The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Read online

  The men on the porch all nodded and said, “That’s right.”

  “Don’t you get scared if anybody come in here try to attack Mama when we’re not around,” Mike said, “cause she’ll scare them to death!” Speed’s sons let out a chorus of amens as Mike told a story, saying, “This man came in the store once yellin, ‘I’m gonna come cross that counter and get you.’ I was hidin behind Mama I was so scared! And do you know what Mama did? She rocked her head and raised up them arms and said, ‘Come on! Come onnnnnn! If you think you crazy, you just try it!’ “

  Mike slapped me on the back and all the sons laughed.

  At that moment, Courtney Speed appeared at the bottom of the steps, her long black hair piled loose on her head, strands hanging in wisps around her face, which was thin, beautiful, and entirely ageless. Her eyes were soft brown with a perfect halo of sea blue around the edges. She was delicate, not a hard edge on her. She hugged a grocery bag to her chest and whispered, “But did that man jump across that counter at me?”

  Mike screamed and laughed so hard he couldn’t answer.

  She looked at him, calm and smiling. “I said, Did that man jump?”

  “No, he did not!” Mike said, grinning. “That man didn’t do nuthin but run! That’s why Mama got no gun in this store. She don’t need one!”

  “I don’t live by the gun,” she said, then turned to me and smiled. “How you doin?” She walked up the stairs into the store, and we all followed.

  “Mama,” Keith said, “Pastor brought this woman in here. She’s Miss Rebecca and she’s here to talk to you.”

  Courtney Speed smiled a beautiful, almost bashful smile, her eyes bright and motherly. “God bless you, sweetie,” she said.

  Inside, flattened cardboard boxes covered most of the floor, which was worn from years of foot traffic. Shelves lined each wall, some bare, others stacked with Wonder Bread, rice, toilet paper, and pigs’ feet. On one, Speed had piled hundreds of editions of the Baltimore Sun dating back to the 1970s, when her husband died. She said she’d given up replacing the windows each time someone broke in because they’d just do it again. She’d hung handwritten signs on every wall of the store: one for “Sam the Man Snowballs,” others for sports clubs, church groups, and free GED and adult literacy classes. She had dozens of “spiritual sons,” who she treated no different than her six bio logical sons. And when any child came in to buy chips, candy, or soda, Speed made them calculate how much change she owed them—they got a free Hershey’s kiss for each correct answer.

  Speed started straightening the items on her shelves so each label faced out, then yelled over her shoulder at me, “How did you find your way here?”

  I told her about the four maps, and she threw a box of lard onto the shelf. “Now we got the four-map syndrome,” she said. “They keep trying to push us off the earth, but God won’t let them. Praise the Lord, he brings us the people we really need to talk to.”

  She wiped her hands on her white shirt. “Now that He brought you here, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m hoping to learn about Henrietta Lacks,” I said.

  Courtney gasped, her face suddenly ashen. She took several steps back and hissed, “You know Mr. Cofield? Did he send you?”

  I was confused. I told her I’d never heard of Cofield, and no one had sent me.

  “How did you know about me?” she snapped, backing away further.

  I pulled the old crumpled newspaper article from my purse and handed it to her.

  “Have you talked to the family?” she asked.

  “I’m trying,” I said. “I talked to Deborah once, and I was supposed to meet Sonny today, but he didn’t show up.”

  She nodded, like I knew it. “I can’t tell you anything until you got the support of the family. I can’t risk that.”

  “What about the plaque you got for the museum?” I asked. “Can I see that?”

  “It’s not here,” she snapped. “Nothing’s here, because bad things happened around all that.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, then her face softened. She took my hand in one of hers, and touched my face with the other.

  “I like your eyes,” she said. “Come with me.”

  She hurried out the door and down the stairs to her old brown station wagon. A man sat in the passenger seat, staring straight at the road as if the car were moving. He didn’t look up as she jumped in, saying, “Follow me.”

