Katherine Johnson, Ja’Net DuBois and B. Smith were family

In the past several weeks, we have lost three iconic black women. Actress Ja’Net DuBois, restaurateur and lifestyle guru B. Smith and pioneering mathematician Katherine Johnson are all famous outside the black community. But among their own, they are more than celebrities. They’re like family.

Mourning them is deeply personal: DuBois, Smith and Johnson showed black women a spectrum of accomplishment. They occupied distinct professional circles, and through that diversity of influence, they represented a wide range of what it was possible for us to be.

Like many members of a black household, I grew up on Good Times, which starred DuBois as Willona Woods. (DuBois also co-wrote and sang the iconic theme song of another Norman Lear sitcom: The Je≠ersons.) In my home, she was also Stormy Monday, the Afrocentric goddess in 1973’s Five on the Black Hand Side. The characters had a lot in common: Both were the politically conscious neighbor to the story’s lead, both fashion plates on a fixed income. But DuBois brought a nuance to each role that it was impossible to conflate. Taken together, Stormy and Willona showed us that DuBois could play to the rafters or communicate quiet regality, an ability that served her well in early-career roles on Broadway in the 1960s and as the co-founder of the Pan-African Film and Arts Festival in 1992.

We continued to see DuBois after Good Times, but often in guest roles in black sitcoms and films, where her onscreen dynamism wasn’t given full room to flourish. Even in obituaries, her best-known character is described as “sassy,” an oversimplifying pejorative for the performance DuBois gave during the six seasons that the show aired. Those of us who followed DuBois throughout her career understand not just what we lost in her death, but what we could have had while she was still here, if only the entertainment industry understood the range of her talent.

Smith, who died days after DuBois, came into black families’ homes in an equally intimate way: through her cookbooks and restaurants. For my family, the Washington, D.C., location of B. Smith’s was the site of special occasions: Mother’s Day, Easter Sunday, the weekend of my college graduation. I never saw her there myself, but I stopped to admire the framed photos of her on the walls. I felt, each time I dined there, as though some of her elegance could be carried home with me in my take-home container.

I remember how impressive it was to be served a veritable feast in that Union Station restaurant with tall ceilings, crisp linens and a grand piano and to know that it was owned by a black woman who was once a model. I remember being even more impressed, learning that the D.C. location was merely one of three: the others were in Manhattan and Sag Harbor.

For all her upscale culinary impact, Smith could be down-to-earth, too. For a time, her face could be spotted on grocery store shelves; she appeared on the packaging for Betty Crocker cornbread. At her height, she was everywhere and she was ours.

Unlike with DuBois and Smith, I didn’t grow up with any awareness of Johnson’s influence. My attachment to her came much later. Like a lot of Americans, I learned about her only four years ago, upon the publication of Hidden Figures, the account of her vital work for NASA in the early years of the space program that was adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie. In calculating trajectories for the early manned space flights, Johnson served us all.

But when I think about how long I didn’t know her name, how conspicuously absent she had been from the mainstream 1960s space-race record, I feel a bit robbed of my ability to consider her an intimate. On learning of her death, I mourned the years I missed out on paying due reverence to her, as much as I was grateful to have learned who she was when I did, while she was still alive to know that she was admired and appreciated. I thought of the generations of black girls, raised in the mid-20th century, who could have been inspired to know about Johnson’s childhood precocity in the study of mathematics.