The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (41 page)

I held a page of the records close to my face to make out the small script, then began reading out loud, “ ‘This twenty-eight-year-old’ … something … I can’t read the handwriting … ‘positive Rh.’” The entry was dated November 2, 1949.

“Oh wow!” I said suddenly. “This is three days before you were born—your mom’s pregnant with you here.”

“What? Oh my god!” Deborah screamed, snatching the paper and staring at it, mouth wide. “What else does it say?”

It was a normal checkup, I told her. “Look here,” I said, pointing at the page. “Her cervix is two centimeters dilated … She’s getting ready to have you.”

Deborah bounced on the bed, clapped her hands, and grabbed another page from the medical records.

“Read this one!”

The date was February 6, 1951. “This is about a week after she first went to the hospital with her cervical cancer,” I said. “She’s waking up from anesthesia after getting her biopsy. It says she feels fine.”

For the next few hours, Deborah pulled papers off the pile for me to read and sort. One moment she’d screech with joy over a fact I’d found, the next she’d panic over a new fact that didn’t sit well, or at the sight of me holding a page of her mother’s medical records. Each time she panicked, she’d pat the bed and say, “Where’s my sister autopsy report?” or “Oh no, where’d I put my room key?”

Occasionally she stashed papers under the pillow, then pulled them out when she decided it was okay for me to see them. “Here’s my mother autopsy,” she said at one point. A few minutes later she handed me a page she said was her favorite because it had her mother’s signature on it—the only piece of Henrietta’s handwriting on record. It was the consent form she’d signed before her radium treatment, when the original HeLa sample was taken.

Eventually, Deborah grew quiet. She lay on her side and curled herself around the Crownsville picture of Elsie for so long, I thought she’d fallen asleep. Then she whispered, “Oh my god. I don’t like the way she got her neck.” She held up the picture and pointed to the white hands.

“No,” I said. “I don’t like that either.”

“I know you was hopin I didn’t notice that, weren’t you?”

“No. I knew you noticed.”

She laid her head back down again. We kept on like this for hours, me reading and taking notes, Deborah staring at Elsie’s picture in long silences broken only by her sparse commentary: “My sister look scared.” … “I don’t like that look on her face.” … “She was chokin herself?” … “I guess after she realized she wasn’t going to see my mother no more, she just gave up.” Occasionally she shook her head hard, like she was trying to snap herself out of something.

Eventually I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. It was the middle of the night and I still had a big pile of paper to sort through.

“You might think about getting yourself another copy of your mother’s medical record and stapling it with all the pages in order to keep it all straight,” I said.

Deborah squinted at me, suddenly suspicious. She moved across the room to the other bed, where she lay on her stomach and started reading her sister’s autopsy report. A few minutes later, she jumped up and grabbed her dictionary.

“They diagnosed my sister with idiocy?” she said, then started reading the definition out loud. “‘Idiocy: utterly senseless or foolish.’” She threw down the dictionary. “That’s what they say was wrong with my sister? She had
foolish?
She was an idiot? How can they do that?”

I told her that doctors used to use the word
idiocy
to refer to mental retardation, and to the brain damage that accompanied hereditary syphilis. “It was sort of a generic word to describe someone who was slow,” I said.

She sat down next to me and pointed to a different word in her sister’s autopsy report. “What does this word mean?” she asked, and I told her. Then her face fell, her jaw slack, and she whispered, “I don’t want you puttin that word in the book.”

“I won’t,” I said, and then I made a mistake. I smiled. Not because I thought it was funny, but because I thought it was sweet that she was protective of her sister. She’d never told me something was off limits for the book, and this was a word I would never have included—to me, it didn’t seem relevant. So I smiled.

Deborah glared at me. “Don’t you put that in the book!” she snapped.

“I
won’t,”
I told her, and I meant it. But I was still smiling, now more from nervousness than anything else.

