medical facilities, in all the computers and the Internet everywhere. When I go to the doctor for my checkups I always say my mother was HeLa. They get all ex-cited, tell me stuff like how her cells...

medical facilities, in all the computers and the Internet

everywhere.

When I go to

the doctor for my checkups I always say my mother was HeLa. They get all

ex-cited, tell me stuff like how her cells helped make my blood pressure

medicines and antide-pression pills and how all this important stuff in science

happen cause of her. But they don’t never explain more than just sayin, Yeah,

your mother was on the moon, she been in nuclear bombs and made that polio

vaccine. I really don’t know how she did all that, but I guess I’m glad she

did, cause that mean she helpin lots of people. I think she would like that.

But I always

have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how

come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got

rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we

don’t get a dime. I used to get so mad about that to where it made me sick and

I had to take pills. But I don’t got it in me no more to fight. I just want to

know who my mother was.

The Immortal

life of Henrietta Lacks The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks The Immortal life

of Henrietta Lacks

1

The Exam

O

n January 29, 1951, David Lacks sat

behind the wheel of his old Buick, watching the rain fall. He was parked under

a towering oak tree outside Johns Hopkins Hospital with three of his

children—two still in diapers—waiting for their mother, Henrietta. A few

minutes earlier she’d jumped out of the car, pulled her jacket over her head,

and scurried into the hospital, past the “colored” bathroom, the only one she

was allowed to use. In the next building, under an eleg-ant domed copper roof,

a ten-and-a-half-foot marble statue of Jesus stood, arms spread wide,

fter her

visit to Hopkins, Henrietta went about life as usual, cleaning and cooking for

Day, their children, and the many cousins who stopped by. Then, a few days

later, Jones got her biopsy results from the pathology lab: “Epidermoid

carcinoma of the cervix, Stage I.”

All cancers

originate from a single cell gone wrong and are categorized based on the type

of cell they start from. Most cervical cancers are carcinomas, which grow from

the epithelial cells that cover the cervix and protect its surface. By chance, when

Henrietta showed up at Hopkins complaining of abnormal bleeding, Jones and his

boss, Richard Wesley TeLinde, were involved in a heated nationwide debate over

what qualified as cervical cancer, and how best to treat it.

TeLinde, one

of the top cervical cancer experts in the country, was a dapper and serious

fifty-six-year-old surgeon who walked with an extreme limp from an ice-skating

accident more than a decade earlier. Everyone at Hopkins called him Uncle Dick.

He’d pioneered the use of estrogen for treating symptoms of menopause and made

important early discoveries about endometriosis. He’d also written one of the

most famous clinical gynecology textbooks, which is still widely used sixty

years and ten editions after he first wrote it. His reputation was

inter-national: when the king of Morocco’s wife fell ill, he insisted only

TeLinde could operate on her. By 1951, when Henrietta arrived at Hopkins,

TeLinde had developed a theory about cer-vical cancer that, if correct, could

save the lives of millions of women. But few in the field be-lieved him.

C

ervical

carcinomas are divided into two types: invasive carcinomas, which have

penetrated the surface of the cervix, and noninvasive carcinomas, which

haven’t. The noninvasive type is sometimes called “sugar-icing carcinoma,”

because it grows in a smooth layered sheet across the surface of the cervix,

but its official name is carcinoma in situ, which derives from the Latin for

“cancer in its original place.”

In 1951,

most doctors in the field believed that invasive carcinoma was deadly, and

car-cinoma in situ wasn’t. So they treated the invasive type aggressively but

generally didn’t worry about carcinoma in situ because they thought it couldn’t

spread. TeLinde disagreed—he be-lieved carcinoma in situ was simply an early

stage of invasive carcinoma that, if left untreated, eventually became deadly.

So he treated it aggressively, often removing the cervix, uterus, and most of

the vagina. He argued that this would drastically reduce cervical cancer deaths,

but his critics called it extreme and unnecessary.

bathroom and found blood spotting her underwear when it wasn’t her

time of the month.

She filled her bathtub, lowered herself

into the warm water, and slowly spread her legs. With the door closed to her

children, husband, and cousins, Henrietta slid a finger inside her-self and

rubbed it across her cervix until she found what she somehow knew she’d find: a

hard lump, deep inside, as though someone had lodged a marble just to the left of

the open-ing to her womb.

Henrietta

climbed out of the bathtub, dried herself off, and dressed. Then she told her

hus-band, “You better take me to the doctor. I’m bleedin and it ain’t my time.”

Her local

doctor took one look inside her, saw the lump, and figured it was a sore from

syphilis. But the lump tested negative for syphilis, so he told Henrietta she’d

better go to the Johns Hopkins gynecology clinic.

Hopkins was one of the top hospitals in

the country. It was built in 1889 as a charity hos-pital for the sick and poor,

and it covered more than a dozen acres where a cemetery and in-sane asylum once

sat in East Baltimore. The public wards at Hopkins were filled with patients,

most of them black and unable to pay their medical bills. David drove Henrietta

nearly twenty miles to get there, not because they preferred it, but because it

was the only major hospital for miles that treated black patients. This was the

era of Jim Crow—when black people showed up at white-only hospitals, the staff

was likely to send them away, even if it meant they might die in the parking

lot. Even Hopkins, which did treat black patients, segregated them in colored

wards, and had colored-only fountains.

So when the

nurse called Henrietta from the waiting room, she led her through a single door

to a colored-only exam room—one in a long row of rooms divided by clear glass

walls that let nurses see from one to the next. Henrietta undressed, wrapped

herself in a starched white hospital gown, and lay down on a wooden exam table,

waiting for Howard Jones, the gynecologist on duty. Jones was thin and graying,

his deep voice softened by a faint Southern accent. When he walked into the

room, Henrietta told him about the lump. Before examining her, he flipped

through her chart—a quick sketch of her life, and a litany of untreated

condi-tions:

Sixth or

seventh grade education; housewife and mother of five. Breathing difficult

since childhood due to recurrent throat infections and deviated septum in

patient’s nose. Physician recommended surgical repair. Patient declined.

Patient had one toothache for nearly five years; tooth eventually extracted

with several others. Only anxiety is oldest daughter who is epileptic and can’t

talk. Happy household. Very occasional drinker. Has not traveled. Well

nourished, cooperative. Patient was one of ten siblings. One died of car

accident, one from rheumatic heart, one was poisoned. Unexplained vaginal

bleeding and blood in urine during last two pregnancies; physician recommended

sickle cell test. Patient declined. Been with

husband

since age 15 and has no liking for sexual intercourse. Patient has asymptomatic

neuro syphilis but cancelled syphilis treatments, said she felt fine. Two

months prior to current visit, after delivery of fifth child, patient had

significant blood in urine. Tests showed areas of increased cellular activity

in the cervix. Physician recommended diagnostics and referred to specialist for

ruling out in fection or cancer. Patient canceled appointment. One month prior to

current visit, patient tested positive for gonorrhea. Patient recalled to

clinic for treatment. No response.

