The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

  She turned to run but he hit her, grabbed her by the arm, threw her into the car, and kept right on having his way with her. A few weeks later, as Deborah walked home from work with a neighborhood boy named Alfred “Cheetah” Carter, Galen pulled up alongside them, yelling at her to get in the car. When Deborah refused, Galen raced up the street, tires screaming. A few minutes later he pulled up beside her again, this time with Day in the passenger seat. Galen jumped out of the car, cussing and screaming and telling her she was a whore. He grabbed Deborah by the arm, threw her in the car, and punched her hard in the face. Her father didn’t say a word, just stared through the windshield.

  Deborah cried the whole way home to Bobbette and Lawrence’s house, blood dripping from her split eyebrow, then leapt from the car and ran through the house, straight into the closet where she hid when she was upset. She held the door closed tight. Bobbette saw Deborah run through the house crying, saw the blood on her face, and chased her to the closet. With Deborah inside sobbing, Bobbette pounded on the door saying, “Dale, what the hell is going on?”

  Bobbette had been part of the family long enough to know that cousins sometimes had their way with other cousins. But she didn’t know about Galen hurting Deborah, because Deborah never told anyone—she was afraid she’d get in trouble.

  Bobbette pulled Deborah from the closet, grabbed her shoulders, and said, “Dale, if you don’t tell me nothing, I won’t know nothing. Now, I know you love Galen like he your father, but you got to tell me what’s goin on.”

  Deborah told Bobbette that Galen had hit her, and that he sometimes talked dirty to her in the car. She said nothing about Galen touching her, because she was sure Bobbette would kill him and she worried that with Galen dead and Bobbette in jail for murdering him, she’d have lost the two people who cared for her most in the world.

  Bobbette stormed over to Galen and Ethel’s house, and burst in their front door screaming that if either of them touched one of those Lacks children again, she’d kill them herself.

  Soon after, Deborah asked Bobbette what pregnant was. Bobbette told her, then grabbed Deborah’s shoulders again and told her to listen good. “I know your mother and father and all the cousins all mingled together in their own way, but don’t you ever do it, Dale. Cousins are not supposed to be havin sex with each other. That’s uncalled for.”

  Deborah nodded.

  “You promise me,” Bobbette said. “You fight them if they try and get with you—I don’t care if you have to hurt them. Don’t let them touch you.”

  Deborah promised she wouldn’t.

  “You just got to go to school,” Bobbette said. “Don’t mess with boy cousins, and don’t have babies until you’re grown.”

  Deborah wasn’t thinking about having babies anytime soon, but by the time she turned thirteen she was thinking about marrying that neighbor boy everyone called Cheetah, mainly because she thought Galen would have to stop touching her if she had a husband. She was also thinking she’d drop out of school.

  Like her brothers, she’d always struggled in school because she couldn’t hear the teacher. None of the Lacks children could hear much unless the person speaking was nearby, talking loud and slow. But they’d been taught to keep quiet with adults, so they never told their teachers how much they were missing. None of them would realize the extent of their deafness or get hearing aids until later in life.

  When Deborah told Bobbette she wanted to leave school, Bobbette said, “Sit up front if you can’t hear. I don’t care what you do, but you get an education, cause that’s your only hope.”

  So Deborah stayed in school. She spent summers in Clover, and as she developed, her boy cousins would grab her and try to have their way. Sometimes they’d try to drag her into a field or behind a house. Deborah fought back with fists and teeth, and soon the cousins left her alone. They’d sneer at her, tell her she was ugly, and say, “Dale mean—she born mean and she gonna stay mean.” Still, three or four cousins asked Deborah to marry them and she just laughed, saying, “Man, is you crazy? That ain’t no game, you know? It affects the child!”

  Bobbette had told Deborah that maybe she and her siblings had hearing problems because their parents were first cousins. Deborah knew other cousins had children who were dwarves, or whose minds never developed. She wondered if that had something to do with what happened to Elsie.