  We drove through Turner Station to the parking lot of the local public library. As I opened my car door, Courtney appeared, clapping, grinning, and bouncing on her tiptoes. Words erupted from her: “February first is Henrietta Lacks day here in Baltimore County,” she said. “This February first is going to be the big kickoff event here at the library! We’re still trying to put a museum together, even though the Cofield situation did cause so many problems. Terrified Deborah. We were supposed to be almost done with the museum by now—we were so close before all that horribleness. But I’m glad He sent you,” she said, pointing to the sky. “This story just got to be told! Praise the Lord, people got to know about Henrietta!”

  “Who’s Cofield?” I asked.

  She cringed and slapped her hand over her mouth. “I really can’t talk until the family says it’s okay,” she said, then grabbed my hand and ran into the library.

  “This is Rebecca,” she told the librarian, bouncing on her toes again. “She’s writing about Henrietta Lacks!”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful!” the librarian said. Then she looked at Courtney. “Are you talking to her?”

  “I need the tape,” Courtney said.

  The librarian walked down a row of videos, pulled a white box from the shelf, and handed it to her.

  Courtney tucked the video under her arm, grabbed my hand, and ran me back to the parking lot, where she jumped into her car and sped off, waving for me to follow. We stopped outside a convenience store while the man in her front seat got out and bought a loaf of bread. Then we dropped him off in front of his house as Courtney yelled back to me, “He’s my deaf cousin! Can’t drive!”

  Finally she led me to a small beauty parlor she owned, not far from Speed’s Grocery. She unlocked two bolts on the front door and waved her hand in the air, saying, “Smells like I got a mouse in one of those traps.” The shop was narrow, with barber chairs lining one wall and dryers along the other. The hair-washing sink, propped up with a piece of plywood, drained into a large white bucket, the walls around it splattered with years’ worth of hair dye. Next to the sink sat a price board: Cut and style ten dollars. Press and curl, seven. And against the back wall, on top of a supply cabinet, sat a photocopy of the picture of Henrietta Lacks, hands on hips, in a pale wood frame several inches too big.

  I pointed to the photo and raised my eyebrows. Courtney shook her head.

  “I’ll tell you everything I know,” she whispered, “just as soon as you talk to the family and they say it’s okay. I don’t want any more problems. And I don’t want Deborah to get sick over it again.”

  She pointed to a cracked red vinyl barber’s chair, which she spun to face a small television next to the hair dryers. “You have to watch this tape,” she said, handing me the remote and a set of keys. She started to walk out the door, then turned. “Don’t you open this door for nothing or nobody but me, you hear?” she said. “And don’t you miss nothing in that video—use that rewind button, watch it twice if you have to, but don’t you miss nothing.”

  Then she left, locking the door behind her.

  What rolled in front of me on that television screen was a one-hour BBC documentary about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, called The Way of All Flesh, which I’d been trying to get a copy of for months. It opened to sweet music and a young black woman who wasn’t Henrietta, dancing in front of the camera. A British man began narrating, his voice melodramatic, like he was telling a ghost story that just might be true.

  “In 1951 a woman died in Baltimore in America,” he said, pausing for effect. “She was
called Henrietta Lacks.” The music grew louder and more sinister as he told the story of her cells: “These cells have transformed modern medicine. … They shaped the policies of countries and of presidents. They even became involved in the Cold War. Because scientists were convinced that in her cells lay the secret of how to conquer death….”

  What really grabbed me was footage of Clover, an old plantation town in southern Virginia, where some of Henrietta’s relatives still seemed to live. The last image to appear on the screen was Henrietta’s cousin Fred Garret, standing behind an old slave shack in Clover, his back to the family cemetery where the narrator said Henrietta lay buried in an unmarked grave.

  Fred pointed to the cemetery and looked hard into the camera.

  “Do you think them cells still livin?” he asked. “I talkin bout in the grave.” He paused, then laughed a long, rumbling laugh. “Hell naw,” he said, “I don’t guess they are. But they’re still livin out in the test tubes. That’s a miracle.”

  The screen went blank and I realized, if Henrietta’s children and husband wouldn’t talk to me, I needed to visit Clover and find her cousins.