It was no surprise that she hadn’t come

back all those times for follow-up. For Henrietta, walking into Hopkins was

like entering a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. She knew

about harvesting tobacco and butchering a pig, but she’d never heard the words

cervix or biopsy. She didn’t read or write much, and she hadn’t studied science

in school. She, like most black patients, only went to Hopkins when she thought

she had no choice.

Jones

listened as Henrietta told him about the pain, the blood. “She says that she

knew there was something wrong with the neck of her womb,” he wrote later.

“When asked why she knew it, she said that she felt as if there were a lump

there. I do not quite know what she means by this, unless she actually palpated

this area.”

Henrietta lay back on the table, feet

pressed hard in stirrups as she stared at the ceiling. And sure enough, Jones

found a lump exactly where she’d said he would. He described it as an eroded,

hard mass about the size of a nickel. If her cervix was a clock’s face, the

lump was at four o’clock. He’d seen easily a thousand cervical cancer lesions,

but never anything like this: shiny and purple (like “grape Jello,” he wrote

later), and so delicate it bled at the slightest touch. Jones cut a small

sample and sent it to the pathology lab down the hall for a diagnosis. Then he

told Henrietta to go home.

Soon after, Howard Jones sat down and

dictated notes about Henrietta and her diagnosis: “Her history is interesting

in that she had a term delivery here at this hospital, September 19, 1950,” he

said. “No note is made in the history at that time, or at the six weeks’ return

visit that there is any abnormality of the cervix.”

Yet here she

was, three months later, with a full-fledged tumor. Either her doctors had

missed it during her last exams—which seemed impossible—or it had grown at a

terrifying rate.

The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks The Immortal life of

Henrietta Lacks

2

Clover

H

enrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant

in Roanoke, Virginia, on August 1, 1920. No one knows how she became Henrietta.

A midwife named Fannie delivered her into a small shack on a dead-end road

overlooking a train depot, where hundreds of freight cars came and went each

day. Henrietta shared that house with her parents and eight older siblings

until 1924, when her mother, Eliza Lacks Pleasant, died giving birth to her

tenth child.

Henrietta’s

father, Johnny Pleasant, was a squat man who hobbled around on a cane he often

hit people with. Family lore has it that he killed his own brother for trying

to get fresh with Eliza. Johnny didn’t have the patience for raising children,

so when Eliza died, he took them all back to Clover, Virginia, where his family

still farmed the tobacco fields their ancestors had worked as slaves. No one in

Clover could take all ten children, so relatives divided them up—one with this

cousin, one with that aunt. Henrietta ended up with her grandfather, Tommy

Lacks.

Tommy lived

in what everyone called the home-house—a four-room log cabin that once served

as slave quarters, with plank floors, gas lanterns, and water Henrietta hauled

up a long hill from the creek. The home-house stood on a hillside where wind

whipped through cracks in the walls. The air inside stayed so cool that when

relatives died, the family kept their corpses in the front hallway for days so

people could visit and pay respects. Then they buried them in the cemetery out

back.

Henrietta’s

grandfather was already raising another grandchild that one of his daughters

had left behind after delivering him on the home-house floor. That child’s name

was David Lacks, but everyone called him Day, because in the Lacks country

drawl, house sounds like hyse, and David sounds like Day.

Young Day

was what the Lacks family called a sneak baby: a man named Johnny Cole-man had

passed through town; nine months later Day arrived. A twelve-year-old cousin

and midwife named Munchie delivered him, blue as a stormy sky and not

breathing. A white doc-tor came to the home-house with his derby and walking

stick, wrote “stillborn” on Day’s birth

certificate,

then drove his horse-drawn buggy back to town, leaving a cloud of red dust

be-hind.

Munchie

prayed as he rode away, Lord, I know you didn’t mean to take this baby. She

washed Day in a tub of warm water, then put him on a white sheet where she

rubbed and pat-ted his chest until he gasped for breath and his blue skin

warmed to soft brown.

By the time

Johnny Pleasant shipped Henrietta off to live with Grandpa Tommy, she was four

and Day was almost nine. No one could have guessed she’d spend the rest of her

life with Day—first as a cousin growing up in their grandfather’s home, then as

his wife.

As children, Henrietta and Day awoke each

morning at four o’clock to milk the cows and feed the chickens, hogs, and

horses. They tended a garden filled with corn, peanuts, and greens, then headed

to the tobacco fields with their cousins Cliff, Fred, Sadie, Margaret, and a

horde of others. They spent much of their young lives stooped in those fields,

planting to-bacco behind mule-drawn plows. Each spring they pulled the wide

green leaves from their stalks and tied them into small bundles—their fingers

raw and sticky with nicotine resin—then climbed the rafters of their

grandfather’s tobacco barn to hang bundle after bundle for curing. Each summer

day they prayed for a storm to cool their skin from the burning sun. When they

got one, they’d scream and run through fields, snatching armfuls of ripe fruit

and walnuts that the winds blew from the trees.

Like most

young Lackses, Day didn’t finish school: he stopped in the fourth grade because

the family needed him to work the fields. But Henrietta stayed until the sixth

grade. During the school year, after taking care of the garden and livestock

each morning, she’d walk two miles—past the white school where children threw

rocks and taunted her—to the colored school, a three-room wooden farmhouse

hidden under tall shade trees, with a yard out front where Mrs. Coleman made

the boys and girls play on separate sides. When school let out each day, and

any time it wasn’t in session, Henrietta was in the fields with Day and the

cous-ins.

If the weather was nice, when they

finished working, the cousins ran straight to the swim-ming hole they made each

year by damming the creek behind the house with rocks, sticks, bags of sand,

and anything else they could sink. They threw rocks to scare away the poison

ous cottonmouth snakes, then dropped into the water from tree branches or dove

from muddy banks.

At nightfall they built fires with pieces

of old shoes to keep the mosquitoes away, and watched the stars from beneath

the big oak tree where they’d hung a rope to swing from. They played tag,

ring-around-the-rosy, and hopscotch, and danced around the field singing until

Grandpa Tommy yelled for everyone to go to bed.

