Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race(15)

“If the Placement Officer shall see fit to assign thee to a far-off land of desolation, a land of marshes and mosquitoes without number known as the West Area, curse him not. But equip thyself with hip-boots, take heed that thy hospitalization is paid up and go forth on thy safari into the wilderness and be not bitter over thy sad fate,” joked a contributor to the weekly employee newsletter, Air Scoop.

Since its establishment in 1917, the laboratory’s operations had been concentrated on the campus of the Langley Field military base on the bank of Hampton’s Back River. Beginning in the Administration Building, with a single wind tunnel, the lab grew until space limits pushed it to expand to the west onto several large properties tracing their provenance to colonial-era plantations. Some Hamptonites still recalled how the strange folks at the laboratory saved the town from the economic despair of Prohibition. With a disproportionate number of Hampton citizens earning a living from the liquor industry in the early days of the twentieth century, the alcohol drought that was rolling across the country was potentially devastating. The city’s clerk of courts, Harry Holt, working with a cabal including oyster magnate Frank Darling, whose company, J. S. Darling and Son, was the world’s third largest oyster packer, endeavored to clandestinely purchase parcels that were once the homesteads of wealthy Virginians, including George Wythe. Holt consolidated the parcels and sold them to the federal government for the flying field and laboratory. “The future of this favored section of Virginia is made,” crowed the local newspaper. It was the biggest thing to happen to the area since Collis Huntington set up his shipyard in Newport News. Locals were so happy about the “life-giving energy” of federal money that they didn’t even begrudge Holt and his business cronies the tidy profit they made on their real estate speculation.

Construction of the West Area began in earnest in 1939. Now, as Dorothy and the other passengers in the shuttle bus came to the end of the forested back road that connected the two sides of the campus, the view opened onto a bizarre landscape consisting of finished two-story brick buildings and cleared construction sites with half-complete structures reaching up out of what was still mostly a thicket of woods and fields. Towering behind one building was a gigantic three-story-high ribbed-metal pipe, like a caterpillar loosed from the mind of H. G. Wells. This racetrack of air called the Sixteen-foot High-Speed Tunnel was completed just two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor and formed a closed rectangular circuit that stretched three hundred feet wide and one hundred feet deep. Adding to the futuristic aspect of the landscape was the fact that all the buildings on the West Side—indeed, all the laboratory’s buildings and everything on the air base as well—had been painted dark green in 1942 to camouflage them against a possible attack by Axis forces.

The shuttle bus made the West Side rounds, stopping to deposit Dorothy at the front door of an outpost called the Warehouse Building. There was nothing to distinguish the building or its offices from any of the other unremarkable spaces on the laboratory’s register: same narrow windows with a view of the fevered construction taking place outside, same office-bright ceiling lights, same government-issue desks arranged classroom style. Even before she walked through the door that would be her workaday home for the duration, she could hear the music of the calculating machines inside the room: a click every time its minder hit a key to enter a number, a drumbeat in response to an operations key, a full drumroll as the machine ran through a complex calculation; the cumulative effect sounded like the practice room of a military band’s percussion unit. The arrangement played in all the rooms where women were engaged in aeronautical research at its most granular level, from the central computing pool over on the East Side to the smaller groups of computers attached to specific wind tunnels or engineering groups. The only difference between the other rooms at Langley and the one that Dorothy walked into was that the women sitting at the desks, plying the machines for answers to the question what makes things fly, were black.

The white women from the State Teachers College across from Dorothy’s house in Farmville, and their sisters from schools like Sweetbriar and Hollins and the New Jersey College for Women, performed together in the East Area computing pool. In the West Area computing office where Dorothy was beginning work, the members of the calculating machine symphony hailed from the Virginia State College for Negroes, and Arkansas AM&N, and Hampton Institute. This room, set up to accommodate about twenty workers, was nearly full. Miriam Mann, Pearl Bassette, Yvette Brown, Thelma Stiles, and Minnie McGraw filled the first five seats at the end of May. Over the following six months, more graduates of Hampton Institute’s Engineering for Women training class joined the group, as well as women from farther afield, like Lessie Hunter, a graduate of Prairie View University in Texas. Many, like Dorothy, brought years of teaching experience to the position.

Dorothy took a seat as the women greeted her over the din of the calculating machines; she knew without needing to ask that they were all part of the same confederation of black colleges, alumni associations, civic organizations, and churches. Many of them belonged to Greek letter organizations like Delta Sigma Theta or Alpha Kappa Alpha, which Dorothy had joined at Wilberforce. By securing jobs in Langley’s West Computing section, they now had pledged one of the world’s most exclusive sororities. In 1940, just 2 percent of all black women earned college degrees, and 60 percent of those women became teachers, mostly in public elementary and high schools. Exactly zero percent of those 1940 college graduates became engineers. And yet, in an era when just 10 percent of white women and not even a full third of white men had earned college degrees, the West Computers had found jobs and each other at the “single best and biggest aeronautical research complex in the world.”