Dorothy’s older children had mourned the loss of their small-town freedom and the space that had come with the big house in Farmville. As talented as Dorothy was as a mathematician, she might have missed her calling in the military: she ran the Newport News household with the authority of a general and the economy of a quartermaster, eventually sending the babysitter back to Farmville and offering room and board to a returning military man and his wife in exchange for keeping the children during the day.
While her children went to school, managing the transition from being well-known faces in a small town to faces in a large crowd, Dorothy began to knit together the pieces of life she had been working on since her arrival, hosting a party for nearly twenty people in the little home on Forty-Eighth Street. Some she had met at work; others came from the neighborhood or St. Paul’s AME Church. She grew closer to Miriam Mann and her family, the two women and their children becoming like one large extended family, often taking advantage of the many activities available on the Hampton Institute campus. From the moment the acclaimed contralto Marian Anderson announced a performance at the college’s Ogden Hall, the two women knew they would go together. Anderson had taken the stage there many times since her earliest professional performances as a teenager. She had gone on to sing on four continents, but there was perhaps no place she was as warmly and enthusiastically welcomed as the Hampton Institute theater; many patrons there had come out for every recital. Dorothy and Miriam Mann bought tickets in advance to secure their seats. On the evening of the concert, the Vaughans dressed up and met the Manns at the theater, arriving early so that their large group could all sit together.
It was an exceptional performance. Dorothy looked over at her children, still so young but entranced by the contralto voice that seemed to each person in the audience to be singing to them, only to them. It was, she knew right then, a moment they would never forget.
Katherine Goble would have eventually found her way back to the classroom, but a fever hastened the process: in 1944, her husband, Jimmy, the chemistry teacher at the Negro high school in Marion, Virginia, had fallen ill with undulant fever. The illness, which came from drinking unpasteurized milk, had sickened at least eight people in Smyth County that summer. Weeks, sometimes months, of sweats, fatigue, poor appetite, and pain lay in store for the unfortunate victims. There was no way Jimmy would be able to start the school year that fall, so the principal offered Jimmy’s yearlong contract to Katherine instead. Despite being a full-time wife and mother for the last four years, Katherine had been careful to keep her teaching certificate current.
It would be her second time around as a teacher at the school. In 1937, newly graduated from West Virginia State Institute, eighteen-year-old Katherine applied for a position at the Marion school, which was just on the Virginia side of the border. “If you can play the piano, the job is yours,” the telegram read. She bade farewell to her home state and boarded a bus in Charleston, the state capital, settling in for the three-hour ride to Marion. Upon entering Virginia, she and the other black passengers, who had been interspersed with whites throughout the bus, were ordered to move to the back. A short time later, the driver evicted the black passengers, announcing that service wouldn’t continue into the town’s Negro area. Katherine paid a cab to take her to the house of the principal of the Marion school, where she had arranged to rent a room.
For the two years she taught in Marion, Katherine earned $50 a month, less than the $65 the state paid similarly trained white teachers in the county. In 1939, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed suit against the state of Virginia on behalf of a black teacher at Norfolk’s Booker T. Washington High School. The black teacher and her colleagues, including the principal, made less money than the school’s white janitor. The NAACP’s legal eagles, led by the fund’s chief counsel, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Houston’s top deputy, a gangly, whip-smart Howard University law school grad named Thurgood Marshall, shepherded the Alston v. Norfolk case to the US Supreme Court, which ordered Virginia to bring Negro teachers’ salaries up to the white teachers’ level. It was a victory, but a year too late for Katherine: when a $110-a-month job offer came from a Morgantown, West Virginia, high school for the 1939 school year, Katherine jumped at it. Pay equalization might have been a battle in Virginia, but West Virginia got on board without a fight.
Katherine always made sure that people knew she was from West Virginia, not Virginia. West Virginia’s hilly terrain offered cool evening breezes, whereas Virginia was sweltering and malarial. The antebellum plantation system had never taken root in West Virginia the way it had farther east and south. During the Civil War, the mountain state seceded from Virginia and joined the Union. This didn’t make West Virginia an oasis of progressive views on race—segregation kept blacks and whites separate in lodging, schools, public halls, and restaurants—but the state did offer its tiny black population just the slightest bit more breathing room. Compared to West Virginia, the state’s Negro residents thought, Virginia was the South.
Born and raised in White Sulphur Springs, Katherine was the youngest of Joshua and Joylette Coleman’s four children. “You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you,” Joshua told his children, a philosophy he embodied to the utmost. Dressed neatly in a coat and tie whenever he was on business in town, Joshua quietly commanded admiration from both blacks and whites in tiny White Sulphur Springs; you never had to tell anybody to respect Josh Coleman.
Though educated only through the sixth grade, Katherine’s father was a mathematical whiz who could tell how many board feet a tree would yield just by looking at it. As soon as their youngest daughter could talk, Joshua and Joylette realized that she’d inherited her father’s winning way with people and his mind for math. Katherine counted whatever crossed her path—dishes, steps, and stars in the nighttime sky. Insatiably curious about the world, the child peppered her grammar school teachers with questions and skipped ahead from second grade to fifth. When teachers turned around from the blackboard to discover an empty desk in Katherine’s place, they knew they’d find their pupil in the classroom next door, helping her older brother with his lesson. The children’s school, the only one in the area for Negroes, terminated with the sixth grade. When Katherine’s older sister, Margaret, graduated from the White Sulphur Springs schoolhouse, Joshua rented a house 125 miles away so that all four children, supervised by their mother, could continue their education at the laboratory school operated by West Virginia State Institute.
Income from the Coleman farm slowed to a trickle during the hardscrabble years of the Depression. Anxious for a way to support the household and cover the cost of the children’s education, Joshua moved the family into town and accepted a job as a bellman at the Greenbrier, the country’s most exclusive resort. (It was here, years later, that he met Dorothy Vaughan’s husband, Howard.) The enormous white-columned hotel, built in the classical revival style, sprawled on a manicured estate in the middle of White Sulphur. Joseph and Rose Kennedy spent their 1914 honeymoon in room 145 of the hotel. Bing Crosby, the Duke of Windsor, Lou Gehrig, Life magazine publisher Henry Luce, actress Mary Pickford, a young Malcolm Forbes, the emperor of Japan, and assorted Vanderbilts, Du Ponts, and Pulitzers all converged on White Sulphur Springs throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, where they Charlestoned, cha-chaed, and rumbaed the night away. Even as breadlines snaked through America’s main streets and drought broke the backs of tens of thousands of farm families, “Old White” remained a magnet for glamorous international guests who golfed, took the waters at the resort’s famed springs, and basked in its unbridled luxury.
The Greenbrier segmented its serving class carefully. Negroes worked as maids, bellmen, and kitchen help, while Italian and Eastern European immigrants attended the dining room. During summers home from Institute, the Coleman boys pulled stints as bellmen, and Katherine and her sister took jobs as personal maids to individual guests. Accommodating the every need of the visiting gentry—cleaning their rooms; washing, ironing, and setting out their clothes; anticipating their desires while appearing invisible—was a sow’s ear of a job that Katherine deftly spun to