Summary
Mary Jackson, 26 years old, joins West Computing in 1951. She’s got deep roots in Hampton, and many of her siblings work in the Hampton school system. Jackson completed two majors in university, mathematics and physical science, and started work at the King Street USO in 1943. (She meets her husband, Levi, at the USO, and they marry in 1944.) Her entire family is known for their humanitarianism, and she is a Girl Scout leader and doting mother. She applies to work at Langley as a typist, but in the paranoid aftermath of conflict with the USSR along the North/South Korea border, the NACA decides she’d make a better computer.
The next scientific endeavor is travel at hypersonic speeds, but fear of spies and communism is rampant nationwide. Many Langley employees are interrogated, especially Jews and people who want racial equality. Racial tensions are extremely high—and this makes America look bad on the global stage. Shetterly writes that “Through its inability to solve its racial problems, the United States handed the Soviet Union one of the most effective propaganda weapons in their arsenal” (104). America's problems with racial inequality give the USSR power. To try to fix this, Truman desegregates the military (Executive Order 9981) and makes federal department heads “personally responsible” for maintaining a discrimination-free work environment (Executive Order 9980).
Two years later, Dorothy Vaughan sends Mary Jackson out on a group-specific assignment on the East Side. Things with the engineering group go well until Jackson asks her fellow female computers (all white) where she should use the bathroom; they laugh and tell her they don’t know where her bathroom is. Furious, she recounts the incident to Kazimierz “Kaz” Czarnecki, an engineer working in the Four-by-Four wind tunnel. He offers to let her work for him instead.
As planes become safer and aeronautical discoveries are made, some of the women are able to move up—Dorothy Hoover, for example, earns the title “aeronautical research scientist,” then resigns and gets a master’s degree in mathematics. Mary Jackson defends her math to John Becker, head of the Compressibility Division (Czarnecki’s boss’s boss’s boss), and he ends up apologizing to her—common for male engineers, but almost unheard of for computers. In other parts of the NACA, black men are hired as engineers, able to advance and receive more pay than the West Computers, but they’re isolated among white engineers and face a different kind of racism as a result.
We’re back to Katherine Goble, who hears about the math positions open in Hampton, then moves to Newport News with her husband and three daughters in 1952. She starts work at Langley in 1953, and after two weeks, Dorothy Vaughan sends her to the engineering group at the Flight Research Division, headed by Henry Pearson. As she sits in her new cubicle, the white man next to her gets up and leaves. Goble keeps her cool professionally despite the numerous prejudices at work against her, and within a few weeks, she and that new coworker will be friends.
Six months later, Goble’s position in the Flight Research Division looks pretty permanent, so Vaughan sits with Henry Pearson and makes him give Goble an official position and a corresponding raise (and the same for a white computer in the same position, who’d unsuccessfully lobbied for a raise herself). One of Goble’s first projects includes air disturbances left after planes fly through an area. She loves the work and her coworkers, and the segregation doesn’t bother her—there isn’t a specified colored bathroom in her building, so she just uses the unmarked women’s bathroom, sharing with white women. She and the engineers talk frankly about issues like Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the engineers respect her brains and confidence. Around 1955, she and Jimmy plan to move to a nicer neighborhood, but Jimmy has an inoperable tumor at the base of his skull, and he dies in December 1956, leaving Goble a widowed mother of three at 38 years old.
As math becomes more complex and machines get more advanced, Vaughan accurately predicts that human computers need to evolve. The NACA gets a Bell calculator in 1947, then IBM computers in the mid-1950s. Vaughan enrolls in computation courses and encourages other women to do the same. Social progress is less linear. Walkouts begin, as people start to protest “separate but equal” treatment. The South resists Brown v. Board of Education. However, pressure from the USSR makes Americans concerned about American students’ progress in math and the sciences—desperately needed brainpower is being wasted by neglecting Negro schools. In 1956, with Czarnecki’s support, Mary Jackson appeals to the City of Hampton to let her take advanced math courses so she can be an engineer; the classes she needs are only held at the white high school. Faced with the lack of social progress, black Americans wonder, “What are we fighting for?” The fight for democracy abroad and at home continues.
Analysis
Chapter 10 introduces Mary Jackson, who joins Langley before Katherine Goble/Johnson. Jackson's perspective introduces the "veil of politeness" maintained by black people in front of white people, as a manner of self-defense after centuries of abuse. The "veil" or "mask" is a concept popularized by W. E. B. Du Bois, and when Jackson's "mask" breaks, it happens to be in front of Kazimierz Czarnecki—whether by serendipity or excellent instincts, Jackson ends up in the right place at the right time, expressing her rage to the right person. Specific male engineers like Kaz make an appearance in this section, where previous sections rarely mention male engineers by name; this change reflects the women's opportunity to get to know those male engineers, as they begin to specialize and join engineering groups.
The Red Scare is covered in these chapters. Again, the narrative avoids an exhaustive documentation, focusing on the risk to particular Langley employees. The period of high paranoia made it particularly dangerous to be different—especially different and outspoken about it, like the West Computer who leaves Langley after being connected to suspicious activity. Anything but absolute enthusiasm about 1950s America might create a dangerous situation, or an accusation of being a communist spy—and for black folks, 1950s America might not exactly inspire absolute belief, with COLORED BATHROOM signs still hanging on the walls. Many people had to hide their doubts, fears, and beliefs, to protect themselves and their families from public persecution by McCarthy and others.
Another threat to the human computers appears with the burgeoning rise of technology, as the technology now known as computing is developed. Vaughan again takes initiative in the form of coursework, like she did to learn about aerodynamics during the war; she gets other women to do the same, so their jobs won't be lost to machines.
Chapter 14 bears an excellent example of the interconnectivity theme woven through the novel, as Shetterly compares the relatively linear development of calculators/computers to the less-linear social progress of the period. As black Americans wonder what they're fighting for, since they're treated so poorly on American soil, America begins to see a connection between its disenfranchisement of people of color and its lack of progress in research and technology. Compared to the USSR, America's academic advancement is languishing—and people begin to see that it's because of the prejudices baked into the legal and economic codes of the nation, which hold down a valuable, eager workforce.
Structurally, the death of Katherine's husband, Jimmy, is described as an "intermission." It occurs roughly halfway through the narrative, providing a structural intermission of its own. Shetterly uses terms like this (and "symbol," "synecdoche," so on) to draw attention to the narrative nature of what she's doing—this isn't a textbook, it's a story, and understanding it as a story helps us engage more emotionally with the material.
