The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Page 9

  He looked around the room, nodding his head toward spaces between the wall and ceiling where he’d stuffed dried garlic and onions.

  “You know, a lot of things, they man-made,” he told me, dropping his voice to a whisper. “You know what I mean by man-made, don’t you?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Voodoo,” he whispered. “Some peoples is sayin Henrietta’s sickness and them cells was man-or woman-made, others say it was doctor-made.”

  As he talked, the preacher’s voice on the radio grew louder, saying, “The Lord, He’s gonna help you, but you got to call me right now. If my daughter or sister had cancer! I would get on that phone, cause time’s running out!”

  Cootie yelled over the radio. “Doctors say they never heard of another case like Henrietta’s! I’m sure it was either man-made or spirit-made, one of the two.”

  Then he told me about spirits in Lacks Town that sometimes visited people’s houses and caused disease. He said he’d seen a man spirit in his house, sometimes leaning against the wall by his woodstove, other times by the bed. But the most dangerous spirit, he told me, was the several-ton headless hog he saw roaming Lacks Town years ago with no tail. Links of broken chain dangled from its bloodstained neck, dragging along dirt roads and clanking as it walked.

  “I saw that thing crossin the road to the family cemetery,” Cootie told me. “That spirit stood right there in the road, its chain swingin and swayin in the breeze.” Cootie said it looked at him and stomped its foot, kicking red dust all around its body, getting ready to charge. Just then, a car came barreling down the road with only one headlight.

  “The car came along, shined a light right on it, I swear it was a hog,” Cootie said. Then the spirit vanished. “I can still hear that chain draggin.” Cootie figured that car saved him from getting some new disease.

  “Now I don’t know for sure if a spirit got Henrietta or if a doctor did it,” Cootie said, “but I do know that her cancer wasn’t no regular cancer, cause regular cancer don’t keep on growing after a person die.”

  11

  “The Devil of Pain Itself”

  By September, Henrietta’s body was almost entirely taken over by tumors. They’d grown on her diaphragm, her bladder, and her lungs. They’d blocked her intestines and made her belly swell like she was six months pregnant. She got one blood transfusion after another because her kidneys could no longer filter the toxins from her blood, leaving her nauseated from the poison of her own body. She got so much blood that one doctor wrote a note in her record stopping all transfusions “until her deficit with the blood bank was made up.”

  When Henrietta’s cousin Emmett Lacks heard somebody at Sparrows Point say Henrietta was sick and needed blood, he threw down the steel pipe he was cutting and ran looking for his brother and some friends. They were working men, with steel and asbestos in their lungs and years’ worth of hard labor under their calluses and cracked fingernails. They’d all slept on Henrietta’s floor and eaten her spaghetti when they first came to Baltimore from the country, and anytime money ran low. She’d ridden the streetcar to and from Sparrows Point to make sure they didn’t get lost during their first weeks in the city. She’d packed their lunches until they found their feet, then sent extra food to work with Day so they didn’t go hungry between paychecks. She’d teased them about needing wives and girlfriends, and sometimes helped them find good ones. Emmett had stayed at Henrietta’s so long, he had his own bed in the hallway at the top of the stairs. He’d only moved out a few months earlier.

  The last time Emmett saw Henrietta, he’d taken her to visit Elsie in Crownsville. They found her sitting behind barbed wire in the corner of a yard outside the brick barracks where she slept. When she saw them coming she made her birdlike noise, then ran to them and just stood, staring. Henrietta wrapped her arms around Elsie, looked her long and hard in the eyes, then turned to Emmett.

  “She look like she doin better,” Henrietta said. “Yeah, Elsie look nice and clean and everything.” They sat in silence for a long time. Henrietta seemed relieved, almost desperate, to see Elsie looking okay. That was the last time she would see her daughter—Emmett figures she knew she was saying goodbye. What she didn’t know was that no one would ever visit Elsie again.

