After the astronauts fly safely home,
Katherine works on ways to reach Mars, a journey
that may uncover more history hidden in darkness.
After thirty-three years at Langley, she retires,
but she doesn’t stop asking questions.
She’s proud of her daughters’ work teaching
and raising children,
Joylette’s career as a NASA mathematician.
Katherine adds photographs of her grandchildren,
then her great-grandchildren, on a table by a phone
she answers one afternoon. Margot Lee Shetterly
tells her that her father was a research scientist at Langley.
She speaks of her childhood singing in a church
filled with mathematicians, reciting Bible verses
to a Sunday school teacher who was retired from Langley.
Now Margot is a writer and back
in Hampton with questions.
Did you love math as a child? she asks Katherine.
Who helped you along? Who stood in your way?
Katherine talks about herself, insists, I just did my share.
She speaks of how she worked with Dorothy Vaughan,
Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden,
all Black women who once taught math.
Katherine checked her work against computer programs
written by Dr. Evelyn Boyd Granville, one of the first
African American women to earn a PhD in mathematics.
Katherine used NASA’s planetary flight handbook,
partially written by Mary Golda Ross, a Cherokee woman
who became the first woman engineer at Lockheed,
where she designed satellites and rockets.
Working around the same time, Amy Gonzales,
a Mexican American, calculated rocket trajectories.
Sometimes alone, often together,
women opened doors to mystery. None expected
to be celebrated beyond the walls where they worked.
But at ninety-eight, Katherine Johnson,
resplendent in silver and pearls
at a premiere of the movie Hidden Figures,
graciously nods as people stand to applaud her.
Fame is built with math, rides on an arc.
Shine on one point shows up others.
Katherine won’t forget those who didn’t live to see
their own brilliance praised. She cares more
about getting things right
than clapping, which goes on and on.
The world has long waited to cheer
for a woman who did her best, and was extraordinary.