began and ended in Farmville. He made it down to Newport News when he could: it was too crowded, too noisy, too far away from his now elderly mother for him to convince himself to stay too long. Dorothy would send the children back home for summer vacations, and went back herself as she could, unwilling and unable to sever the ties with the people she loved deeply and would always consider her family. Her marriage with Howard settled into a state of limbo, never together but never completely apart either. It was a stable instability that would endure for the rest of Howard’s life, which was destined to be many decades shorter than Dorothy’s.

      By 1945, five out of ten people in southeastern Virginia worked for Uncle Sam, directly or indirectly. The sylvan fields, forests, and shores had been mowed down, paved over, and built up with roads, bridges, hospitals, boatyards, jails, and military bases, cities in and of themselves. Housing developments sprawled for miles, a new feature of the landscape, neither urban nor rural but something in between; the names of the new asphalted places were reflections of the green spaces they replaced: Ferguson Park, Stuart Gardens, Copeland Park, Newsome Park, Aberdeen Gardens. On the peninsula was Military Highway, a modern ribbon of road whose wide, smooth lanes now connected all the you-can’t-get-there-from-here points along the finger of land from Old Point Comfort at Fort Monroe to the Newport News shipyard, with stops along the way at Langley Field and Langley. All of it was the product of the war emergency. But what was a war boomtown without the war?

      V-J Day came on August 15, 1945, at 7:03 p.m. Eastern War Time. Into the vacuum of waiting and anxiety flooded “joyous tumult.” All the pent-up emotions of a nation weary from four years of war exploded in a paroxysm, nowhere as much as in the war communities leading the home-front effort. From Camp Patrick Henry and Naval Station Norfolk, Langley Field and Fort Monroe, soldiers and civilians streamed into the streets. Bars and USO clubs filled in a grand hurrah. Business owners locked their doors and joined the uncounted thousands of servicemen and civilians in the celebration that lasted through the night. Spontaneous parades erupted on Washington Avenue in Newport News. In Norfolk, middies held hands and formed a human chain, dancing around cars like kindergartners, madly encircling the standstill traffic. Cries of human jubilation and “indescribable noise-making devices” sounded off into the night. Makeshift confetti snowed from windows onto the celebrants in the streets below. Some exuberant revelers piled the paper into heaps and set them on fire, the bonfires further enhancing the primal joy of the outcry. The faithful filled churches, giving thanks and imploring their creator to allow this one to be the war to truly end all wars.

      After the deluge, the uncertainty settled in. Three weeks after V-J Day, the Norfolk Journal and Guide reported layoffs СКАЧАТЬ