  A few months later, when Emmett heard Henrietta needed blood, he and his brother and six friends piled into a truck and went straight to Hopkins. A nurse led them through the colored ward, past rows of hospital beds to the one where Henrietta lay. She’d withered from 140 pounds to about 100. Sadie and Henrietta’s sister Gladys sat beside her, their eyes swollen from too much crying and not enough sleep. Gladys had come from Clover by Greyhound as soon as she got word Henrietta was in the hospital. The two had never been close, and people still teased Gladys, saying she was too mean and ugly to be Henrietta’s sister. But Henrietta was family, so Gladys sat beside her, clutching a pillow in her lap.

  A nurse stood in the corner watching as the eight big men crowded around the bed. When Henrietta tried to move her arm to lift herself, Emmett saw the straps around her wrists and ankles, attaching her to the bed frame.

  “What you doin here?” Henrietta moaned.

  “We come to get you well,” Emmett said to a chorus of yeahs from the other men.

  Henrietta didn’t say a word. She just lay her head back on the pillow.

  Suddenly her body went rigid as a board. She screamed as the nurse ran to the bed, tightening the straps around Henrietta’s arms and legs to keep her from thrashing onto the floor as she’d done many times before. Gladys thrust the pillow from her lap into Henrietta’s mouth, to keep her from biting her tongue as she convulsed in pain. Sadie cried and stroked Henrietta’s hair.

  “Lord,” Emmett told me years later. “Henrietta rose up out that bed wailin like she been possessed by the devil of pain itself.”

  The nurse shooed Emmett and his brothers out of the ward to the room designated for colored blood collection, where they’d donate eight pints of blood. As Emmett walked from Henrietta’s bedside, he turned to look just as the fit began to pass and Gladys slid the pillow from Henrietta’s mouth.

  “That there’s a memory I’ll take to my grave,” he told me years later. “When them pains hit, looked like her mind just said, Henrietta, you best leave. She was sick like I never seen. Sweetest girl you ever wanna meet, and prettier than anything. But them cells, boy, them cells of hers is somethin else. No wonder they never could kill them … That cancer was a terrible thing.”

  Soon after Emmett and his friends visited, at four o’clock on the afternoon of September 24, 1951, a doctor injected Henrietta with a heavy dose of morphine and wrote in her chart, “Discontinue all medications and treatments except analgesics.” Two days later, Henrietta awoke terrified, disoriented, wanting to know where she was and what the doctors had been doing to her. For a moment she forgot her own name. Soon after that, she turned to Gladys and told her she was going to die.

  “You make sure Day takes care of them children,” Henrietta told her sister, tears streaming down her face. “Especially my baby girl Deborah.” Deborah was just over a year old when Henrietta went into the hospital. Henrietta had wanted to hold Deborah, to dress her in beautiful clothes and braid her hair, to teach her how to paint her nails, curl her hair, and handle men.

  Henrietta looked at Gladys and whispered, “Don’t you let anything bad happen to them children when I’m gone.”

  Then she rolled over, her back to Gladys, and closed her eyes.

  Gladys slipped out of the hospital and onto a Greyhound back to Clover. That night, she called Day.

  “Henrietta gonna die tonight,” she told him. “She wants you to take care of them kids—I told her I’d let you know. Don’t let nuthin happen to them.”

  Henrietta died at 12:15 a.m. on October 4, 1951.

  12

  The Storm

  There was no obituary for Henrietta Lacks, but word of her death reached the Gey lab quickly. As Henrietta’s body
cooled in the “colored” freezer, Gey asked her doctors if they’d do an autopsy. Tissue culturists around the world had been trying to create a library of immortal cells like Henrietta’s, and Gey wanted samples from as many organs in her body as possible, to see if they’d grow like HeLa. But to get those samples after her death, someone would have to ask Henrietta’s husband for permission.

  Though no law or code of ethics required doctors to ask permission before taking tissue from a living patient, the law made it very clear that performing an autopsy or removing tissue from the dead without permission was illegal.

  The way Day remembers it, someone from Hopkins called to tell him Henrietta had died, and to ask permission for an autopsy, and Day said no. A few hours later, when Day went to Hopkins with a cousin to see Henrietta’s body and sign some papers, the doctors asked again about the autopsy. They said they wanted to run tests that might help his children someday. Day’s cousin said it wouldn’t hurt, so eventually Day agreed and signed an autopsy permission form.

