Revealing “Hidden Figures” and Healing Souls
I sat in the theater choking back tears before the movie started.
A memory played repeatedly in my mind:
Thirty-four years before the release of Hidden Figures and a full twenty-one years after John Glenn’s “Friendship 7” orbit around the Earth, I was a too-smart-for-my-own-good sophomore in an Algebra 2 class. In those days I knew my “variables” from my “constants” but today I couldn’t solve an equation to save my life. My teacher, Mr. G, was a scruffy-faced, burly, white math enthusiast. He LOVED math! He took pleasure in assigning multiple pages of work in order to stretch us beyond the teenage breaking point. He was sure we’d have fun, if only we were willing to sacrifice our social lives on the altar of imaginary numbers.
I was good at math. Mr. G taught the honors class. But I didn’t love math like he did. I didn’t see the point of working and re-working problems to get answers that didn’t matter in real-life. Even though it came easily to me I didn’t care to spend more time on math homework than I felt necessary. I gave every problem one try. The extra time required to re-work an equation was committed to homework I preferred, like writing essays. I had more important things on my agenda other than solving quadratic equations, including eating dinner and watching TV.
One day, Mr. G got wise to my homework slacking ways. He tried, in vain, to challenge me to work harder, because math, he said was “worth it.”
“Tell me one thing you can do in life without MATH?” he asked towering over my desk, bloviating about how important his class was.
“English?” I suggested, smiling wryly while my friends chuckled and he-at least in my high school memory-dramatically threw up his hands in defeat and returned to his desk.
When I think of that moment now, I think of all the things he could have said to counter my resistance. What I understand now about the relationship between English and math was unknown to me then. I graduated high school with a plan to find a math-free major. In college I suffered through a statistics class solely because I had to. After my Freshman year the plan was clear. I would avoid higher level math for the rest of my life. Thirty-four years after that conversation with Mr. G, I sat in a theater waiting to see a monumental story about brilliant black women working as mathematicians for NASA.
Ironically, “The Right Stuff”, the feature film about John Glenn and his fellow Mercury 7 astronauts, was released in 1983, the same year I refused to respond to Mr. G’s encouragement. The movie, highlighting extraordinary white men, didn’t help me understand that I too could be a part of making history. Behind John Glenn and the others stood women who looked like me and were essential to the narrative. As I sat in the theater I wondered if my math teacher would have had a different conversation with me that day if he had known the story of these women. I wondered too if I would have needed a “motivational” conversation at all.
As the commercials and then the previews rolled, I noted my anticipation but also a sense of grief. Grief, in part, because this story had been outside of mainstream culture for my entire life. Somehow celebrating these women also highlighted a sense of loss. How many other examples of black determination and brilliance lay dormant in our collective history? Why did this story remain untold for so long?And at what cost to the emotional healing of a people who continue to assert their validity in the American story?
I also felt immense hope and pride. Six black, middle school girls from my church family attended the movie with me. These lively, young women were about to see their futures displayed in a story from the past. They were about to see women who were not only smart but savvy; strong, black women taking spaces that were never going to be given to them. As is the case with most Middle school life lessons, I understood that the full depth and power of this story would be mitigated by the angst and insanity of puberty. But I also knew that seeds of possibility would be planted that day. Role models heretofore hidden from them, from me and from history itself were soon to be revealed in celebration. There in the dark, my tears fell as my heart swelled with pride. Past merged with possibility. There was healing power in this room. I could feel it.
And the movie hadn’t even started.
