The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (34 page)

Years later, when I talked to Grover Hutchins, the pathologist listed in Cofield’s lawsuit, he shook his head and said, “The whole thing was very sad. They wanted to have some kind of recognition for Henrietta, but then things got so hairy with Cofield and the crazy things he was saying the family thought about Hopkins, they decided it was best to let sleeping dogs lie and not get involved with anything having to do with the Lackses.”

When I talked with Johns Hopkins spokesperson JoAnn Rodgers, she said there had never been an official effort by Hopkins to honor Henrietta. “It was an individual effort—maybe one or two people—and when they went away, it went away. It was never an institutional initiative.”

Though the subpoenas had finally stopped coming, Deborah didn’t believe the lawsuit was truly over. She couldn’t shake the idea that Cofield might send people to her house to steal her mother’s Bible or the lock of hair she kept tucked inside it. Or maybe he’d try to steal her cells, thinking they might be valuable like her mother’s.

She stopped checking her mail and rarely left the house except to work her shifts driving a school bus for disabled children. Then she was in a freak accident: a teenager on the bus attacked her, throwing himself on top of her, biting and scratching until two men ran onto the bus and pulled him off. A few days later the same boy attacked her again, this time permanently damaging several discs in her spine.

Deborah had her husband hang dark curtains on their windows and stopped answering her phone. Then, sitting in her dark living room a year and a half after Cofield’s lawsuit ended, she finally began reading and rereading the full details of her mother’s death in her medical records. And for the first time, she learned that her sister had been committed to a mental institution called Crownsville.

She began worrying that something bad had happened to her sister in that hospital.
Maybe she was used in some kind of research like
our mother
, she thought. Deborah called Crownsville for a copy of Elsie’s records, but an administrator said most of Crownsville’s documents from before 1955, the year Elsie died, had been destroyed. Deborah immediately suspected that Crownsville was hiding information about her sister, just as she still believed Hopkins was hiding information about Henrietta.

Within hours of her call to Crownsville, Deborah became disoriented and had trouble breathing. Then she broke out in hives—red welts covering her face, neck, and body, even the soles of her feet. When she checked herself into a hospital, saying, “Everything going on with my mother and sister is making my nerves break down,” her doctor said her blood pressure was so high she’d nearly had a stroke.

A few weeks after Deborah came home from the hospital, Roland Pattillo left a message on her answering machine saying he’d been talking to a reporter who wanted to write a book about Henrietta and her cells, and he thought Deborah should talk to her. That reporter was me.

29
A Village of Henriettas

F
or nearly a year after our first conversation, Deborah refused to talk to me. I traveled back and forth to Clover, sitting on porches and walking the tobacco fields with Cliff, Cootie, and Gladys’s son Gary. I dug through archives, church basements, and the abandoned, falling-down building where Henrietta went to school. While I was on the road, I’d leave messages for Deborah every few days, hoping to convince her that if she talked to me, we could learn about Henrietta together.

“Hey, I’m in your mother’s tobacco field by the home-house,” I told her. “I’m on the porch with Cousin Cliff, he says hi.” “I found your mother’s baptism records today.” “Aunt Gladys is doing well after her stroke. She told me some great stories about your mom.” I imagined Deborah leaning over her answering machine listening, dying to know what I’d found.

But she never picked up.

One day her husband, the Reverend James Pullum, answered the phone on the second ring and started yelling without saying hello: “They want to be assured that they going to get some MONETARY SATISFACTION. And until anybody makes an AGREEMENT or puts that on PAPER, they are NOT going to talk ANYMORE. Everybody’s received some compensation but them, and that was they MOTHER. They just feel wrong about it. It’s been a real long haul for my wife, and she really takes a trip on it. Used to be she just wanted John Hopkin to give her mother some credit and explain that cell stuff to where she understand what happened to her mother. But they ignored us, so now we just mad.” Then he hung up on me.

A few days later, ten months after our first conversation, Deborah called me. When I answered the phone, she yelled, “Fine, I’ll talk to you!” She didn’t say who she was and didn’t need to. “If I’m gonna do this, you got to promise me some things,” she said. “First, if my mother is so famous in science history, you got to tell everybody to get her name right. She ain’t no Helen Lane. And second, everybody always say Henrietta Lacks had four children. That ain’t right, she had five children. My sister died and there’s no leavin her out of the book. I know you gotta tell
all
the Lacks story and there’ll be good and bad in that cause of my brothers. You gonna learn all that, I don’t care. The thing I care about is, you gotta find out what happened to my mother and my sister, cause I need to know.”

She took a deep breath, then laughed.

“Get ready, girl,” she said. “You got no idea what you gettin yourself into.”

     
D
eborah and I met on July 9, 2000, at a bed-and-breakfast on a cobblestone street corner near the harbor in Baltimore, in a neighborhood called Fell’s Point. When she saw me standing in the lobby waiting for her, she pointed to her hair and said, “See this? I’m the gray child cause I’m the one doing all the worrying about our mother. That’s why I wouldn’t talk to you this last year. I swore I was never talkin to nobody about my mother again.” She sighed. “But here I am … I hope I don’t regret this.”

Deborah was a substantial woman—about five feet tall and two hundred pounds. Her tight curls were less than an inch long and jet black, except for a thin streak of natural gray framing her face like a headband. She was fifty, but seemed both a decade older and younger at the same time. Her smooth light brown skin was dotted with big freckles and dimples, her eyes light and mischievous. She wore capri pants and Keds sneakers and moved slowly, leaning most of her weight on an aluminum cane.