  Deborah didn’t know she had a sister for much of her childhood. When Day finally told her, all he said was that Elsie was deaf and dumb and she’d died in an institution when she was fifteen. Deborah was devastated. She demanded to know if anyone ever tried to teach her sister sign language. No one had.

  Deborah begged Lawrence to tell her about their sister, but the only thing he’d say was that she was beautiful, and that he had to take her everywhere he went so he could protect her. Deborah couldn’t shake the idea that since Elsie couldn’t talk, she couldn’t have said no to boys like Deborah did, or tell anyone if something bad happened. Deborah hounded Lawrence to tell her anything he remembered about their sister and mother. Eventually he broke down sobbing and Deborah stopped asking.

  When she was in high school, Deborah cried and lay awake at night worrying about what awful things might have happened to her mother and sister. She’d ask Day and her parents’ cousins, “What in the world happened to my sister? And who was my mother? What happened to her?” Day just said the same thing again and again: “Her name was Henrietta Lacks, and she died when you was too young to remember.”

  16

  “Spending Eternity in the Same Place”

  During my first visit with Henrietta’s cousin Cootie, as we sat drinking juice, he told me that no one ever talked about Henrietta. Not when she was sick, not after she died, and not now. “We didn’t say words like cancer,” he told me, “and we don’t tell stories on dead folks.” At that point, he said, the family had gone so long without talking about Henrietta, it was almost like she’d never existed, except for her children and those cells.

  “It sound strange,” he said, “but her cells done lived longer than her memory.”

  If I wanted to know anything about Henrietta, he told me, I’d need to go up the road and talk to her cousin Cliff, who’d grown up with her like a brother.

  When I pulled into Cliff’s driveway, he figured I was a Jehovah’s Witness or an insurance sales rep, since the only white people who visited him were usually one or the other. He smiled and waved just the same, saying, “How you doin?”

  Cliff was in his seventies and still minding the tobacco barn behind the farmhouse his father had built decades earlier, checking the furnaces several times a day to make sure they stayed at 120 degrees. Inside Cliff’s house, the electric-blue and white walls were darkened with smudges of oil and dirt. He’d blocked the stairs to the second floor with cardboard and blankets to keep warm air from going up and out through missing windows, and he’d patched holes in his ceiling, walls, and windows with newspaper and duct tape. He slept downstairs on a thin, sheetless twin bed across from the refrigerator and woodstove, next to a folding table where he’d piled so many pills, he’d forgotten what they were all for. Maybe the prostate cancer, he said. Maybe the pressure.

  Cliff spent most of his time on his porch, sitting in a plaid recliner so worn down it was mostly just exposed foam and springs, waving at each car that passed. He was about six feet tall, even with several inches of slouch, his light brown skin dry and weathered like alligator, his eyes sea green at the center, with deep blue edges. Decades in shipyards and tobacco fields had left his hands coarse as burlap, his fingernails yellowed, cracked, and worn to the cuticles. As Cliff talked, he stared at the ground and twisted his arthritic fingers, one over the other like he was crossing them all for good luck. Then he untwisted them and started again.

  When he heard I was writing a book about Henrietta, he got up from his recliner, pulled on a jacket, and walked over to my car, yelling, “Come on then, I’ll show you where she buried!”

&nb
sp; About a half-mile down Lacks Town Road, Cliff had me park in front of a cinder block and pressboard house that couldn’t have been more than three hundred square feet inside. He jerked open a log-and-barbed-wire gate that led into a pasture and motioned for me to walk through. At the end of the pasture, hidden in the trees, stood a slave-time log cabin covered in boards with gaps wide enough to see through. Its windows had no glass and were covered by thin pieces of wood and rusted Coke signs from the fifties. The house slanted, its corners resting on piles of rocks of varying sizes that had been holding it above ground for more than two hundred years, its base high enough off the ground for a small child to crawl under.

  “That there is the old home-house where Henrietta grew up!” Cliff yelled, pointing. We walked toward it through red dirt and dried leaves that cracked under our feet, the air smelling of wild roses, pine, and cows.