  Soon Henrietta’s body lay on a stainless-steel table in the cavernous basement morgue, and Gey’s assistant, Mary, stood in the doorway breathing fast, feeling like she might faint. She’d never seen a dead body. Now there she was with a corpse, a stack of petridishes, and the pathologist, Dr. Wilbur, who stood hunched over the autopsy table. Henrietta’s arms were extended, as if she were reaching above her head. Mary walked toward the table, whispering to herself, You’re not going to make a fool of yourself and pass out.

  She stepped around one of Henrietta’s arms and took her place beside Wilbur, her hip in Henrietta’s armpit. He said hello, Mary said hello back. Then they were silent. Day wanted Henrietta to be presentable for the funeral, so he’d only given permission for a partial autopsy, which meant no incision into her chest and no removal of her limbs or head. Mary opened the dishes one by one, holding them out to collect samples as Wilbur cut them from Henrietta’s body: bladder, bowel, uterus, kidney, vagina, ovary, appendix, liver, heart, lungs. After dropping each sample into a petridish, Wilbur put bits of Henrietta’s tumor-covered cervix into containers filled with formal dehyde to save them for future use.

  The official cause of Henrietta’s death was terminal uremia: blood poisoning from the buildup of toxins normally flushed out of the body in urine. The tumors had completely blocked her urethra, leaving her doctors unable to pass a catheter into her bladder to empty it. Tumors the size of baseballs had nearly replaced her kidneys, bladder, ovaries, and uterus. And her other organs were so covered in small white tumors it looked as if someone had filled her with pearls.

  Mary stood beside Wilbur, waiting as he sewed Henrietta’s abdomen closed. She wanted to run out of the morgue and back to the lab, but instead, she stared at Henrietta’s arms and legs—anything to avoid looking into her lifeless eyes. Then Mary’s gaze fell on Henrietta’s feet, and she gasped: Henrietta’s toenails were covered in chipped bright red polish.

  “When I saw those toenails,” Mary told me years later, “I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way.”

  A few days later, Henrietta’s body made the long, winding train ride from Baltimore to Clover in a plain pine box, which was all Day could afford. It was raining when the local undertaker met Henrietta’s coffin at the Clover depot and slid it into the back of a rusted truck. He rolled through downtown Clover, past the hardware store where Henrietta used to watch old white men play checkers, and onto Lacks Town Road, turning just before The Shack, where she’d danced only a few months earlier. As the undertaker drove into Lacks Town, cousins filed onto porches to watch Henrietta pass, their hands on hips or clutching children as they shook their heads and whispered to the Lord.

  Cootie shuffled into his yard, looked straight into the falling rain, and yelled, “Sweet Jesus, let that poor woman rest, you hear me? She had enough!”

  Amens echoed from a nearby porch.

  A quarter-mile down the road, Gladys and Sadie sat on the broken wooden steps of the home-house, a long pink dress draped across their laps and a basket at their feet filled with makeup, curlers, red nail polish, and the two pennies they’d rest on Henrietta’s eyes to keep them closed for the viewing. They watched silently as the undertaker inched through the field between the road and the house, his tires sinking into puddles of red mud.

  Cliff and Fred stood in the graveyard behind the house, their over alls drenched and heavy with rain. They’d spent most of the day thrusting shovels into the rocky cemetery ground, digging a grave for Henrietta. They dug in one spot, then another, moving each time their shovels hit the coffins of unknown relatives buried with no markers. Eventually they found an empty spot for Henrietta near her mother’s tombstone.

  When Cliff and Fred heard the undertaker’s truck, they walked toward the home-house to help unload Henrietta. When they got her into the hallway, they opened the pine box, and Sadie began to cry. What got her most wasn’t the sight of Henrietta’s lifeless body, it was her toenails: Henrietta would rather have died than let her polish get all chipped like that.

  “Lord,” Sadie said. “Hennie must a hurt somethin worse than death.”