  That night, back at the hotel, I finally got Sonny on the phone. He said he’d decided not to meet me but wouldn’t tell me why. When I asked him to put me in touch with his family in Clover, he told me to go there and find them myself. Then he laughed and wished me luck.

  10

  The Other Side of the Tracks

  Clover sits a few rolling hills off Route 360 in southern Virginia, just past Difficult Creek on the banks of the River of Death. I pulled into town under a blue December sky, with air warm enough for May, a yellow Post-it note with the only information Sonny had given me stuck on my dashboard: “They haven’t found her grave. Make sure it’s day—there are no lights, gets darker than dark. Ask anybody where Lacks Town is.”

  Downtown Clover started at a boarded-up gas station with RIP spray-painted across its front, and ended at an empty lot that once held the depot where Henrietta caught her train to Baltimore. The roof of the old movie theater on Main Street had caved in years ago, its screen landing flat in a field of weeds. The other businesses looked like someone left for lunch decades earlier and never bothered coming back: one wall of Abbott’s clothing store was lined with boxes of new Red Wing work boots stacked to the ceiling and covered in thick dust; inside its long glass counter, beneath an antique cash register, lay rows and rows of men’s dress shirts, still folded starch-stiff in their plastic. The lounge at Rosie’s restaurant was filled with overstuffed chairs, couches, and shag carpet, all in dust-covered browns, oranges, and yellows. A sign in the front window said OPEN 7 DAYS, just above one that said CLOSED. At Gregory and Martin Super Market, half-full shop ping carts rested in the aisles next to decades-old canned foods, and the wall clock hadn’t moved past 6:34 since Martin closed up shop to become an undertaker sometime in the eighties.

  Even with kids on drugs and the older generation dying off, Clover didn’t have enough death to keep an undertaker in business: in 1974 it had a population of 227; in 1998 it was 198. That same year, Clover lost its town charter. It did still have several churches and a few beauty parlors, but they were rarely open. The only steady business left downtown was the one-room brick post office, but it was closed when I got there.

  Main Street felt like a place where you could sit for hours without seeing a pedestrian or a car. But a man stood in front of Rosie’s, leaning against his red motorized bicycle, waiting to wave at any cars that might pass. He was a short, round white man with red cheeks who could have been anywhere from fifty to seventy. Locals called him the Greeter, and he’d spent most of his life on that corner waving at anyone who drove by, his face expressionless. I asked if he could direct me to Lacks Town, where I planned to look for mailboxes with the name Lacks on them, then knock on doors asking about Henrietta. The man never said a word, just waved at me, then slowly pointed behind him, across the tracks.

  The dividing line between Lacks Town and the rest of Clover was stark. On one side of the two-lane road from downtown, there were vast, well-manicured rolling hills, acres and acres of wide-open property with horses, a small pond, a well-kept house set back from the road, a minivan, and a white picket fence. Directly across the street stood a small one-room shack about seven feet wide and twelve feet long; it was made of unpainted wood, with large gaps between the wallboards where vines and weeds grew.

  That shack was the beginning of Lacks Town, a single road about a mile long and lined with dozens of houses—some painted bright yellows or greens, others unpainted, half caved-in or nearly burnt-down. Slave-era cabins sat next to cinder-block homes and trailers, some with satellite dishes and porch swings, others rusted and half buried. I drove the length of Lacks Town Road again and again, past the END OF STATE MAINTENANCE sign where the road turned to gravel, past a tobacco field with a basketball court in it—just a patch of red dirt and a bare hoop attached to the top of a weathered tree trunk.

  The muffler on my beat-up black Honda had fallen off somewhere between Pittsburgh and Clover, which meant everyone in Lacks Town heard each time I passed. They walked onto porches and peered through windows as I drove by. Finally, on my third or fourth pass, a man who looked like he was in his seventies shuffled out of a green two-room wooden cabin wearing a bright green sweater, a matching scarf, and a black driving cap. He waved a stiff arm at me, eyebrows raised.

  “You lost?” he yelled over my muffler.

  I rolled down my window and said not exactly.

  “Well where you tryin to go?” he said. “Cause I know you’re not from around here.”

  I asked him if he’d heard of Henrietta.

