What Marge passed along to Dorothy and the women of West Computing was usually a small portion of a larger task, the work by necessity carved up into smaller pieces and distributed for quick, efficient, and accurate processing. By the time the work trickled down to the computer’s desk, it might be just a set of equations and eye-blearing numbers disembodied from all physical significance. She might not hear another word about the work until a piece appeared in Air Scoop or Aviation or Air Trails. Or never. For many men, a computer was a piece of living hardware, an appliance that inhaled one set of figures and exhaled another. Once a girl finished a particular job, the calculations were whisked away into the shadowy kingdom of the engineers. “Woe unto thee if they shall make thee a computer,” joked a column in Air Scoop. “For the Project Engineer will take credit for whatsoever thou doth that is clever and full of glory. But if he slippeth up, and maketh a wrong calculation, or pulleth a boner of any kind whatsoever, he shall lay the mistake at thy door when he is called to account and he shall say, ‘What can you expect from girl computers anyway?’ ”
Now and again, however, when a NACA achievement was so important that the news made the popular press, as was the case with the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, everyone got to take a victory lap. Newspapers wrote about the Superfortress and its exploits with the kind of fawning adoration accorded movie stars like Cary Grant. It was one of the planes that crossed over from being the love object of flyers and aviation insiders to a broadly known symbol of US technological prowess and bravery. The XB-29 model had logged more than a hundred hours in the laboratory’s Eight-Foot High-Speed Tunnel.
“There is no one in the Laboratory who should feel that he or she did not have a part in the bombing of Japan,” Henry Reid said to the lab’s employees. “The engineers who assisted, the mechanics and modelmakers who did their share, the computers who worked up the data, the secretaries who typed and retyped the results, and the janitors and maids who kept the tunnel clean and suitable for work all made their contribution for the final bombing of Japan.”
For seven months Dorothy Vaughan had apprenticed as a mathematician, growing more confident with the concepts, the numbers, and the people at Langley. Her work was making a difference in the outcome of the war. And the devastation Henry Reid described … she had a part in that as well. Honed to a razor’s edge by the women and men at the laboratory—flying farther, faster, and with a heavier bomb load than any plane in history—B-29s dropped precision bombs over the country of Japan from high in the sky. They brought destruction at close range with incendiary bombs, and they released annihilation—and a new, modern fear—with the atomic bombs they delivered. War, technology, and social progress; it seemed that the second two always came with the first. The NACA’s work—more intense and interesting than she ever would have imagined—would remain her work for the duration. And until the war ended, whenever that might be, Dorothy would be one of the NACA nuts.
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,