The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

  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 prob ably 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.

  Deborah raised her eyebrows at me like, See? I told you!

  I started saying it was just Henrietta’s cells scientists had cloned, not Henrietta herself. But Deborah waved her hand in my face, shushing me like I was talking nonsense, then fished a videocassette from the pile and held it up for me to see. It said Jurassic Park on the spine.

  “I saw this movie a bunch of times,” she said. “They talking about the genes and taking them from cells to bring that dinosaur back to life and I’m like, Oh Lord, I got a paper on how they were doin that with my mother’s cells too!” She held up another videocassette, this one a made-for-TV movie called The Clone. In it, an infertility doctor secretly harvests extra embryos from one of his patients and uses them to create a colony of clones of the woman’s son, who died young in an accident.

  “That doctor took cells from that woman and made them into little boys look just like her child,” Deborah told me. “That poor woman didn’t even know about all the clones until she saw one walk out of a store. I don’t know what I’d do if I saw one of my mother clones walkin around somewhere.”

  Deborah realized these movies were fiction, but for her the line between sci-fi and reality had blurred years earlier, when her father got that first call saying Henrietta’s cells were still alive. Deborah knew her mother’s cells had grown like the Blob until there were so many of them they could wrap around the Earth several times. It sounded crazy, but it was true.

  “You just never know,” Deborah said, fishing two more articles from the pile and handing them to me. One was called HUMAN, PLANT CELLS FUSED: WALKING CARROTS NEXT? The other was MAN-ANIMAL CELLS BRED IN LAB. Both were about her mother’s cells, and neither was science fiction.

  “I don’t know what they did,” Deborah said, “but it all sound like Jurassic Park to me.”

  For the next three days, Deborah came to my B&B room each morning, sat on the bed, and unloaded her mind. When we needed a change of scenery, we rode water taxis and walked along the Baltimore Harbor. We ate crabs and burgers and fries and drove the city streets. We visited the houses she’d lived in as a child, most now boarded up with CONDEMNED signs out front. We spent day and night together as I soaked up as much of her story as I could, constantly worried she’d change her mind and stop talking to me. But in reality, it seemed now that Deborah had started talking, she might never stop again.

  Deborah’s was a world without silence. She yelled, punctuated most sentences with a raspy, high-pitched laugh, and maintained a running commentary on everything around her: “Look at the size of those trees!” “Isn’t that car a nice green?” “Oh my god, I’ve never seen such pretty flowers.” She walked down the street talking to tourists, sanitation workers, and homeless people, waving her cane at every person she passed, saying, “Hi there, how y’all doin?” again and again.

  Deborah was full of oddly charming quirks. She carried a bottle of Lysol in her car that she would often spray at random, only half-joking. She sprayed directly in front of my nose several times when I sneezed, but mostly she sprayed it out the window when we stopped somewhere that looked particularly unsanitary, which happened often. She also gestured with her cane as she spoke, often tapping my shoulder with it to get my attention, or smacking it against my leg to emphasize a point.

  One of the first times she hit me with her cane, we were sitting in my room. She’d just handed me a copy of Medical Genetics, by Victor McKusick, and said, “I met this man cause he wanted some blood from me for some cancer tests.”

  I told her he’d taken the blood for research on Henrietta’s cells, not to test her and her brothers for cancer. That’s when she smacked me on the leg with her cane.

  “Dang!” she yelled. “Now you tell me! When I started asking him questions about them tests and my mother’s cells, he just handed me a copy of this book, patted me on my back, and send me home.” She reached over, flipped the book open, and pointed. “He autographed it for me,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Would have been nice if he’d told me what the damn thing said too.”

  Deborah and I sprawled across the bed for hours each day, reading her files and talking about her life. Then, toward the end of the third day, I noticed a thick manila folder on my pillow.

  “Are those your mother’s medical records?” I asked, reaching for it.

  “No!” Deborah screamed, wild-eyed, leaping up and diving onto the folder like it was a fumbled football, hugging it to her chest, curling her body around it.

  I sat stunned, hand still reaching toward the pillow where the envelope had been, stammering, “I… I mean … I wasn’t …”

  “That’s right you wasn’t!” Deborah snapped. “What were you gonna do to my mother medical records?!”

  “I thought you put them there for me … I’m sorry … I don’t need to read them now. … It’s fine.”

  “We ain’t ready for that!” Deborah snapped, her eyes wide and panicked. She grabbed her bag, stuffed all her things back inside it, then ran for the door.

  I was stunned. The woman I’d been lying next to for days—laughing, elbowing, consoling—was now running from me like I was out to get her.

  “Deborah!” I called after her. “I’m not trying to do anything bad. I just want to learn your mother’s story, same as you.”

  She whipped around, her eyes still panicked, “I don’t know who to trust,” she hissed, then ran out the door, slamming it behind her.

  30

  Zakariyya

  T he next day, Deborah called my room from the front desk as if nothing had happened. “Come on downstairs,” she said. “It’s time you went and talked to Zakariyya. He been askin about you.”

