The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (41 page)

“You’re lying!” she yelled again. She jumped off the bed and stood over me, pointing a finger in my face. “If you’re not lying, why did you smile?”

She started frantically stuffing papers into her canvas bags as I tried to explain myself and talk her down. Suddenly she threw the bag on the bed and rushed toward me. Her hand hit my chest hard as she slammed me against the wall, knocking me breathless, my head smacking the plaster.

“Who you working for?” she snapped. “John Hopkin?”

“What? No!” I yelled, gasping for breath. “You know I work for myself.”

“Who sent you? Who’s paying you?” she yelled, her hand still holding me against the wall. “Who paid for this room?”

“We’ve been through this!” I said. “Remember? Credit cards? Student loans?”

Then, for the first time since we met, I lost my patience with Deborah. I jerked free of her grip and told her to get the fuck off me and chill the fuck out. She stood inches from me, staring wild-eyed again
for what felt like minutes. Then, suddenly, she grinned and reached up to smooth my hair, saying, “I never seen you mad before. I was starting to wonder if you was even human cause you never cuss in front of me.”

Then, perhaps as an explanation for what just happened, she finally told me about Cofield.

“He was a good pretender,” she said. “I told him I would walk through fire alive before I would let him take my mother medical records. I don’t want nobody else to have them. Everybody in the world got her cells, only thing we got of our mother is just them records and her Bible. That’s why I get so upset about Cofield. He was trying to take one of the only things I really got from my mother.”

She pointed at my laptop on the bed and said, “I don’t want you typin every word of it into your computer either. You type what you need for the book, but not everything. I want people in our family to be the only ones who have all them records.”

After I promised I wouldn’t copy all the records, Deborah said she was going to bed again, but for the next several hours, she knocked on my door every fifteen or twenty minutes. The first time she reeked of peaches and said, “I just had to go to my car for my lotion so I thought I’d say hi.” Each time it was something else: “I forgot my nail file in the car!” …
“X-Files
is on!” … “I’m suddenly thinking about pancakes!” Each time she knocked, I opened my door wide so she could see the room and the medical records looking just as they had when she left.

The last time she knocked, she stormed past me into the bathroom and leaned over the sink, her face close to the mirror. “Am I broken out?” she yelled. I walked into the bathroom, where she stood pointing to a quarter-sized welt on her forehead. It looked like a hive.

She turned and pulled her shirt down so I could see her neck and back, which were covered in red welts.

“I’ll put some cream on it,” she said. “I should probably take my sleeping pill.” She went back to her room and a moment later the volume on her TV went up. Screaming and crying and gunfire poured
out of the television all night, but I didn’t see her again until six o’clock in the morning—one hour after I’d gone to sleep—when she knocked on my door yelling, “Free continental breakfast!”

My eyes were red and swollen with dark circles under them, and I was still wearing my clothes from the day before. Deborah looked at me and laughed.

“We’re a mess!” she said, pointing to the hives now covering her face. “Lord, I was so anxious last night. I couldn’t do anything with myself so I painted my fingernails.” She held out her hands for me to see. “I did a
horrible
job!” she said, laughing. “I think I did it after I took my pill.”

Her nails and much of the skin around them were bright fire-engine red. “From a distance it looks okay,” she said. “But I’d get fired if I was still doin nails for a living.”

We walked down to the lobby for our free breakfast. As Deborah wrapped a handful of mini-muffins in a napkin for later, she looked up at me and said, “We’re okay, Boo.”

I nodded and said I knew. But at that point I wasn’t sure of anything.

B
y later that day, the hives had spread across Deborah’s back, her cheeks were splotchy and red, and long welts filled the spaces beneath each eye. Both lids were swollen and shining like she’d covered them in blood-red shadow. I asked again and again if she was okay and said maybe we should stop somewhere so she could see a doctor. But she just laughed.

