Jackie Thomas was an outsider just about from the day that she was born in Washington. Almost as soon as the little black girl could stand up and walk, she stuck out from the other children, and not only because she was taller than many of them.
She was the youngest of four children. By the time she came along, her mother Muriel already had her hands full with the first three children. Her father tried to do what he could to help, but that wasn't really very much. James Thomas worked on the night shift to make a little extra money for the family, and that meant that he had to sleep during the day.
When Jackie was three years old, she began to notice the school-books that her brothers and her sister brought home. All that Jackie could do then was to look at the pictures, and she was frustrated at not being able to get at the words that she was told said such interesting things.
Her mother decided to try teaching Jackie to read a little. If Jackie watched television, the little girl would often turn the sound up too much and that would keep her father awake. Books didn't make noise.
Things didn't exactly work the way that Muriel Thomas had planned, though. That little bit of reading turned into a lot of it.
Jackie tried to work her way through all the school-books now, though many of them were still way beyond her. There were not many other books in that house, let alone books for little children. There was a Bible, which was much harder for Jackie to understand than the school-books were. But for a while Jackie was read to from the Bible.
And that created problems of its own. Jackie started asking the minister questions after church on Sunday that he had trouble believing a little black girl would think of by herself.
Jackie's mother started taking her on a walk once a week, all of three blocks to the local library. The one book a week they started with at that time had turned into two books by the time Jackie was old enough for kindergarten.
Kindergarten brought on other problems. The teachers did not like the idea of a child already knowing how to read, and doing it about as well as a third-grader. This upset their plans; they declared that she would certainly have gotten it wrong and would probably have a lot of trouble in school because of it. One of them just stopped short of saying that a child who learned things outside of school would never be normal.
But she was normal. Jackie was just as interested in her dolls and in playing games as any other little girl. She was a little taller and a little stronger for her age than most, but not so much that you would think to comment on it.
Since she was already walking to school with other children, it wasn't long before she was allowed to walk to the library with one child or another and back again. And soon she was allowed to make the trip by herself if she had to. The librarian in branch #19 got to know Jackie's happy face as well as she did her own, because the little girl was always looking for corners in the library that she hadn't found before.
One corner that Jackie found along the way was science. As she slowly turned into a big girl, she learned a lot of it. She began with little books on astronomy, then she worked through physics and chemistry, and finally she spent a long time on computer science. All this reading made it easier to stay up with the studies in these subjects, indeed left her knowing more at the beginning than some did at the end. She got some comments from others about "acting white", but by the time she finished high school she had been getting those comments for years and treating them just the way they deserved.
By the time she finished high school she was five foot eleven, slim, and beautiful. A couple of boys had tried to give her practice in biology by then. The ones who couldn't be talked or slapped out of it found out that she had picked up a good knowledge of anatomy and even some judo. Some of the other girls in her neighborhood had already learned harder lessons; her own sister had miscarried once, though they were both careful to not let their mother find out about it.
Jackie had high grades and even higher recommendations from her teachers. She was clearly going to be the first person from her family to go on to college. Then her father had a heart attack.
All the plans for college went out the window then, at least for a while. The burial expenses took a while to pay off. Muriel Thomas grieved herself into becoming ill and couldn't work, not that she had done work outside the home for the last twenty-five years. Her brother Donald was in the army and couldn't send home much money. The younger brother, Bob, did not work steadily. Her sister Lucille only made a little at her job as a store clerk. Because of the paperwork, the survivors' benefits did not start for most of a year, and the insurance took nearly as long to come through.
All of which meant that Jackie took a fast three-month course in electronics and started looking for a job. Then she found out that there were dozens of companies after her and she could hold out for a fairly high starting salary. Since she was black, female, and good at what she did, she was in an automatic three-way minority. She could fill a couple of EEOC slots at once for the government contractors. To be honest, it seemed strange to her that she would be wanted just because she was an outsider, and it was not entirely comfortable.
She wondered at times if she wasn't being an outsider in the modern world just by being a virgin then, and for years afterward. But Jackie had made up her mind that she wasn't going to be sidetracked by any man unless he was clearly about as smart as she was.
She started working at Sanders Associates in Rockville. That company tried to keep one foot in each of two streams by leasing desktop computers to the smaller government agencies, and maintaining them, and writing and consulting on software for mainframes for the middle-sized ones. (The big agencies do those things themselves.)
Jackie started in their computer repair division. On her first day on the job, she got buried in her work and barely looked up in time to see everyone else vanish out the door at lunch-time. She packed away her tools and she was gazing out the front door of the building and trying to decide where to eat when a voice behind her said: "None of them are really great, but the sandwich shop across the street is all right. Martucci's has good shrimp on Thursdays."
When she turned around a short red-haired and very Irish woman gave her a wide freckled grin. "You are Jackie Thomas, right? My name's Maggie Flynn."
They went out to lunch together that day, and every one after that for the next three weeks. They talked about the news or clothes or what they were doing at work. After some of that last, Maggie came to a conclusion one day and she decided to take a chance on looking foolish. She went into her supervisor's office the first thing in the afternoon.
An hour later there was a message that the personnel department wanted to talk to Jackie. She sat there on the edge of the red leather seat frightened and chewing her lip. She knew that she had been making mistakes on her job, but she hoped that they were not going to fire her this quickly. She really had been trying...
They sat her down and had her take an odd sort of test in logic. When she finished it a half-hour later, there was a wait for a few minutes and then she was called into a private office.
A beefy middle-aged man in a brown suit looked at her and said: "Would you be interested in moving into another job?"
"I -- I don't know," she said nervously. "If you don't think I'm any good where I am --"