She followed me to my room, where a large flat package covered in bright, flowered wrapping paper lay on the bed. I told her it was a gift for her from a young Hopkins cancer researcher named Christoph Lengauer. He’d e-mailed me a few months earlier in response to an article I’d published in
Johns Hopkins Magazine
after meeting the Lacks men. “I felt somehow bad for the Lacks family,” Lengauer wrote. “They deserved better.”

He’d been working with HeLa cells daily his whole career, he said, and now he couldn’t get the story of Henrietta and her family out of his mind. As a Ph.D. student, he’d used HeLa to help develop something called
fluorescence in situ hybridization
, otherwise known as FISH, a technique for painting chromosomes with multicolored fluorescent dyes that shine bright under ultraviolet light. To the trained eye, FISH can uncover detailed information about a person’s DNA. To the untrained eye, it simply creates a beautiful mosaic of colored chromosomes.

Christoph had framed a fourteen-by-twenty-inch print of Henrietta’s chromosomes that he’d “painted” using FISH. It looked like a photograph of a night sky filled with multicolored fireflies glowing red, blue, yellow, green, purple, and turquoise.

“I want to tell them a little what HeLa means to me as a young cancer researcher, and how grateful I am for their donation years ago,” he wrote. “I do not represent Hopkins, but I am part of it. In a way I might even want to apologize.”

Deborah threw her black canvas tote bag onto the floor, tore the wrapping paper from the photo, then held the frame at arm’s length in front of her. She said nothing, just ran through a set of French doors onto a small patio to see the picture in the setting sunlight.

“They’re beautiful!” she yelled from the porch. “I never knew they were so pretty!” She walked back inside clutching the picture, her cheeks flushed. “You know what’s weird? The world got more pictures of my mother cells than it do of her. I guess that’s why nobody knows who she is. Only thing left of her is them cells.”

She sat down on the bed and said, “I want to go to research labs and seminars to learn what my mother cells did, talk to people that been cured of cancer.” She started bouncing, excited like a little girl. “Just thinkin about that make me want to get back out there. But something always happens and I go back into hiding.”

I told her Lengauer wanted her to come into his lab. “He wants to say thank you and show you your mother’s cells in person.”

Deborah traced her mother’s chromosomes in the picture with her finger. “I do want to go see them cells, but I’m not ready yet,” she said. “My father and my brothers should go too, but they think I’m crazy just comin down here. They always yellin about ‘Them white folks gettin rich off our mother while we got nothin.’” Deborah sighed. “We ain’t gonna get rich about any of this stuff on my mother cells. She out there helpin people in medicine and that’s good, I just want the history to come out to where people know my mother, HeLa, was Henrietta Lacks. And I would like to find some information about my mother. I’m quite sure she breastfed me, but I never knew for sure. People won’t talk about my mother or my sister. It’s like the two of them never born.”

Deborah grabbed her bag off the floor, and dumped its contents onto the bed. “This is what I got about my mother,” she said, pointing to a pile on the bed. There were hours of unedited videotapes from the BBC documentary, a tattered English dictionary, a diary, a genetics textbook, many scientific journal articles, patent records, and unsent greeting cards, including several birthday cards she’d bought for Henrietta, and a Mother’s Day card, which she grabbed off the pile.

“I carried this around in my purse for a long time,” she said, handing it to me. The outside was white with pink flowers, and inside, in flowing script, the card said, “May the spirit of our Lord and savior be with you on this day on which you are honored for all the love you have given to your family and loved ones. With prayers and love. Happy Mother’s Day.” It was signed “Love, Deborah.”

But mostly her bag was filled with ragged newspaper and magazine articles. She held up a story about her mother from the
Weekly World News
tabloid. It was headlined THE IMMORTAL WOMAN! and it ran between an article about a telepathic dog and another about a half-human, half-alligator child.

“When I saw this thing in the grocery store, it scared me half to death,” Deborah told me. “I was like, what crazy thing they sayin happened to my mother now? Everybody always say Hopkins took black folks and experiment on them in the basement over there. Nobody could prove it so I never did believe it really. But when I found out about my mother cells, I didn’t know what to think except maybe all that stuff about them experimentin on people is true.”

Just a few weeks earlier, Deborah told me, Day’s new wife, Margaret, came home from a doctor’s appointment screaming about something she’d seen in the basement at Hopkins. “She hit some wrong button on the elevator and it took her all the way down in the basement where it was dark,” Deborah told me. “The door opened up and she looked straight ahead and saw all these cages. She started yellin, ‘Dale, you not gonna believe it, but them cages was filled with man-sized rabbits!’”

Deborah laughed as she told me the story. “I didn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Man-sized rabbits?! You crazy!’ I mean, who ever heard of a man-sized rabbit? But Margaret usually honest with me, so I know she saw something got her all scared. I guess anything possible.”

Then, as though she was saying something as everyday as
It’s supposed to rain tomorrow
, she said, “Scientists do all kinds of experiments and you never know what they doin. I still wonder how many people they got in London walkin around look just like my mother.”

“What?” I said. “Why would there be women in London who look like your mother?”

“They did that cloning on my mother over there,” she said, surprised I hadn’t come across that fact in my research. “A reporter came here from England talking about they cloned a sheep. Now they got stuff about cloning my mother all over.” She held up an article from
The Independent
in London and pointed at a circled paragraph: “Henrietta Lacks’s cells thrived. In weight, they now far surpassed the person of their origin and there would probably be more than sufficient to populate a village of Henriettas.” The writer joked that Henrietta should have put ten dollars in the bank in 1951, because if she had, her clones would be rich now.