“This happens all the time,” she said. “I’m fine. I just need some Benadryl.” She bought a bottle that she kept in her purse and swigged from all day. By noon, about a third of it was gone.

When we got to Clover, we walked along the river, down Main Street, and through Henrietta’s tobacco field. And we visited the home-house, where Deborah said, “I want you to take a picture of me here with my sister.”

She stood in front of the house, turned both photos of Elsie so they faced me, and held them to her chest. She had me take pictures of her and Elsie on the stump of what used to be Henrietta’s favorite oak tree and in front of Henrietta’s mother’s tombstone. Then she knelt on the ground, next to the sunken strips of earth where she imagined
her mother and sister were buried. “Take one of me and my sister by her and my mother grave,” she said. “It’ll be the only picture in the world with the three of us almost together.”

Finally we ended up at Henrietta’s sister Gladys’s house, a small yellow cabin with rocking chairs on its porch. Inside we found Gladys sitting in her dark wood-paneled living room. It was warm out, sweatshirt weather, but Gladys had her double-wide black wood-stove burning so hot, she sat beside it wiping sweat from her forehead with tissue. Her hands and feet were gnarled from arthritis, her back so bent her chest nearly touched her knees unless she propped herself up with an elbow. She wore no underwear, only a thin nightgown that had ridden above her waist from hours in her wheelchair.

She tried to straighten her gown to cover herself when we walked in, but her hands couldn’t grasp it. Deborah pulled it down for her, saying, “Where everybody at?”

Gladys said nothing. In the next room, her husband moaned from a hospital bed, just days from death.

“Oh right,” Deborah said, “they at work ain’t they?”

Gladys said nothing, so Deborah raised her voice loud to make sure Gladys could hear: “I got a Internet!” she yelled. “I’m going to get a web page up about my mother and hopefully be getting some donations and funding so I can come back down here put a monument up on her grave and turn that old home-house into a museum that will remind people of my mother down here!”

“What you put in there?” Gladys asked, like Deborah was crazy.

“Cells,” Deborah said. “Cells so people can see her multiply.”

She thought for a moment. “And a great big picture of her, and maybe one of them wax statues. Plus some of them old clothes and that shoe in the house. All that stuff mean a whole lot.”

Suddenly the front door opened and Gladys’s son Gary came inside yelling, “Hey Cuz!” Gary was fifty, with that smooth Lacks skin, a thin mustache and soul patch, and a gap between his front teeth that the girls loved. He wore a red and blue short-sleeved rugby shirt that matched his blue and red jeans and sneakers.

Deborah squealed, threw her arms around Gary’s neck, and pulled the photo of Elsie from her pocket. “Look what we got from Crowns ville! It’s my sister!” Gary stopped smiling and reached for the picture.

“That’s a bad shot,” Deborah said. “She’s crying cause it’s cold.”

“How about showing him that picture of her on the porch when she was a kid?” I said. “That’s a good one.” Gary looked at me like,
What the hell is going on here?

“That picture’s got her a little upset,” I said.

“I understand why,” he whispered.

“Plus she just saw her mother’s cells for the first time,” I told him.

Gary nodded. Over the years, he and I had spent many hours talking; he understood Deborah and what she’d been through more than anyone else in her family.

Deborah pointed to the hives on her face. “I’m having a reaction, swellin up and breakin out. I’m crying and happy at the same time.” She started pacing back and forth, her face shining with sweat as the woodstove clanged and seemed to suck most of the oxygen from the room. “All this stuff I’m learning,” she said, “it make me realize that I
did
have a mother, and all the tragedy she went through. It hurts but I wanna know more, just like I wanna know about my sister. It make me feel closer to them, but I do miss them. I wish they were here.”

Keeping his eyes on Deborah, Gary walked across the room, sat in an oversized recliner, and motioned for us to join him. But Deborah didn’t sit. She paced back and forth across the linoleum floor, picking the red polish off her nails and talking an incoherent stream about a murder she’d heard about on the news and the traffic in Atlanta. Gary’s eyes followed her from one side of the room to the other, intense and unblinking.