  For several days, Henrietta’s corpse lay in the hallway of the home-house, doors propped open at each end to let in the cool wet breeze that would keep her body fresh. Family and neighbors waded through the field to pay respects, and all the while, the rain kept coming.

  The morning of Henrietta’s funeral, Day walked through the mud with Deborah, Joe, Sonny, and Lawrence. But not Elsie. She was still in Crownsville and didn’t even know her mother had died.

  The Lacks cousins don’t remember much about the service—they figure there were some words, probably a song or two. But they all remember what happened next. As Cliff and Fred lowered Henrietta’s coffin into her grave and began covering her with handfuls of dirt, the sky turned black as strap molasses. The rain fell thick and fast. Then came long rumbling thunder, screams from the babies, and a blast of wind so strong it tore the metal roof off the barn below the cemetery and sent it flying through the air above Henrietta’s grave, its long metal slopes flapping like the wings of a giant silver bird. The wind caused fires that burned tobacco fields. It ripped trees from the ground, blew power lines out for miles, and tore one Lacks cousin’s wooden cabin clear out of the ground, threw him from the living room into his garden, then landed on top of him, killing him instantly.

  Years later, when Henrietta’s cousin Peter looked back on that day, he just shook his bald head and laughed: “Hennie never was what you’d call a beatin-around-the-bush woman,” he said. “We shoulda knew she was tryin to tell us somethin with that storm.”

  13

  The HeLa Factory

  Not long after Henrietta’s death, planning began for a HeLa factory—a massive operation that would grow to produce trillions of HeLa cells each week. It was built for one reason: to help stop polio.

  By the end of 1951 the world was in the midst of the biggest polio epidemic in history. Schools closed, parents panicked, and the public grew desperate for a vaccine. In February 1952, Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh announced that he’d developed the world’s first polio vaccine, but he couldn’t begin offering it to children until he’d tested it on a large scale to prove it was safe and effective. And doing that would require culturing cells on an enormous, industrial scale, which no one had done before.

  The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP)—a charity created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who’d himself been paralyzed by polio—began organizing the largest field trial ever conducted to test the polio vaccine. Salk would inoculate 2 million children and the NFIP would test their blood to see if they’d become immune. But doing this would require millions of neutralizat
ion tests, which involved mixing blood serum from newly vaccinated children with live poliovirus and cells in culture. If the vaccine worked, the serum from a vaccinated child’s blood would block the poliovirus and protect the cells. If it didn’t work, the virus would infect the cells, causing damage scientists could see using a microscope.

  The trouble was, at that point, the cells used in neutralization tests came from monkeys, which were killed in the process. This was a problem, not because of concern for animal welfare—which wasn’t the issue then that it is today—but because monkeys were expensive. Doing millions of neutralization tests using monkey cells would cost millions of dollars. So the NFIP went into overdrive looking for a cultured cell that could grow on a massive scale and would be cheaper than using monkeys.

  The NFIP turned to Gey and a few other cell culture experts for help, and Gey recognized the opportunity as a gold mine for the field. The NFIP’s March of Dimes was bringing in an average of $ 50 million in donations each year, and its director wanted to give much of that money to cell culturists so they could find a way to mass-produce cells, which they’d been wanting to do for years anyway.

  The timing was perfect: by chance, soon after the NFIP contacted Gey for help, he realized that Henrietta’s cells grew unlike any human cells he’d seen.

  Most cells in culture grew in a single layer in a clot on a glass surface, which meant they ran out of space quickly. Increasing their numbers was labor-intensive: scientists had to repeatedly scrape the cells from one tube and split them into new ones to give them more space. HeLa cells, it turned out, weren’t picky—they didn’t need a glass surface in order to grow. They could grow floating in a culture medium that was constantly stirred by a magnetic device, an important technique Gey developed, now called growing in suspension. This meant that HeLa cells weren’t limited by space in the same way other cells were; they could simply divide until they ran out of culture medium. The bigger the vat of medium, the more the cells grew. This discovery meant that if HeLa was susceptible to poliovirus, which not all cells were, it would solve the mass-production problem and make it possible to test the vaccine without millions of monkey cells.