  I was not excited to meet Zakariyya. I’d heard several times that of all the Lackses, he was by far the angriest about what happened to his mother, and that he was looking for any revenge he could get. I hoped to see the age of thirty, and it seemed like being the first white person to show up at Zakariyya’s apartment asking questions about his mother might interfere with that.

  Outside, as I followed Deborah to her car, she said, “Things never went quite right with Zakariyya after he got out of jail. But don’t worry. I’m pretty sure he’s ready to talk about our mother again.”

  “You’re pretty sure?” I said.

  “Well, I used to make copies of information about our mother and give it to him, but he got enough to where one day he cuss me out. He ran at me screamin, ‘I don’t wanna hear no more stuff about my mother and that damn doctor who done raped her cells!’ We haven’t really talked about it since.” She shrugged. “But he says he’s okay with you askin questions today though. We just got to catch him before he start drinkin.”

  When we got to Deborah’s car, her two grandsons—Davon and Alfred, who were just s
hy of their eighth and fourth birthdays—sat in the backseat screaming at each other. “Them are my two little hearts,” Deborah said. They were strikingly beautiful children, with huge smiles and wide, dark eyes. Alfred sat in the back wearing two pairs of jet-black plastic sunglasses, one on top of the other, each about three times too big for his face.

  “Miss Rebecca!” he yelled as we climbed into the car. “Miss Rebecca!”

  I turned around. “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  “Thank you.”

  I turned back to Deborah, who was telling me how I shouldn’t say something or other around Zakariyya.

  “Miss Rebecca! Miss Rebecca!” Alfred yelled again, slowly pushing both pairs of sunglasses down to the tip of his nose and wiggling his eyebrows at me.

  “You’re mine,” he said.

  “Oh knock that off!” Deborah yelled, swatting at him from the front seat. “Oh Lord, he just like his father, Mr. Ladies’ Man.” She shook her head. “My son always out rippin and runnin them streets, drinkin and druggin just like his father. I worry he gonna get himself in trouble—I don’t know what gonna happen to Little Alfred then. I’m afraid he learnin too much already.” Little Alfred was always beating up on Davon, even though Davon was older and bigger, but Davon never hit back without Deborah’s permission.

  When I asked the boys to tell me about their uncle Zakariyya, Davon puffed up his chest, sucked in his nose so his nostrils vanished, then yelled “GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!” his voice deeper than I thought possible for an eight-year-old. He and Alfred burst out laughing and collapsed into a pile in the backseat. “Like one of them wrestlers on TV!” Davon said, gasping for breath.

  Alfred screamed and bounced in his seat. “WWF!! WWF!!”

  Deborah looked at me and smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know how to handle him. I just keep remindin him to separate: Rebecca’s not one of them researchers, she’s not working for John Hopkin. She workin for herself. He kept sayin, ‘I’m all right, I won’t do nothing crazy’ But if I detect anything wrong we’ll leave right back outta there.”

  We drove for a few blocks in silence, passing boarded-up storefronts, rows of fast-food restaurants and liquor stores. At one point, Davon pointed to his school and told us about the metal detectors and how they locked all the students inside during classes. Eventually Deborah leaned over to me and whispered, “Younger brother always felt like he was cheated out of life, because when my mother had him, four months later, that’s when the sickness broke down on her. Brother’s got a lot of anger. You just got to make sure you say his name right.”

  I’d been saying it wrong, she told me, and I couldn’t do that in front of him. He pronounced it Zuh-CAR-ee-uh, not Zack-a-RYE-uh. Bobbette and Sonny had a hard time remembering that, so they called him Abdul, one of his middle names. But only when he wasn’t around.

  “Whatever you do, don’t call him Joe,” Deborah told me. “A friend of Lawrence’s called him Joe one Thanksgiving and Zakariyya knocked that man out right into his mashed potatoes.”

  Zakariyya was about to turn fifty and lived in an assisted-living facility that Deborah had helped him get into when he was on the streets. He qualified because of his deafness and the fact that he was nearly blind without glasses. He hadn’t lived there long, but was already on probationary status for being loud and aggressive with the other residents.

  As Deborah and the boys and I walked from the car toward the front door, Deborah cleared her throat loudly and nodded toward a hulk of a man hobbling from the building in khaki pants. He was five feet eight inches tall and weighed just under four hundred pounds. He wore bright blue orthopedic sandals, a faded Bob Marley T-shirt, and a white baseball hat that said, HAM, BACON, SAUSAGE.

  “Hey Zakariyya!” Deborah yelled, waving her hands above her head.

  Zakariyya stopped walking and looked at us. His black hair was buzzed close to his head, his face smooth and youthful like Deborah’s except for his brow, which was creased from decades of scowling. Beneath thick plastic glasses, his eyes were swollen, bloodshot, and surrounded by deep dark circles. One hand leaned on a metal cane identical to Deborah’s, the other held a large paper plate with at least a pint of ice cream on it, probably more. Under his arm, he’d folded several newspaper ad sections.