Each night,

piles of cousins packed into the crawl space above a little wooden kitchen

house just a few feet from the home-house. They lay one next to the

other—telling stories about the headless tobacco farmer who roamed the streets

at night, or the man with no eyes who lived by the creek—then slept until their

grandmother Chloe fired up the woodstove be-low and woke them to the smell of

fresh biscuits.

One evening each month during harvest

season, Grandpa Tommy hitched the horses after supper and readied them to ride

into the town of South Boston—home of the nation’s second-largest tobacco

market, with tobacco parades, a Miss Tobacco pageant, and a port where boats

collected the dried leaves for people around the world to smoke.

Before leaving home, Tommy would call for

the young cousins, who’d nestle into the flat wagon on a bed of tobacco leaves,

then fight sleep as long as they could before giving in to the rhythm of the

horses. Like farmers from all over Virginia, Tommy Lacks and the grandchil-dren

rode through the night to bring their crops to South Boston, where they’d line

up at dawn—one wagon behind the next-waiting for the enormous green wooden

gates of the auc-tion warehouse to open.

When they arrived, Henrietta and the

cousins would help unhitch the horses and fill their troughs with grain, then

unload the family’s tobacco onto the wood-plank floor of the ware-house. The

auctioneer rattled off numbers that echoed through the huge open room, its

ceil-ing nearly thirty feet high and covered with skylights blackened by years

of dirt. As Tommy Lacks stood by his crop praying for a good price, Henrietta

and the cousins ran around the to-bacco piles, talking in a fast gibberish to

sound like the auctioneer. At night they’d help Tommy haul any unsold tobacco

down to the basement, where he’d turn the leaves into a bed for the children.

White farmers slept upstairs in lofts and private rooms; black farmers slept in

the dark underbelly of the warehouse with the horses, mules, and dogs, on a

dusty dirt floor lined with rows of wooden stalls for livestock, and mountains

of empty liquor bottles piled al-most to the ceiling.

Night at the warehouse was a time of

booze, gambling, prostitution, and occasional murders as farmers burned through

their season’s earnings. From their bed of leaves, the Lacks children would

stare at ceiling beams the size of trees as they drifted off to the sound of

laughter and clanking bottles, and the smell of dried tobacco.

In the morning they’d pile into the wagon

with their unsold harvest and set out on the long journey home. Any cousins

who’d stayed behind in Clover knew a wagon ride into South Bo-ston meant treats

for everyone—a hunk of cheese, maybe, or a slab of bologna—so they waited for

hours on Main Street to follow the wagon to the home-house.

Clover’s wide, dusty Main Street was full

of Model As, and wagons pulled by mules and horses. Old Man Snow had the first

tractor in town, and he drove it to the store like it was a

car—newspaper tucked under his arm, his

hounds Cadillac and Dan baying beside him. Main Street had a movie theater,

bank, jewelry store, doctor’s office, hardware store, and several churches.

When the weather was good, white men with suspenders, top hats, and long

ci-gars—everyone from mayor to doctor to under taker—stood along Main Street

sipping whis-key from juice bottles, talking, or playing checkers on the wooden

barrel in front of the phar-macy. Their wives gossiped at the general store as

their babies slept in a row on the counter, heads resting on long bolts of

fabric.

Henrietta and her cousins would hire

themselves out to those white folks, picking their to-bacco for ten cents so

they’d have money to see their favorite Buck Jones cowboy movies. The theater

owner showed silent black-and-white films, and his wife played along on the

pi-ano. She knew only one song, so she played happy carnival-style music for

every scene, even when characters were getting shot and dying. The Lacks

children sat up in the colored section next to the projector, which clicked

like a metronome through the whole movie.

A

s Henrietta and Day grew older, they

traded ring-around-the-rosy for horse races along the dirt road that ran the

length of what used to be the Lacks tobacco plantation, but was now simply

called Lacks Town. The boys always fought over who got to ride Charlie Horse,

Grandpa Tommy’s tall bay, which could outrun any other horse in Clover.

Henrietta and the other girls watched from the hillside or the backs of

straw-filled wagons, hopping up and down, clapping and screaming as the boys

streaked by on horseback.

Henrietta often yelled for Day, but

sometimes she cheered for another cousin, Crazy Joe Grinnan. Crazy Joe was what

their cousin Cliff called “an over average man”—tall, husky, and strong, with

dark skin, a sharp nose, and so much thick black hair covering his head, arms,

back, and neck that he had to shave his whole body in the summer to keep from

burning up. They called him Crazy Joe because he was so in love with Henrietta,

he’d do anything to get her attention. She was the prettiest girl in Lacks

Town, with her beautiful smile and walnut eyes.

The first

time Crazy Joe tried to kill himself over Henrietta, he ran circles around her

in the middle of winter while she was on her way home from school. He begged

her for a date, say-ing, “Hennie, come on … just give me a chance.” When she

laughed and said no, Crazy Joe ran and jumped straight through the ice of a

frozen pond and refused to come out until she agreed to go out with him.

All the

cousins teased Joe, saying, “Maybe he thought that ice water might’a cool him

off, but he so hot for her, that water nearly started boiling!” Henrietta’s

cousin Sadie, who was Crazy Joe’s sister, yelled at him, “Man you so much in

love with a girl, you gonna die for her? That ain’t right.”

No one knew

what happened between Henrietta and Crazy Joe, except that there were some

dates and some kisses. But Henrietta and Day had been sharing a bedroom since

she was four, so what happened next didn’t surprise anyone: they started having

children togeth-er. Their son Lawrence was born just months after Henrietta’s

fourteenth birthday; his sister Lucile Elsie Pleasant came along four years

later. They were both born on the floor of the home-house like their father,

grandmother, and grandfather before them.

People wouldn’t use words like epilepsy,

mental retardation, or neurosyphilis to describe Elsie’s condition until years

later. To the folks in Lacks Town, she was just simple. Touched. She came into

the world so fast, Day hadn’t even gotten back with the midwife when Elsie shot

right out and hit her head on the floor. Everyone would say maybe that was what

left her mind like an infant’s.

The old

dusty record books from Henrietta’s church are filled with the names of women

cast from the congregation for bearing children out of wedlock, but for some

reason Henrietta never was, even as rumors floated around Lacks Town that maybe

Crazy Joe had fathered one of her children.

When Crazy

Joe found out Henrietta was going to marry Day, he stabbed himself in the chest

with an old dull pocketknife. His father found him lying drunk in their yard,

shirt soaked with blood. He tried to stop the bleeding, but Joe fought

him—thrashing and punching—which just made him bleed more. Eventually Joe’s

father wrestled him into the car, tied him tight to the door, and drove to the

doctor. When Joe got home all bandaged up, Sadie just kept say-ing, “All that

to stop Hennie from marrying Day?” But Crazy Joe wasn’t the only one trying to

stop the marriage.