“You’re lying,” Deborah yelled, flipping off my tape recorder and clenching her fists.

“I’m not, I swear, look, I’ll say it on tape and you can sue me if I use it.” I clicked the recorder on, said into the mic that I wouldn’t put that word in the book, then turned it off.

“You’re lying!” she yelled again. She jumped off the bed and stood over me, pointing a finger in my face. “If you’re not lying, why did you smile?”

She started frantically stuffing papers into her canvas bags as I tried to explain myself and talk her down. Suddenly she threw the bag on the bed and rushed toward me. Her hand hit my chest hard as she slammed me against the wall, knocking me breathless, my head smacking the plaster.

“Who you working for?” she snapped. “John Hopkin?”

“What? No!” I yelled, gasping for breath. “You know I work for myself.”

“Who sent you? Who’s paying you?” she yelled, her hand still holding me against the wall. “Who paid for this room?”

“We’ve been through this!” I said. “Remember? Credit cards? Student loans?”

Then, for the first time since we met, I lost my patience with Deborah. I jerked free of her grip and told her to get the fuck off me and chill the fuck out. She stood inches from me, staring wild-eyed again for what felt like minutes. Then, suddenly, she grinned and reached up to smooth my hair, saying, “I never seen you mad before. I was starting to wonder if you was even human cause you never cuss in front of me.”

Then, perhaps as an explanation for what just happened, she finally told me about Cofield.

“He was a good pretender,” she said. “I told him I would walk through fire alive before I would let him take my mother medical records. I don’t want nobody else to have them. Everybody in the world got her cells, only thing we got of our mother is just them records and her Bible. That’s why I get so upset about Cofield. He was trying to take one of the only things I really got from my mother.”

She pointed at my laptop on the bed and said, “I don’t want you typin every word of it into your computer either. You type what you need for the book, but not everything. I want people in our family to be the only ones who have all them records.”

After I promised I wouldn’t copy all the records, Deborah said she was going to bed again, but for the next several hours, she knocked on my door every fifteen or twenty minutes. The first time she reeked of peaches and said, “I just had to go to my car for my lotion so I thought I’d say hi.” Each time it was something else: “I forgot my nail file in the car!” …
“X-Files
is on!” … “I’m suddenly thinking about pancakes!” Each time she knocked, I opened my door wide so she could see the room and the medical records looking just as they had when she left.

The last time she knocked, she stormed past me into the bathroom and leaned over the sink, her face close to the mirror. “Am I broken out?” she yelled. I walked into the bathroom, where she stood pointing to a quarter-sized welt on her forehead. It looked like a hive.

She turned and pulled her shirt down so I could see her neck and back, which were covered in red welts.

“I’ll put some cream on it,” she said. “I should probably take my sleeping pill.” She went back to her room and a moment later the volume on her TV went up. Screaming and crying and gunfire poured out of the television all night, but I didn’t see her again until six o’clock in the morning—one hour after I’d gone to sleep—when she knocked on my door yelling, “Free continental breakfast!”

My eyes were red and swollen with dark circles under them, and I was still wearing my clothes from the day before. Deborah looked at me and laughed.

“We’re a mess!” she said, pointing to the hives now covering her face. “Lord, I was so anxious last night. I couldn’t do anything with myself so I painted my fingernails.” She held out her hands for me to see. “I did a
horrible
job!” she said, laughing. “I think I did it after I took my pill.”

Her nails and much of the skin around them were bright fire-engine red. “From a distance it looks okay,” she said. “But I’d get fired if I was still doin nails for a living.”

We walked down to the lobby for our free breakfast. As Deborah wrapped a handful of mini-muffins in a napkin for later, she looked up at me and said, “We’re okay, Boo.”

I nodded and said I knew. But at that point I wasn’t sure of anything.