  “Henrietta kept it nice—a real home-house. Now I can’t hardly recognize it.”

  The floors inside were covered with straw and manure; they’d collapsed in several places under the weight of cows that now roamed free on the property. Upstairs, in the room Henrietta once shared with Day, a few remnants of life lay scattered on the floor: a tattered work boot with metal eyes but no laces, a TruAde soda bottle with a white and red label, a tiny woman’s dress shoe with open toes. I wondered if it was Henrietta’s.

  “Could be!” Cliff said. “Sure look like her shoe.”

  He pointed toward what used to be the back wall, which had fallen years earlier, leaving little more than the frames of two tall windows. “This is where Henrietta slept.”

  She used to lie on her stomach and stare out those windows, looking at the woods and the family cemetery, a small quarter-acre clearing where a few strands of barbed wire now surrounded a scattering of tombstones. The same cows that had trampled the home-house floor had destroyed several sections of the cemetery fence. They’d left manure and hoofprints on graves, crushed flower arrangements into piles of stems, ribbon, and Styrofoam, and knocked over several tombstones, which now lay flat on the ground next to their bases.

  When we got outside, Cliff shook his head and picked up fragments of a broken sign. One piece said WE LOVE, the other said MOM.

  Some of the family tombstones were homemade from concrete; a few were store-bought and marble. “Them’s the folks with some money,” Cliff said, pointing to a marble one. Many graves were marked with index-card-sized metal plates on sticks with names and dates; the rest were unmarked.

  “Used to be we’d mark them graves with a rock so we could find em,” Cliff told me. “But the cemetery got cleaned out one time with a bulldozer, so that pretty much cleared those rocks on away.” There were so many people buried in the Lacks cemetery now, he said, they’d run out of room decades ago and started piling graves on top of each other.

  He pointed at an indentation in the ground with no marker beside it. “This was a good friend of mine,” he said. Then he started pointing around the graveyard to other body-sized indentations in the dirt. “See that sunk in right there … and that sunk right there … and there … Them’s all unmarked graves. They sink after a time when the dirt settle around the bodies.” Occasionally he’d point to a small plain rock poking through the earth and say it was a cousin or an aunt.

  “That there’s Henrietta’s mother,” he said, pointing to a lone tombstone near the cemetery’s edge, surrounded by trees and wild roses. It was several feet tall, its front worn rough and browned from age and weather. The inscription said this:

  ELIZA

  WIFE OF J.R.

  PLEASANT

  JUL 12, 1888

  OCTOBER 28, 1924

  GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

  Until I read those dates, I hadn’t done the math: Henrietta was barely four years old when she lost her mother, about the same age Sonny was when Henrietta died.

  “Henrietta used to come talk to her mother, took real good care of her grave. Now Henrietta somewhere in here with her,” Cliff said, waving his arms toward the clearing between Eliza’s stone and the next tree a good fifteen feet away. “Never did get a marker, so I couldn’t tell you exactly where she at, but the immediate family be buried next to each other. So she probably round in here somewhere.”

  He pointed to three body-sized indentations in the clearing and said, “Any one of those could be Henrietta.”

  We stood in silence as Cliff kicked at the dirt with his toe.

  “I don’t know what happened on that deal with them cells from Henrietta,” he said eventually. “Don’t nobody say anything about it round here. I just knowed she had something rare, cause she been dead a pretty good while, but her cells still living, and that’s amazing.” He kicked at the ground. “I heard they did a lot of research and some of her cells have develop a lot of curing other diseases. It’s a miracle, that’s all I can say.”

  Then suddenly he yelled at the ground, as if he was talking directly to Henrietta. “They named them HeLa! And they still living!” He kicked at the dirt again.

  A few minutes later, seemingly out of nowhere, he pointed to the dirt and said, “You know, white folks and black folks all buried over top of each other in here. I guess old white granddaddy and his brothers was buried in here too. Really no tellin who in this ground now.” Only thing he knew for sure, he said, was that there was something beautiful about the idea of slave-owning white Lackses being buried under their black kin.