Henrietta’s

sister Gladys was always saying Henrietta could do better. When most Lackses

talked about Henrietta and Day and their early life in Clover, it sounded as

idyllic as a fairy tale. But not Gladys. No one knew why she was so against the

marriage. Some folks said Gladys was just jealous because Henrietta was prettier.

But Gladys always insisted Day would be a no-good husband.

Henrietta

and Day married alone at their preacher’s house on April 10, 1941. She was

twenty; he was twenty-five. They didn’t go on a honeymoon because there was too

much work to do, and no money for travel. By winter, the United States was at

war and tobacco companies were supplying free cigarettes to soldiers, so the

market was booming. But as large farms flourished, the small ones struggled.

Henrietta and Day were lucky if they sold

enough tobacco each season to feed the family and plant the next

crop.

So after

their wedding, Day went back to gripping the splintered ends of his old wooden

plow as Henrietta followed close behind, pushing a homemade wheelbarrow and

dropping to-bacco seedlings into holes in the freshly turned red dirt.

Then one

afternoon at the end of 1941, their cousin Fred Garret came barreling down the

dirt road beside their field. He was just back from Baltimore for a visit in

his slick ‘36 Chevy and fancy clothes. Only a year earlier, Fred and his

brother Cliff had been tobacco farmers in Clover too. For extra money, they’d

opened a “colored” convenience store where most cus-tomers paid in IOUs; they

also ran an old cinderblock juke joint where Henrietta often danced on the

red-dirt floor. Everybody put coins in the jukebox and drank RC Cola, but the

profits never amounted to much. So eventually Fred took his last three dollars

and twenty-five cents and bought a bus ticket north for a new life. He, like

several other cousins, went to work at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point steel

mill and live in Turner Station, a small community of black workers on a

peninsula in the Patapsco River, about twenty miles from downtown Bal-timore.

In the late 1800s, when Sparrows Point

first opened, Turner Station was mostly swamps, farmland, and a few shanties

connected with wooden boards for walkways. When demand for steel increased

during World War I, streams of white workers moved into the nearby town of

Dundalk, and Bethlehem Steel’s housing barracks for black workers quickly

overflowed, push-ing them into Turner Station. By the early years of World War

II, Turner Station had a few paved roads, a doctor, a general store, and an ice

man. But its residents were still fighting for water, sewage lines, and

schools.

Then, in December 1941, Japan bombed

Pearl Harbor, and it was like Turner Station had won the lottery: the demand

for steel skyrocketed, as did the need for workers. The govern-ment poured

money into Turner Station, which began filling with one-and two-story housing

projects, many of them pressed side by side and back-to-back, some with four to

five hundred units. Most were brick, others covered with asbestos shingles.

Some had yards, some didn’t. From most of them you could see the flames dancing

above Sparrows Point’s furnaces and the eerie red smoke pouring from its

smokestacks.

Sparrows

Point was rapidly becoming the largest steel plant in the world. It produced

con-crete-reinforcing bars, barbed wire, nails, and steel for cars,

refrigerators, and military ships. It would burn more than six million tons of

coal each year to make up to eight million tons of steel and employ more than

30,000 workers. Bethlehem Steel was a gold mine in a time flush with poverty, especially

for black families from the South. Word spread from Maryland to the farms of

Virginia and the Carolinas, and as part of what would become known as the Great

Migration, black families flocked from the South to Turner Station—the Promised

Land.

The work was

tough, especially for black men, who got the jobs white men wouldn’t touch.

Like Fred, black workers usually started in the bowels of partially built

tankers in the shipyard, collecting bolts, rivets, and nuts as they fell from the

hands of men drilling and welding thirty or forty feet up. Eventually black

workers moved up to the boiler room, where they shoveled coal into a blazing

furnace. They spent their days breathing in toxic coal dust and asbestos, which

they brought home to their wives and daughters, who inhaled it while shaking

the men’s clothes out for the wash. The black workers at Sparrows Point made

about eighty cents an hour at most, usually less. White workers got higher

wages, but Fred didn’t complain: eighty cents an hour was more than most

Lackses had ever seen.

Fred had made it. Now he’d come back to

Clover to convince Henrietta and Day that they should do the same. The morning

after he came barreling into town, Fred bought Day a bus ticket to Baltimore.

They agreed Henrietta would stay behind to care for the children and the

tobacco until Day made enough for a house of their own in Baltimore, and three

tickets north. A few months later, Fred got a draft notice shipping him

overseas. Before he left, Fred gave Day all the money he’d saved, saying it was

time to get Henrietta and the children to Turner Station.

Soon, with a

child on each side, Henrietta boarded a coal-fueled train from the small wooden

depot at the end of Clover’s Main Street. She left the tobacco fields of her

youth and the hundred-year-old oak tree that shaded her from the sun on so many

hot afternoons. At the age of twenty-one, Henrietta stared through the train

window at rolling hills and wide-open bodies of water for the first time,

heading toward a new life.

The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks The Immortal life of

Henrietta Lacks

3

Diagnosis and Treatment

A

fter her

visit to Hopkins, Henrietta went about life as usual, cleaning and cooking for

Day, their children, and the many cousins who stopped by. Then, a few days

later, Jones got her biopsy results from the pathology lab: “Epidermoid

carcinoma of the cervix, Stage I.”

All cancers

originate from a single cell gone wrong and are categorized based on the type

of cell they start from. Most cervical cancers are carcinomas, which grow from

the epithelial cells that cover the cervix and protect its surface. By chance,

when Henrietta showed up at Hopkins complaining of abnormal bleeding, Jones and

his boss, Richard Wesley TeLinde, were involved in a heated nationwide debate

over what qualified as cervical cancer, and how best to treat it.

TeLinde, one

of the top cervical cancer experts in the country, was a dapper and serious

fifty-six-year-old surgeon who walked with an extreme limp from an ice-skating

accident more than a decade earlier. Everyone at Hopkins called him Uncle Dick.

He’d pioneered the use of estrogen for treating symptoms of menopause and made

important early discoveries about endometriosis. He’d also written one of the

most famous clinical gynecology textbooks, which is still widely used sixty

years and ten editions after he first wrote it. His reputation was

inter-national: when the king of Morocco’s wife fell ill, he insisted only

TeLinde could operate on her. By 1951, when Henrietta arrived at Hopkins,

TeLinde had developed a theory about cer-vical cancer that, if correct, could

save the lives of millions of women. But few in the field be-lieved him.