  “You told me you’d be here in an hour,” he snapped.

  “Uh … yeah … sorry,” Deborah mumbled. “There wasn’t any traffic.”

  “I’m not ready yet,” he said, then grabbed the bundle of newspaper from under his arm and smacked Davon hard across the face with it. “Why’d you bring them?” he yelled. “You know I don’t like no kids around.”

  Deborah grabbed Davon’s head and pressed it to her side, rubbing his cheek and stammering that their parents had to work and no one else could take them, but she swore they’d be quiet, wouldn’t they? Zakariyya turned and walked to a bench in front of his building without saying another word.

  Deborah tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to another bench on the opposite side of the building’s entrance, a good fifteen feet from Zakariyya. She whispered, “Sit over here with me,” then yelled, “Come on boys, why don’t you show Miss Rebecca how fast you can run!”

  Alfred and Davon raced around the concrete cul-de-sac in front of Zakariyya’s building, yelling, “Look at me! Look at me! Take my picture!”

  Zakariyya sat eating his ice cream and reading his ads like we didn’t exist. Deborah glanced at him every few seconds, then back to me, then the grandkids, then Zakariyya again. At one point she crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out at Zakariyya, but he didn’t see.

  Finally, Zakariyya spoke.

  “You got the magazine?” he asked, staring into the street.

  Zakariyya had told Deborah he wanted to read the Johns Hopkins Magazine story I wrote about their mother before he’d talk to me, and he wanted me sitting next to him while he read it. Deborah nudged me toward his bench, then jumped up saying she and the boys would wait upstairs for us, because it was better if we talked outside in the nice weather rather than being cooped up alone inside. It was in the nineties with dizzying humidity, but neither of us wanted me going in that apartment alone with him.

  “I’ll be watching from that window up there,” Deborah whispered. She pointed several floors up. “If anything funny starts, just wave and I’ll come down.”

  As Deborah and the boys walked inside the building, I sat beside Zakariyya and started telling him why I was there. Without looking at me or saying a word, he took the magazine from my hand and began reading. My heart pounded each time he sighed, which was often.

  “Damn!” he yelled suddenly, pointing at a photo caption that said Sonny was Henrietta’s youngest son. “He ain’t youngest! I am!” He slammed the magazine down and glared at it as I said of course I knew he was the youngest, and the magazine did the captions, not me.

  “I think my birth was a miracle,” he said. “I believe that my mother waited to go to the doctor till after I was born because she wanted to have me. A child born like that, to a mother full of tumors and sick as she was, and I ain’t suffered no kinda physical harm from it? It’s possible all this is God’s handiwork.”

  He looked up at me for the first time since I’d arrived, then reached up and turned a knob on his hearing aid.

  “I switched it off so I didn’t have to listen to them fool children,” he said, adjusting the volume until it stopped squealing. “I believe what them doctors did was wrong. They lied to us for twenty-five years, kept them cells from us, then they gonna say them things donated by our mother. Them cells was stolen! Those fools come take blood from us sayin they need to run tests and not tell us that all these years they done profitized off of her? That’s like hanging a sign on our backs saying, ‘I’m a sucker, kick me in my butt.’ People don’t know we just as po’ as po’. They probably think by what our mother cells had did that we well off. I hope George Grey burn in hell. If he wasn’t dead already, I’d take
a black pitchfork and stick it up his ass.”

  Without thinking, almost as a nervous reflex I said, “It’s George Gey, not Grey.”

  He snapped back, “Who cares what his name is? He always tellin people my mother name Helen Lane!” Zakariyya stood, towering over me, yelling, “What he did was wrong! Dead wrong. You leave that stuff up to God. People say maybe them takin her cells and makin them live forever to create medicines was what God wanted. But I don’t think so. If He wants to provide a disease cure, He’d provide a cure of his own, it’s not for man to tamper with. And you don’t lie and clone people behind their backs. That’s wrong—it’s one of the most violating parts of this whole thing. It’s like me walking in your bathroom while you in there with your pants down. It’s the highest degree of disrespect. That’s why I say I hope he burn in hell. If he were here right now, I’d kill him dead.”

  Suddenly, Deborah appeared beside me with a glass of water. “Just thought you might be thirsty,” she said, her voice stern like What the hell is going on here, because she’d seen Zakariyya standing over me yelling.

  “Everything okay out here?” she asked. “Y’all still reportin?”

  “Yeah,” Zakariyya said. But Deborah put her hand on his shoulder, saying maybe it was time we all went inside.

  As we walked toward the front door of his building, Zakariyya turned to me. “Them doctors say her cells is so important and did all this and that to help people. But it didn’t do no good for her, and it don’t do no good for us. If me and my sister need something, we can’t even go see a doctor cause we can’t afford it. Only people that can get any good from my mother cells is the people that got money, and whoever sellin them cells—they get rich off our mother and we got nothing.” He shook his head. “All those damn people didn’t deserve her help as far as I’m concerned.”