Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

weekend, approached. Mary helped her
son refine the vehicle until they
possessed something that could roll
down the street with its pilot, as the
racers were known, in the driver’s seat.
The final step was to smooth, sand,
and polish the body of the car to within
an inch of its home-built life. All the
derby’s matches started at the top of a
hill, with no pushing allowed. Levi and
his competitors would set off from the
Twenty-Fifth Street Bridge in Newport
News, virtually the only thing that could
pass as a hill in the flat-as-a-pancake
coastal terrain. As the pilots released
their brakes, they hunched themselves as
far down as they could into their
vehicle’s cockpit, imploring the gods of
gravity to pull them as quickly as
possible down the nine-hundred-foot