C

ervical

carcinomas are divided into two types: invasive carcinomas, which have

penetrated the surface of the cervix, and noninvasive carcinomas, which

haven’t. The noninvasive type is sometimes called “sugar-icing carcinoma,”

because it grows in a smooth layered sheet across the surface of the cervix,

but its official name is carcinoma in situ, which derives from the Latin for

“cancer in its original place.”

In 1951,

most doctors in the field believed that invasive carcinoma was deadly, and

car-cinoma in situ wasn’t. So they treated the invasive type aggressively but

generally didn’t worry about carcinoma in situ because they thought it couldn’t

spread. TeLinde disagreed—he be-lieved carcinoma in situ was simply an early

stage of invasive carcinoma that, if left untreated, eventually became deadly.

So he treated it aggressively, often removing the cervix, uterus, and most of

the vagina. He argued that this would drastically reduce cervical cancer

deaths, but his critics called it extreme and unnecessary.

the water being contaminated by Sparrows

Point. Anytime Henrietta got word that Lawrence was at the pier, she’d storm

down there, drag him out of the water, and whip him.

“Ooooh Lord,” Sadie said once, “Hennie

went down there with a switch. Yes Lord. She pitched a boogie like I never

seen.” But those were the only times anyone could ever remem-ber seeing

Henrietta mad. “She was tough,” Sadie said. “Nothin scared Hennie.”

For a month and a half, no one in Turner

Station knew Henrietta was sick. The cancer was easy to keep secret, because

she only had to go back to Hopkins once, for a checkup and a second radium

treatment. At that point the doctors liked what they saw: her cervix was a bit

red and inflamed from the first treatment, but the tumor was shrinking.

Regardless, she had to start X-ray therapy, which meant visiting Hopkins every

weekday for a month. For that, she needed help: Henrietta lived twenty minutes

from Hopkins, and Day worked nights, so he couldn’t take her home after

radiation until late. She wanted to walk to her cousin Margaret’s house a few

blocks from Hopkins and wait there for Day after her treatments. But first

she’d have to tell Margaret and Sadie she was sick.

Henrietta told her cousins about the

cancer at a carnival that came to Turner Station each year. The three of them

climbed onto the Ferris wheel as usual, and she waited till it got so high they

could see across Sparrows Point toward the ocean, till the Ferris wheel stopped

and they were just kicking their legs back and forth, swinging in the crisp spring

air.

“You remember when I said I had a knot

inside me?” she asked. They nodded yes. “Well, I got cancer,” Henrietta said.

“I been havin treatments down at John Hopkins.”

“What?!” Sadie said, looking at Henrietta

and feeling suddenly dizzy, like she was about to slide off the Ferris wheel

seat.

“Nothin serious wrong with

me,” Henrietta said. “I’m fine.”

And at that point it looked like she was

right. The tumor had completely vanished from the radium treatments. As far as

the doctors could see, Henrietta’s cervix was normal again, and they felt no

tumors anywhere else. Her doctors were so sure of her recovery that while she

was in the hospital for her second radium treatment, they’d performed

reconstructive surgery on her nose, fixing the deviated septum that had given

her sinus infections and headaches her whole life. It was a new beginning. The

radiation treatments were just to make sure there were no cancer cells left

anywhere inside her.

But about two weeks after her second

radium treatment, Henrietta got her period—the flow was heavy and it didn’t

stop. She was still bleeding weeks later on March 20, when Day began dropping

her off each morning at Hopkins for her radiation treatments. She’d change into

a surgical gown, lie on an exam table with an enormous machine mounted on the

wall above her, and a doctor would put strips of lead inside her vagina to

protect her colon and

earlier

biopsies first had carcinoma in situ. In addition to that study, TeLinde

thought, if he could find a way to grow living samples from normal cervical

tissue and both types of cancer-ous tissue—something never done before—he could

compare all three. If he could prove that carcinoma in situ and invasive

carcinoma looked and behaved similarly in the laboratory, he could end the

debate, showing that he’d been right all along, and doctors who ignored him

were killing their patients. So he called George Gey (pronounced Guy), head of

tissue culture research at Hopkins.

Gey and his

wife, Margaret, had spent the last three decades working to grow malignant

cells outside the body, hoping to use them to find cancer’s cause and cure. But

most cells died quickly, and the few that survived hardly grew at all. The Geys

were determined to grow the first immortal human cells: a continuously dividing

line of cells all descended from one ori-ginal sample, cells that would

constantly replenish themselves and never die. Eight years earlier—in 1943—a

group of researchers at the National Institutes of Health had proven such a

thing was possible using mouse cells. The Geys wanted to grow the human

equival-ent—they didn’t care what kind of tissue they used, as long as it came from

a person.

Gey took any cells he could get his hands

on—he called himself “the world’s most famous vulture, feeding on human

specimens almost constantly.” So when TeLinde offered him a supply of cervical

cancer tissue in exchange for trying to grow some cells, Gey didn’t hesitate.

And TeLinde began collecting samples from any woman who happened to walk into

Hopkins with cervical cancer. Including Henrietta.

O

n February 5, 1951, after Jones got

Henrietta’s biopsy report back from the lab, he called and told her it was

malignant. Henrietta didn’t tell anyone what Jones said, and no one asked. She

simply went on with her day as if nothing had happened, which was just like

her—no sense upsetting anyone over something she could deal with herself.

That night

Henrietta told her husband, “Day, I need to go back to the doctor tomorrow. He

wants to do some tests, give me some medicine.” The next morning she climbed

from the Buick outside Hopkins again, telling Day and the children not to

worry.

“Ain’t nothin serious wrong,”

she said. “Doctor’s gonna fix me right up.”

Henrietta

went straight to the admissions desk and told the receptionist she was there

for her treatment. Then she signed a form with the words OPERATION PERMIT at

the top of the

page. It said:

I hereby

give consent to the staff of The Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any

operative procedures and under any anaesthetic either local or general that

they may deem necessary in the proper surgical care and treatment of:

______________________________

Henrietta

printed her name in the blank space. A witness with illegible handwriting

signed a line at the bottom of the form, and Henrietta signed another.

Then she

followed a nurse down a long hallway into the ward for colored women, where

Howard Jones and several other white physicians ran more tests than she’d had

in her entire life. They checked her urine, her blood, her lungs. They stuck

tubes in her bladder and nose.

On her second night at the hospital, the

nurse on duty fed Henrietta an early dinner so her stomach would be empty the

next morning, when a doctor put her under anesthetic for her first cancer

treatment. Henrietta’s tumor was the invasive type, and like hospitals

nationwide, Hopkins treated all invasive cervical carcinomas with radium, a

white radioactive metal that glows an eerie blue.

