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Mae Jemison
hilarity. Tall and striking, her hair short and
natural, she appears refreshingly unadorned almost no makeup or jewelry,
other than a gold hoop in each ear and a rubber band around her right wrist.
As Jemison is quick to point out, she is far from a one-dimensional NASA-molded,
“black Barbie doll.” On her shuttle flight, she brought along an Alvin
Ailey
dance poster, a West African statuette and a Michael Jordan jersey
artifacts designed to promote the idea that “space is a birthright for all
of us
on this planet.”
It is a view of the world that ultimately left her feeling somewhat confined at
NASA, where space missions are built on specialization and training depends on
the repetition of narrowly prescribed tasks. “Mae’s personality was too
big for
that,” says Homer Hickam, her training manager for the Endeavour
mission.
Although he described Jemison’s 1993 resignation as amicable, he
acknowledged
that the space agency was not thrilled to see her go. “NASA had spent a lot
of
money training her; she also filled a niche, obviously, being a woman of
color,”
says Hickam, now the training manager for NASA’s space station efforts. But
he
added that it would have been counterproductive to stand in her way.
“I see Mae as sort of an all-around ambassador,” says Hickam. “She
just really
wanted to make a connection with the world.”
Born in Alabama and raised in Chicago by a carpenter father and schoolteacher
mother, young Mae spent her childhood learning to make connections to the world
by studying the patterns of stars, flowers, trees, ants even pustulant
wounds.
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