“Cuz,” he said finally. “Please sit.”

Deborah raced over to a rocking chair not far from Gary, threw herself into it, and started rocking violently, thrusting her upper body back and forth and kicking her feet like she was trying to flip the chair over.

“You wouldn’t believe what we been learning!” she said. “They injected my mother’s cells with all kinds of, uh, poisons and stuff to test if they’d kill people.”

“Dale,” Gary said, “do something for yourself.”

“Yeah, I’m tryin,” she said. “You know they shot her cells into murderers in prison?”

“I mean to relax,” Gary said. “Do something to
relax
yourself.”

“I can’t help it,” Deborah said, waving him off with her hand. “I worry all the time.”

“Like the Bible said,” Gary whispered, “man brought nothing into this world and he’ll carry nothing out. Sometime we care about stuff too much. We worry when there’s nothing to worry about.”

In a moment of clarity, Deborah nodded, saying, “And we bring our own body down by doing it.”

“You don’t seem so good right now, Cuz. Make some time for yourself,” Gary said. “When I get in my car and drive, don’t have to be going nowhere, circles is fine by me. Just got to have time to relax with the road under me. Everybody needs something like that.”

“If I ever get any money,” Deborah said, “I’ll get an RV where I can go back and forth and I don’t have to be in the same place ever. Can’t nobody bother you when you’re movin.”

She stood up and started pacing again.

“Only time I really relax is when I’m drivin down here,” she said. “But this time I just be drivin along the whole time thinking about what happened to my sister and my mother.”

The moment Deborah said the words
sister
and
mother
, her face got redder and she started to panic. “You know they shot my mother cells into space and blew her up with nuclear bombs? They even did that thing … what do you call it … um …
cloning! …
that’s right, they did that cloning on her.”

Gary and I shot each other a nervous glance and both started talking at once, scrambling to bring her back from wherever she was going.

“There are no clones,” I said. “Remember?”

“You don’t have to be fearful,” Gary said. “The word of God said if we honor our father and mother, we can live long upon the earth, and you doing that, you honoring your mother.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “I love this scripture that’s in Psalms,” he told her. “It says even if our father and our mother fall sick, the Lord take care of you. Even if you lose everybody like your mother and your sister, God’s love will never turn His back on you.”

But Deborah didn’t hear any of it.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” she said. “You know they mixed her with mice to make a human-mouse? They say she’s not even human anymore!” She laughed a loud, manic laugh and ran to the window. “Holy cuss!” she yelled, “is it raining out there?”

“Much needed rain,” Gary whispered, rocking back and forth.

Deborah grabbed the blue ribbon keychain that always hung around her neck. It said WWJD. “What is this,” she said, “a radio station? I never heard of WWJD.” She started yanking it off her neck.

“Come on, Cuz, it means ‘What Would Jesus Do,’” Gary said. “You know that.”

Deborah stopped fussing with the keys and collapsed back into the chair. “Can you believe they even gave her that AID virus and injected her into monkeys?” She stared at the floor, rocking violently, her chest rising and falling fast with each breath.

Gary sat, calmly rocking in his chair, watching Deborah’s every move, like a doctor studying a patient. “Don’t make yourself sick over something you can’t do nothin about,” Gary whispered to Deborah as she rubbed the welts on her eyes. “It’s not worth it… you got to let the Lord handle it.” His eyes drooped closed as he mumbled, “What is Deborah doing for Deborah?”

When she didn’t answer he looked at me and said, “I was talking to God just now—he’s trying to make me say stuff, trying to make me move.” Deborah called Gary The Disciple because he had a habit of channeling the Lord in the middle of a conversation. It started about twenty years earlier, when he was thirty—one minute he was busy
with booze and women, the next he’d had several heart attacks and bypasses, and he woke up preaching.