When radium was first discovered in the

late 1800s, headlines nationwide hailed it as “a substitute for gas,

electricity, and a positive cure for every disease.” Watchmakers added it to

paint to make watch dials glow, and doctors administered it in powdered form to

treat everything from seasickness to ear infections. But radium destroys any

cells it encounters, and patients who’d taken it for trivial problems began

dying. Radium causes mutations that can turn into cancer, and at high doses it

can burn the skin off a person’s body. But it also kills cancer cells.

Hopkins had

been using radium to treat cervical cancer since the early 1900s, when a

sur-geon named Howard Kelly visited Marie and Pierre Curie, the couple in

France who’d dis-covered radium and its ability to destroy cancer cells.

Without realizing the danger of contact with radium, Kelly brought some back to

the United States in his pockets and regularly traveled the world collecting

more. By the 1940s, several studies—one of them conducted by Howard Jones,

Henrietta’s physician—showed that radium was safer and more effective than

surgery for treating invasive cervical cancer.

The morning

of Henrietta’s first treatment, a taxi driver picked up a doctor’s bag filled

with thin glass tubes of radium from a clinic across town. The tubes were

tucked into individual slots inside small canvas pouches hand-sewn by a local

Baltimore woman. The pouches were called Brack plaques, after the Hopkins

doctor who invented them and oversaw Henrietta’s radium treatment. He would

later die of cancer, most likely caused by his regular exposure to radium, as

would a resident who traveled with Kelly and also transported radium in his pock-ets.

One nurse

placed the Brack plaques on a stainless-steel tray. Another wheeled Henrietta

into the small colored-only operating room on the second floor, with

stainless-steel tables, huge glaring lights, and an all-white medical staff dressed

in white gowns, hats, masks, and gloves.

With

Henrietta unconscious on the operating table in the center of the room, her

feet in stir-rups, the surgeon on duty, Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr., sat on a

stool between her legs. He peered inside Henrietta, dilated her cervix, and

prepared to treat her tumor. But first—though no one had told Henrietta that

TeLinde was collecting samples or asked if she wanted to be a donor—Wharton

picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta’s

cervix: one from her tumor, and one from the healthy cervical tissue nearby.

Then he placed the samples in a glass dish.

Wharton slipped a tube filled with radium

inside Henrietta’s cervix, and sewed it in place. He sewed a plaque filled with

radium to the outer surface of her cervix and packed another plaque against it.

He slid several rolls of gauze inside her vagina to help keep the radium in

place, then threaded a catheter into her bladder so she could urinate without

disturbing the treatment.

When Wharton

finished, a nurse wheeled Henrietta back into the ward, and Wharton wrote in

her chart, “The patient tolerated the procedure well and left the operating

room in good condition.” On a separate page he wrote, “Henrietta Lacks … Biopsy

of cervical tissue … Tissue given to Dr. George Gey.”

A resident took the dish with the samples

to Gey’s lab, as he’d done many times before. Gey still got excited at moments

like this, but everyone else in his lab saw Henrietta’s sample as something

tedious—the latest of what felt like countless samples that scientists and lab

technicians had been trying and failing to grow for years. They were sure

Henrietta’s cells would die just like all the others.

The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks The Immortal life of Henrietta

Lacks

4

The Birth of HeLa

G

ey’s

twenty-one-year-old assistant, Mary Kubicek, sat eating a tuna-salad sandwich

at a long stone culture bench that doubled as a break table. She and Margaret

and the other women in the Gey lab spent countless hours there, all in nearly

identical cat-eye-glasses with fat dark frames and thick lenses, their hair

pulled back in tight buns.

At first glance, the room could have been

an industrial kitchen. There were gallon-sized tin coffee cans full of utensils

and glassware; powdered creamer, sugar, spoons, and soda bottles on the table;

huge metal freezers lining one wall; and deep sinks Gey made by hand using

stones he collected from a nearby quarry. But the teapot sat next to a Bunsen

burner, and the freezers were filled with blood, placentas, tumor samples, and

dead mice (plus at least one duck Gey kept frozen in the lab for more than

twenty years after a hunting trip, since it wouldn’t fit in his freezer at

home). Gey had lined one wall with cages full of squealing rab-bits, rats, and

guinea pigs; on one side of the table where Mary sat eating her lunch, he’d

built shelves holding cages full of mice, their bodies filled with tumors. Mary

always stared at them while she ate, just as she was doing when Gey walked into

the lab carrying the pieces of Hen-rietta’s cervix.

“I’m putting a new sample in

your cubicle,” he told her.

Mary

pretended not to notice. Not again, she thought, and kept eating her sandwich.

It can wait till I’m done.

Mary knew

she shouldn’t wait—every moment those cells sat in the dish made it more likely

they’d die. But she was tired of cell culture, tired of meticulously cutting

away dead tis-sue like gristle from a steak, tired of having cells die after

hours of work.

Why bother? she thought.

G

ey hired

Mary for her hands. She was fresh out of college with a physiology degree when

her adviser sent her for an interview. Gey asked Mary to pick up a pen from the

table and write a few sentences. Now pick up that knife, he said. Cut this

piece of paper. Twirl this

pipette.

Mary didn’t realize until months later

that he’d been studying her hands, checking their dexterity and strength to see

how they’d stand up to hours of delicate cutting, scraping, tweezing, and

pipetting.

By the time Henrietta walked into

Hopkins, Mary was handling most of the tissue samples that came through the

door, and so far all samples from TeLinde’s patients had died.

At that point, there were many obstacles

to growing cells successfully. For starters, no one knew exactly what nutrients

they needed to survive, or how best to supply them. Many re-searchers,

including the Geys, had been trying for years to develop the perfect culture

medi-um—the liquid used for feeding cells. The recipes for Gey Culture Medium

evolved constantly as George and Margaret added and removed ingredients,

searching for the perfect balance. But they all sounded like witches’ brews:

the plasma of chickens, purée of calf fetuses, spe-cial salts, and blood from

human umbilical cords. George had rigged a bell and cable from the window of

his lab across a courtyard to the Hopkins maternity ward, so nurses could ring

any-time a baby was born, and Margaret or Mary would run over and collect

umbilical cord blood.

The other ingredients weren’t so easy to

come by: George visited local slaughterhouses at least once a week to collect

cow fetuses and chicken blood. He’d drive there in his rusted-out old Chevy,

its left fender flapping against the pavement, shooting sparks. Well before

dawn, in a rundown wooden building with a sawdust floor and wide gaps in the

walls, Gey would grab a screaming chicken by the legs, yank it upside down from

its cage, and wrestle it to its back on a butcher block. He’d hold its feet in

one hand and pin its neck motionless to the wood with his elbow. With his free

hand, he’d squirt the bird’s chest with alcohol, and plunge a syringe needle

into the chicken’s heart to draw blood. Then he’d stand the bird upright,

saying, “Sorry, old fella,” and put it back in its cage. Every once in a while,

when a chicken dropped dead from the stress, George took it home so Margaret

could fry it for dinner.

