When Cofield returned alone, the staff refused to give him the records because he wasn’t a doctor or a relative of the patient. When Cofield said he was Dr. Sir Lord Keenan Kester Cofield, the Hopkins medical records staff contacted Richard Kidwell, one of Hopkins’s attorneys. Kidwell got suspicious the moment he heard that someone was poking around Hopkins using the title “Dr. Sir Lord,” so he did some quick background research.
Keenan Kester Cofield wasn’t a doctor or lawyer at all. In fact, Cofield had served years in various prisons for fraud, much of it involving bad checks, and he’d spent his jail time taking law courses and launching what one judge called “frivolous” lawsuits. Cofield sued guards and state officials connected to the prisons he’d been in, and was accused of calling the governor of Alabama from jail and threatening to murder him. Cofield sued McDonald’s and Burger King for contaminating his body by cooking fries in pork fat, and he threatened to sue several restaurants for food poisoning—including the Four Seasons in New York City—all while he was incarcerated and unable to eat at any restaurants. He sued The Coca-Cola Company, claiming a bottle of soda he’d bought was filled with ground glass, though he was in a prison that only offered Pepsi products in aluminum cans. He’d also been convicted of fraud for a scam in which he got an obituary of himself published, then sued the newspaper for libel and damages up to $100 million. He told the FBI that he’d filed at least 150 similar lawsuits.
In various court documents, judges described Cofield as a “con artist,” “no more than a gadfly and an exploiter of the court system,” and “the most litigious inmate in the system.” By the time Cofield contacted the Lackses about suing Hopkins, he’d been banned from filing lawsuits in at least two counties.
But Deborah knew none of this. Cofield called himself doctor and lawyer, and seemed capable of getting and understanding more information from Hopkins than the family ever could. And his demeanor didn’t hurt. When Courtney Speed described him to me a few years later, she said, “Charisma! Woo! I mean, cream of the smooth! Very well versed and knew something about everything.”
When Kidwell learned the truth about Cofield, the first thing he did was protect Deborah—something the Lacks family never would have expected from someone at Hopkins. He told her that Cofield was a con artist, and had her sign a document forbidding Cofield access to her family’s records. The way everyone I talked to at Hopkins remembers it, when Cofield came back and learned that the family had denied him access, he yelled and demanded copies of the records until a security guard threatened to physically remove him and call the police.
Cofield then filed a lawsuit against Deborah, Lawrence, Courtney Speed, the Henrietta Lacks Health History Museum Foundation, and a long list of Hopkins officials: the president, the medical records administrator, an archivist, Richard Kidwell, and Grover Hutchins, the director of autopsy services. He sued ten defendants in all, and several of the Hopkins employees involved had never heard of Cofield or Henrietta Lacks before their subpoenas arrived.
Cofield accused Deborah, Speed, and the museum foundation of breach of contract for entering into an agreement that required him to have access to Henrietta’s medical records, then denying him access. He claimed that Deborah could not legally prohibit him from doing research for the Henrietta Lacks Health History Museum Foundation, because she was not a member of its board of directors, or officially involved with the foundation in any way. He also claimed racial discrimination, saying he was “harassed by negro security of Johns Hopkins, and staff at the archives,” and that “the defendants and employees actions were all racially motivated and very anti-black.” He demanded access to the medical records and autopsy re ports of Henrietta and Deborah’s sister, Elsie, as well as damages of $15,000 per defendant, plus interest.
The most astonishing detail of Cofield’s suit was his claim that the Lacks family had no right to any information about Henrietta Lacks because she’d been born Loretta Pleasant. Since there was no official record of a name change, Cofield argued, Henrietta Pleasant had never actually existed, and therefore neither had Henrietta Lacks. Whoever she was, he said, the family wasn’t legally related to her. In a statement so filled with grammatical errors it’s difficult to understand, Cofield called this an “obvious fraud and conspiracy” and claimed that his lawsuit would “ultimately lead to the ends of justice for only Mrs. Henrietta Lacks, and now the plaintiff who has become the victim of a small, but big time fraud.”
Piles of legal documents began arriving almost daily at Deborah’s door: summonses and petitions and updates and motions. She panicked. She went to Turner Station and burst into Speed’s grocery store screaming, demanding that Speed give her everything she’d gathered related to Henrietta: the documents Speed kept in a superhero pillowcase, the Henrietta Lacks T-shirts and pens, the video of Wyche interviewing Day in Speed’s beauty parlor. Deborah yelled at Speed, accused her of conspiring with Cofield, and said she was going to hire O. J. Simpson’s lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, and sue Speed for everything she had if she didn’t shut down the foundation and stop all Henrietta-related activities.
But Speed had nothing and was just as scared as Deborah. She was a single mother with six sons, and she planned to put all of them through college using money she made cutting hair and selling chips, candy, and cigarettes. Her store was being robbed regularly, and she was getting just as many court mailings from Cofield as Deborah was. Soon, Speed stopped opening the letters and let them pile up in the backroom of her store until they stacked thirty envelopes high. Then she started a new pile. She prayed to God for the letters to stop, and wished her husband was still alive to deal with Cofield.
By this time the BBC documentary had aired, and reporters were calling Deborah, requesting photos of Henrietta and the family, and asking questions about her mother and how she died. But Deborah still didn’t know anything beyond what she’d read in Gold’s book. It was time, she decided, to find out what her mother’s medical records said. So she requested a copy from Hopkins, along with a copy of her sister’s records.
She also met with Kidwell, who told her not to worry and promised that Hopkins would fight Cofield. And it did. The case was eventually dismissed, but everyone involved was spooked. When the group at Hopkins that had been working on a plan to honor Henrietta heard about Cofield’s lawsuit, they quietly dropped the idea, never telling the Lackses they’d even considered it.
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 an
d 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
For 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.”
Deborah 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 uned
ited 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!’”
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Page 23