  He smiled and introduced himself as Cootie, Henrietta’s first cousin.

  His real name was Hector Henry—people started calling him Cootie when he got polio decades earlier; he was never sure why. Cootie’s skin was light enough to pass for Latino, so when he got sick at nine years old, a local white doctor snuck him into the nearest hospital, saying Cootie was his son, since the hospitals didn’t treat black patients. Cootie spent a year inside an iron lung that breathed for him, and he’d been in and out of hospitals ever since.

  The polio had left him partially paralyzed in his neck and arms, with nerve damage that caused constant pain. He wore a scarf regardless of the weather, because the warmth helped ease the pain.

  I told him why I was there, and he pointed up and down the road. “Everybody in Lacks Town kin to Henrietta, but she been gone so long, even her memory pretty much dead now,” he said. “Everything about Henrietta dead except them cells.”

  He pointed to my car. “Turn this loud thing off and come inside. I’ll fix you some juice.”

  His front door opened into a tiny kitchen with a coffeemaker, a vintage toaster, and an old woodstove with two cooking pots on top, one empty, the other filled with chili. He’d painted the kitchen walls the same dark olive green as the outside, and lined them with power strips and fly swatters. He’d recently gotten indoor plumbing, but still preferred the outhouse.

  Though Cootie could barely move his arms, he’d built the house on his own, teaching himself construction as he went along, hammering the plywood walls and plastering the inside. But he’d forgotten to use insulation, so soon after he finished it, he tore down the walls and started over again. A few years after that, the whole place burned down when he fell asleep under an electric blanket, but he built it back up again. The walls were a bit crooked, he said, but he’d used so many nails, he didn’t think it would ever fall down.

  Cootie handed me a glass of red juice and shooed me out of the kitchen into his dark, wood-paneled living room. There was no couch, just a few metal folding chairs and a barber’s chair anchored to the linoleum floor, its cushions covered entirely with duct tape. Cootie had been the Lacks Town barber for decades. “That chair cost twelve hundred dollars now, but I got it for eight dollars back then,” he yelled from the kitchen. “Haircut wasn’t but a
dollar—sometimes I cut fifty-eight heads in one day.” Eventually he quit because he couldn’t hold his arms up long enough to cut.

  A small boom box leaned against one wall blaring a gospel call-in show, with a preacher screaming something about the Lord curing a caller of hepatitis.

  Cootie opened a folding chair for me, then walked into his bedroom. He lifted his mattress with one arm, propped it on his head, and began rummaging through piles of paper hidden beneath it.

  “I know I got some information on Henrietta in here somewhere,” he mumbled from under the mattress. “Where the hell I put that… You know other countries be buying her for twenty-five dollars, sometimes fifty? Her family didn’t get no money out of it.”

  After digging through what looked like hundreds of papers, he came back to the living room.

  “This here the only picture I got of her,” he said, pointing to a copy of the Rolling Stone article with the ever-present hands-on-hips photo. “I don’t know what it say. Only education I got, I had to learn on my own. But I always couldn’t count, and I can’t hardly read or write my name cause my hand’s so jittery.” He asked if the article said anything about her childhood in Clover. I shook my head no.

  “Everybody liked Henrietta cause she was a very good condition person,” he said. “She just lovey dovey, always smilin, always takin care of us when we come to the house. Even after she got sick, she never was a person who say ‘I feel bad and I’m going to take it out on you.’ She wasn’t like that, even when she hurtin. But she didn’t seem to understand what was going on. She didn’t want to think she was gonna die.”

  He shook his head. “You know, they said if we could get all the pieces of her together, she’d weigh over eight hundred pounds now,” he told me. “And Henrietta never was a big girl. She just still growin.”

  In the background, the radio preacher screamed “Hallelujah!” over and over as Cootie spoke.

  “She used to take care of me when my polio got bad,” he told me. “She always did say she wanted to fix it. She couldn’t help me cause I had it before she got sick, but she saw how bad it got. I imagine that’s why she used them cells to help get rid of it for other folk.” He paused. “Nobody round here never understood how she dead and that thing still livin. That’s where the mystery’s at.”