Like many

procedures in their lab, the Gey Chicken Bleeding Technique was Margaret’s

creation. She worked out the method step-by-step, taught it to George, and

wrote detailed in-structions for the many other researchers who wanted to learn

it.

Finding the

perfect medium was an ongoing experiment, but the biggest problem facing cell

culture was contamination. Bacteria and a host of other microorganisms could

find their way into cultures from people’s unwashed hands, their breath, and

dust particles floating through the air, and destroy them. But Margaret had

been trained as a surgical nurse, which meant sterility was her specialty—it

was key to preventing deadly infections in patients in the operating room. Many

would later say that Margaret’s surgical training was the only reason the Gey

lab was able to grow cells at all. Most culturists, like George, were biologists;

they knew nothing about preventing contamination.

Margaret taught George everything he knew about keeping cultures

sterile, and she did the same with every technician, grad student, and

scientist who came to work or study in the lab. She hired a local woman named

Minnie whose sole job was washing the laboratory glassware using the only

product Margaret would allow: Gold Dust Twins soap. Margaret was so serious

about that soap, when she heard a rumor that the company might go out of busi-ness,

she bought an entire boxcar full of it.

Margaret

patrolled the lab, arms crossed, and leaned over Minnie’s shoulder as she

worked, towering nearly a foot above her. If Margaret ever smiled, no one could

have seen it through her ever-present surgical mask. She inspected all the

glassware for spots or smudges, and when she found them—which was often—she’d

scream, “MINNIE!” so loud that Mary cringed.

Mary

followed Margaret’s sterilizing rules meticulously to avoid her wrath. After

finishing her lunch, and before touching Henrietta’s sample, Mary covered

herself with a clean white gown, surgical cap, and mask, and then walked to her

cubicle, one of four airtight rooms George had built by hand in the center of

the lab. The cubicles were small, only five feet in any direction, with doors

that sealed like a freezer’s to prevent contaminated air from getting inside.

Mary turned on the sterilizing system and watched from outside as her cubicle

filled with hot steam to kill anything that might damage the cells. When the

steam cleared, she stepped inside and sealed the door behind her, then hosed

the cubicle’s cement floor with water and scoured her workbench with alcohol.

The air inside was filtered and piped in though a vent on the ceiling. Once

she’d sterilized the cubicle, she lit a Bunsen burner and used its flame to

sterilize test tubes and a used scalpel blade, since the Gey lab couldn’t

afford new ones for each sample.

Only then did she pick up the pieces of

Henrietta’s cervix—forceps in one hand, scalpel in the other—and carefully

slice them into one-millimeter squares. She sucked each square into a pipette,

and dropped them one at a time onto chicken-blood clots she’d placed at the

bot-tom of dozens of test tubes. She covered each clot with several drops of

culture medium, plugged the tubes with rubber stoppers, and labeled each one as

she’d labeled most cultures they grew: using the first two letters of the

patient’s first and last names.

After writing “HeLa,” for Henrietta and

Lacks, in big black letters on the side of each tube, Mary carried them to the

incubator room that Gey had built just like he’d built everything else in the

lab: by hand and mostly from junkyard scraps, a skill he’d learned from a

lifetime of making do with nothing.

G

eorge Gey was born in 1899 and raised on

a Pittsburgh hillside overlooking a steel mill. Soot from the smokestacks made

his parents’ small white house look like it had been permanently charred by

fire and left the afternoon sky dark. His mother worked the garden and fed her

family from nothing but the food she raised. As a child, George dug a small

coal mine in the hill behind his parents’ house. He’d crawl through the damp

tunnel each morning with a pick, filling buckets for his family and neighbors so

they could keep their houses warm and stoves burning.

Gey paid his way through a biology degree

at the University of Pittsburgh by working as a carpenter and mason, and he

could make nearly anything for cheap or free. During his second year in medical

school, he rigged a microscope with a time-lapse motion picture cam-era to

capture live cells on film. It was a Frankensteinish mishmash of microscope

parts, glass, and 16-millimeter camera equipment from who knows where, plus

metal scraps, and old motors from Shapiro’s junkyard. He built it in a hole

he’d blasted in the foundation of Hop-kins, right below the morgue, its base

entirely underground and surrounded by a thick wall of cork to keep it from

jiggling when street cars passed. At night, a Lithuanian lab assistant slept

next to the camera on a cot, listening to its constant tick, making sure it

stayed stable through the night, waking every hour to refocus it. With that

camera, Gey and his mentor, Warren Lewis, filmed the growth of cells, a process

so slow—like the growth of a flower—the naked eye couldn’t see it. They played

the film at high speed so they could watch cell division on the screen in one

smooth motion, like a story unfolding in a flip book.

It took Gey

eight years to get through medical school because he kept dropping out to work

construction and save for another year’s tuition. After he graduated, he and

Margaret built their first lab in a janitor’s quarters at Hopkins—they spent

weeks wiring, painting, plumb-ing, building counters and cabinets, paying for

much of it with their own money.

Margaret was cautious and stable, the

backbone of the lab. George was an enormous, mischievous, grown-up kid. At work

he was dapper, but at home he lived in flannels, khakis, and suspenders. He

moved boulders around his yard on weekends, ate twelve ears of corn in one

sitting, and kept barrels full of oysters in his garage so he could shuck and

eat them any-time he wanted. He had the body of a retired linebacker, six feet

four inches tall and 215 pounds, his back unnaturally stiff and upright from

having his spine fused so he’d stop throw-ing it out. When his basement

wine-making factory exploded on a Sunday, sending a flood of sparkling burgundy

through his garage and into the street, Gey just washed the wine into a storm

drain, waving at his neighbors as they walked to church.

Gey was a reckless visionary—spontaneous, quick to start dozens of

projects at once, filling the lab and his basement at home with half-built

machines, partial discoveries, and piles of junkyard scraps only he could

imagine using in a lab. Whenever an idea hit him, he sat wherever he was—at his

desk, kitchen table, a bar, or behind the wheel of his car—gnawing on his

ever-present cigar and scribbling diagrams on napkins or the backs of torn-off

bottle la-bels. That’s how he came up with the roller-tube culturing technique,

his most important in-vention.