35
Soul Cleansing

B
y later that day, the hives had spread across Deborah’s back, her cheeks were splotchy and red, and long welts filled the spaces beneath each eye. Both lids were swollen and shining like she’d covered them in blood-red shadow. I asked again and again if she was okay and said maybe we should stop somewhere so she could see a doctor. But she just laughed.

“This happens all the time,” she said. “I’m fine. I just need some Benadryl.” She bought a bottle that she kept in her purse and swigged from all day. By noon, about a third of it was gone.

When we got to Clover, we walked along the river, down Main Street, and through Henrietta’s tobacco field. And we visited the home-house, where Deborah said, “I want you to take a picture of me here with my sister.”

She stood in front of the house, turned both photos of Elsie so they faced me, and held them to her chest. She had me take pictures of her and Elsie on the stump of what used to be Henrietta’s favorite oak tree and in front of Henrietta’s mother’s tombstone. Then she knelt on the ground, next to the sunken strips of earth where she imagined her mother and sister were buried. “Take one of me and my sister by her and my mother grave,” she said. “It’ll be the only picture in the world with the three of us almost together.”

Finally we ended up at Henrietta’s sister Gladys’s house, a small yellow cabin with rocking chairs on its porch. Inside we found Gladys sitting in her dark wood-paneled living room. It was warm out, sweatshirt weather, but Gladys had her double-wide black wood-stove burning so hot, she sat beside it wiping sweat from her forehead with tissue. Her hands and feet were gnarled from arthritis, her back so bent her chest nearly touched her knees unless she propped herself up with an elbow. She wore no underwear, only a thin nightgown that had ridden above her waist from hours in her wheelchair.

She tried to straighten her gown to cover herself when we walked in, but her hands couldn’t grasp it. Deborah pulled it down for her, saying, “Where everybody at?”

Gladys said nothing. In the next room, her husband moaned from a hospital bed, just days from death.

“Oh right,” Deborah said, “they at work ain’t they?”

Gladys said nothing, so Deborah raised her voice loud to make sure Gladys could hear: “I got a Internet!” she yelled. “I’m going to get a web page up about my mother and hopefully be getting some donations and funding so I can come back down here put a monument up on her grave and turn that old home-house into a museum that will remind people of my mother down here!”

“What you put in there?” Gladys asked, like Deborah was crazy.

“Cells,” Deborah said. “Cells so people can see her multiply.”

She thought for a moment. “And a great big picture of her, and maybe one of them wax statues. Plus some of them old clothes and that shoe in the house. All that stuff mean a whole lot.”

Suddenly the front door opened and Gladys’s son Gary came inside yelling, “Hey Cuz!” Gary was fifty, with that smooth Lacks skin, a thin mustache and soul patch, and a gap between his front teeth that the girls loved. He wore a red and blue short-sleeved rugby shirt that matched his blue and red jeans and sneakers.

Deborah squealed, threw her arms around Gary’s neck, and pulled the photo of Elsie from her pocket. “Look what we got from Crownsville! It’s my sister!” Gary stopped smiling and reached for the picture.

“That’s a bad shot,” Deborah said. “She’s crying cause it’s cold.”

“How about showing him that picture of her on the porch when she was a kid?” I said. “That’s a good one.” Gary looked at me like,
What the hell is going on here?

“That picture’s got her a little upset,” I said.

“I understand why,” he whispered.

“Plus she just saw her mother’s cells for the first time,” I told him.

Gary nodded. Over the years, he and I had spent many hours talking; he understood Deborah and what she’d been through more than anyone else in her family.

Deborah pointed to the hives on her face. “I’m having a reaction, swellin up and breakin out. I’m crying and happy at the same time.” She started pacing back and forth, her face shining with sweat as the woodstove clanged and seemed to suck most of the oxygen from the room. “All this stuff I’m learning,” she said, “it make me realize that I
did
have a mother, and all the tragedy she went through. It hurts but I wanna know more, just like I wanna know about my sister. It make me feel closer to them, but I do miss them. I wish they were here.”