  “They spending eternity in the same place,” he told me, laughing. “They must’ve worked out their problems by now!”

  Henrietta’s great-great-grandmother was a slave named Mourning. A white man named John Smith Pleasants inherited Mourning and her husband, George, from his father, one of the first slaveholders in Clover. Pleasants’ father came from a family of Quakers, and one of his distant relatives had been the first to fight successfully to free his own slaves through the Virginia courts. But Pleasants hadn’t carried on the family’s antislavery tradition.

  Mourning and George were enslaved on a tobacco plantation in Clover. Their son, Henrietta’s paternal great-grandfather Edmund, took his owner’s last name, which lost the s to become Pleasant. He was eventually freed from slavery at the age of forty, only to be committed later to an asylum for dementia. But before he was freed, he fathered many children, all of them born into slavery, including a daughter named Henrietta Pleasant—the great-aunt of Henrietta Lacks.

  On the other side of Henrietta’s family, her maternal great-grandfather was a white man named Albert Lacks, who’d inherited part of the Lacks Plantation in 1885, when his father divided his land among his three white sons: Winston, Benjamin, and Albert.

  Winston Lacks was a burly man with a beard that grew to his belly—he drank almost every night in a saloon hidden in the basement beneath the general store. When Winston got drunk and started fighting, the locals knew it was time for the soberest man to ride and get Fannie. There are no records of Fannie’s life, but she was most likely born a slave on the Lacks property, and like most Lacks slaves who stayed on the plantation as sharecroppers, she never left. She often rode beside Winston in his wagon, and when he got drunk, she’d march into the saloon, snatch him off the barstool by his long beard, and drag him home.

  The other brothers, Albert and Benjamin, led more private lives and left behind little history aside from their wills and land deeds. Most of the black Lackses I talked to over the years referred to Benjamin Lacks as “old white granddaddy,” though some still called him “Massuh Ben,” as their parents had.

  When Albert died on February 26, 1889, slavery had been abolished, but few black people owned land of their own. Albert’s will left land to five “colored” heirs, most of it in ten-acre chunks, and one of those heirs was Henrietta and Day’s grandfather, Tommy Lacks. Albert’s will said nothing of his relation to his heirs, but folks in Lacks Town knew they were children he’d had with a former slave named Maria.

  After Albert’s death, his brother Benjamin sued t
o take some of that land away from Albert’s black heirs, saying that since it was his father’s land originally, he had the right to choose whichever plot he wanted. The court agreed and divided the original Lacks plantation into two plots “of equal value.” The lower section—on the river—went to Benjamin Lacks; the upper plot—now known as Lacks Town—went to the black Lackses.

  Sixteen years after the court case, when Benjamin Lacks dictated his own will days before his death, he gave small plots of land to each of his sisters, then divided the remaining 124 acres and his horses between seven “colored” heirs of his own, including his nephew Tommy Lacks. There’s no record of Benjamin or Albert Lacks marrying or having any white children, and as with Albert, there’s no record that the black children in Benjamin’s will were his own. But he called them his “nigger children,” and according to black Lacks oral history, everyone living on the land in Clover that was once the Lacks Plantation descended from those two white brothers and their black mistresses who were once slaves.

  When I arrived in Clover, race was still ever-present. Roseland was “the nice colored fellow” who ran Rosie’s before it shut down; Bobcat was “the white man” who ran the mini-mart; Henrietta went to St. Matthew’s, “the colored church.” One of the first things Cootie said when I met him was, “You don’t act strange around me cause I’m black. You’re not from around here.”

  Everyone I talked to swore race relations were never bad in Clover. But they also said Lacks Town was only about twelve miles from the local Lynch Tree, and that the Ku Klux Klan held meetings on a school baseball field less than ten miles from Clover’s Main Street until well into the 1980s.

  Standing in the cemetery, Cliff told me, “The white Lackses know their kin all buried in here with ours cause they family. They know it, but they’ll never admit it. They just say, ‘Them Black Lackses, they ain’t kin!’”