It involved

a large wooden roller drum, a cylinder with holes for special test tubes called

roller tubes. The drum, which Gey called the “whirligig,” turned like a cement

mixer twenty-four hours a day, rotating so slowly it made only two full turns

an hour, sometimes less. For Gey, the rotation was crucial: he believed that

culture medium needed to be in constant mo-tion, like blood and fluids in the

body, which flow around cells, transporting waste and nutri-ents.

When Mary

finally finished cutting the samples of Henrietta’s cervix and dropping them in

dozens of roller tubes, she walked into the incubator room, slid the tubes one

at a time into the drum, and turned it on. Then she watched as Gey’s machine

began churning slowly.

H

enrietta spent the next two days in the

hospital, recovering from her first radium treatment. Doctors examined her

inside and out, pressing on her stomach, inserting new catheters into her

bladder, fingers into her vagina and anus, needles into her veins. They wrote

notes in her chart saying, “30 year-old colored female lying quietly in no

evident distress,” and “Patient feels quite well tonight. Morale is good and

she is ready to go home.”

Before

Henrietta left the hospital, a doctor put her feet in the stirrups again and

removed the radium. He sent her home with instructions to call the clinic if

she had problems, and to come back for a second dose of radium in two and a

half weeks.

Meanwhile,

each morning after putting Henrietta’s cells in culture, Mary started her days

with the usual sterilization drill. She peered into the tubes, laughing to

herself and thinking, Nothing’s happening. Big surprise. Then, two days after

Henrietta went home from the hospit-al, Mary saw what looked like little rings

of fried egg white around the clots at the bottoms of each tube. The cells were

growing, but Mary didn’t think much of it—other cells had survived for a while

in the lab.

But Henrietta’s cells weren’t merely surviving, they were growing

with mythological intens-ity. By the next morning they’d doubled. Mary divided

the contents of each tube into two, giv-ing them room to grow, and within

twenty-four hours, they’d doubled again. Soon she was di-viding them into four

tubes, then six. Henrietta’s cells grew to fill as much space as Mary gave

them.

Still, Gey wasn’t ready to

celebrate. “The cells could die any minute,” he told Mary.

But they didn’t. They kept growing like

nothing anyone had seen, doubling their numbers every twenty-four hours,

stacking hundreds on top of hundreds, accumulating by the millions. “Spreading

like crabgrass!” Margaret said. They grew twenty times faster than Henrietta’s

nor-mal cells, which died only a few days after Mary put them in culture. As

long as they had food and warmth, Henrietta’s cancer cells seemed unstoppable.

Soon, George told a few of his closest

colleagues that he thought his lab might have grown the first immortal human

cells.

To which they replied, Can I have some? And George said yes. The

Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal life of

Henrietta Lacks

5

“Blackness Be Spreadin All

Inside”

H

enrietta knew nothing about her cells

growing in a laboratory. After leaving the hospital, she went back to life as

usual. She’d never loved the city, so almost every weekend she took the

children back to Clover, where she worked the tobacco fields and spent hours

churning butter on the steps of the home-house. Though radium often causes

relentless nausea, vomiting, weakness, and anemia, there’s no record of

Henrietta having any side effects, and no one re-members her complaining of

feeling sick.

When she wasn’t in Clover, Henrietta spent her time cooking for

Day, the children, and whichever cousins happened to be at her house. She made

her famous rice pudding and slow-cooked greens, chitlins, and the vats of

spaghetti with meatballs she kept going on the stove for whenever cousins

dropped by hungry. When Day wasn’t working the night shift, he and Henrietta

spent evenings at home, playing cards and listening to Bennie Smith play blues

guitar on the radio after the kids went to sleep. On the nights Day worked,

Henrietta and Sad-ie would wait until the door slammed, count to one hundred,

then jump out of bed, put on their dancing clothes, and sneak out of the house,

careful not to wake the children. Once they got outside, they’d wiggle their

hips and squeal, scampering down the street to the dance floors at Adams Bar

and Twin Pines.

“We used to really swing out heavy,”

Sadie told me years later. “We couldn’t help it. They played music that when

you heard it just put your soul into it. We’d two-step across that floor,

jiggle to some blues, then somebody maybe put a quarter in there and play a

slow music song, and Lord we’d just get out there and shake and turn around and

all like that!” She giggled like a young girl. “It was some beautiful times.”

And they were beautiful women.

Henrietta

had walnut eyes, straight white teeth, and full lips. She was a sturdy woman

with a square jaw, thick hips, short, muscular legs, and hands rough from

tobacco fields and kit-chens. She kept her nails short so bread dough wouldn’t

stick under them when she kneaded it, but she always painted them a deep red to

match her toenails.

Henrietta

spent hours taking care of those nails, touching up chips and brushing on new

coats of polish. She’d sit on her bed, polish in hand, hair high on her head in

curlers, wearing the silky slip she loved so much she hand-washed it each

night. She never wore pants, and rarely left the house without pulling on a

carefully pressed skirt and shirt, sliding her feet into her tiny, open-toed

pumps, and pinning her hair up with a little flip at the bottom, “just like it

was dancin toward her face,” Sadie always said.

“Hennie made

life come alive—bein with her was like bein with fun,” Sadie told me, staring

toward the ceiling as she talked. “Hennie just love peoples. She was a person

that could really make the good things come out of you.”

But there

was one person Henrietta couldn’t bring out any good in. Ethel, the wife of

their cousin Galen, had recently come to Turner Station from Clover, and she

hated Henrietta—her cousins always said it was jealousy.

“I guess I

can’t say’s I blame her,” Sadie said. “Galen, that husband of Ethel’s, he was

likin Hennie more than he like Ethel. Lord, he followed Hennie! Everywhere she

go, there go Ga-len—he tried to stay up at Hennie house all the time when Day

gone to work. Lord, Ethel was jealous—made her hateful to Hennie somethin

fierce. Always seemed like she wanted to hurt Hennie.” So Henrietta and Sadie

would giggle and slip out the back to another club anytime

Ethel showed up.

When they weren’t sneaking out,

Henrietta, Sadie, and Sadie’s sister Margaret spent evenings in Henrietta’s

living room, playing bingo, yelling, and laughing over a pot of pennies while

Henrietta’s babies—David Jr., Deborah, and Joe—played with the bingo chips on

the carpet beneath the table. Lawrence was nearly sixteen, already out having a

life of his own. But one child was missing: Henrietta’s oldest daughter, Elsie.

Before Henrietta got sick, she took Elsie

down to Clover every time she went. Elsie would sit on the stoop of the

home-house, staring into the hills and watching the sunrise as Henrietta worked

in the garden. She was beautiful, delicate and feminine like Henrietta, who

dressed her in homemade outfits with