The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (42 page)

“I been tryin to keep Him out of this because we’ve got company,” he said, flashing me a bashful grin. “But sometimes He just won’t let me keep Him out.”

Gary’s brown eyes went vacant, unfocused, as he stood slowly from his chair, spread his arms wide, and reached toward Deborah, who struggled to her feet, hobbled toward him, and wrapped her arms around his waist. The moment she touched him, his upper body seized like he’d been electrocuted. His arms thrust closed, hands clasping each side of Deborah’s head, palms to her jaw, fingers spread from the back of her skull to the bridge of her nose. Then he started shaking. He squeezed Deborah’s face to his chest as her shoulders heaved in silent sobs, and tears rolled from Gary’s eyes.

As they rocked back and forth, Gary tipped his head to the sky, and began singing in a hauntingly beautiful baritone.

“Welcome, into this place. … Welcome, into this broken vessel.”
His singing, quiet at first, grew louder with each word until it filled the house and poured into the tobacco fields.
“You desire to abide in the praises of your people, so I lift my hand, and I lift my heart, and I offer up this praise unto ya, Lord.”

“You’re welcome into this broken vessel, Lord,” he whispered, squeezing Deborah’s head in his palms. His eyes shot open and closed, and he began to preach, sweat pouring from his face.

“That you said in your word Lord, that the BELIEVER would lay hands on the sick, and that they shall RECOVER!” His voice rose and fell, from a whisper to a yell and back. “I REALIZE God that TONIGHT there’s just
some things
doctors CANNOT DO!”

“Amen Lord,” Deborah mumbled, face pressed to his chest, voice muffled.

“We thank ya tonight,” Gary whispered. “Because we need your help with them CELLS, Lord … we need your help liftin the BURDEN of them cells from this woman! Lift this burden, Lord, take it away, we don’t NEED it!”

Deborah started convulsing in Gary’s arms, weeping and whispering, “Thank ya, Lord … Thank ya, Lord.” Gary squeezed his eyes tight, and yelled along with her, “THANK YOU, LORD! THANK YOU FOR TONIGHT!” Their voices grew louder together, until Gary stopped, tears and sweat pouring from his face onto Deborah as she screamed, “Thank you Jesus!” and let loose with a chorus of hallelujahs and praise Gods. Gary swayed back and forth, breaking into song again, his voice deep and old, as if coming from the generations who worked his tobacco fields before him:
“I know the Lord been good, yoooooooooooh … I know the Lord been good.”

“Real good,” Deborah whispered.

“He’s put food on my table …”
Gary dropped his voice, humming as Deborah spoke: “Show me which way to go, Lord,” she said. “Show me where you want me to go with these cells, Lord,
please
. I’ll do anything you want me to do, Lord, just help me with this BURDEN. I can’t do it alone—I thought I could. But I can’t TAKE it, Lord.”

Mmmmmmm mmmmmmm mmmmmmm
, Gary hummed.

“Thank you Lord for giving me this information about my mother and my sister, but please HELP ME, cause I know I can’t handle this burden by myself. Take them CELLS from me, Lord, take that BURDEN. Get it off and LEAVE it there! I can’t carry it no more, Lord. You wanted me to give it to you and I just didn’t want to, but you can have it now, Lord. You can HAVE IT! Hallelujah, amen.”

For the first time since Gary stood from his chair, he looked straight at me.

I’d been watching all this from a recliner a few feet away, dumbfounded, terrified to move or make noise, frantically scribbling notes. In any other circumstance I might have thought the whole thing was crazy. But what was happening between Gary and Deborah at that moment was the furthest thing from crazy I’d seen all day. As I watched, all I could think was,
Oh my god… I did this to her
.

Gary stared into my eyes as he hugged Deborah’s sobbing body and whispered to her, “You’re not alone.”

Looking at me, Gary said, “She can’t handle the burden of these
cells no more, Lord! She can’t do it!” Then he raised his arms above Deborah’s head and yelled, “LORD, I KNOW you sent Miss Rebecca to help LIFT THE BURDEN of them CELLS!” He thrust his arms toward me, hands pointed at either side of my head. “GIVE THEM TO HER!” he yelled. “LET HER CARRY THEM.”

I sat frozen, staring at Gary, thinking,
Wait a minute, that wasn’t supposed to happen!

Deborah stepped away from Gary’s embrace, shaking her head, wiping her eyes, and yelling, “Phew!” They both laughed. “Thanks, Cuz,” she said, “I feel so light!”

“Some things you got to release,” Gary said. “The more you hold them in, the worse you get. When you release them, they got to go somewhere else. The Bible says He can carry all that burden.”

She reached up and touched his face. “You always know what I need. You know how to take care of me.”

“It’s not so much that I see it, but He sees it,” Gary said, smiling. “I didn’t know all that was coming out my mouth. That was the Lord talking to you.”

“Well, hallelujah,” Deborah said, giggling. “I’m comin back tomorrow for some more of this! Amen!”

It had been drizzling outside for hours, but suddenly rain pounded the tin roof and turned to hail so loud that it sounded like applause. The three of us walked to the front door to look.

“It’s the Lord saying he heard us,” Gary said, smiling. “He got the faucet turned on high to clean you out, Cuz!”

“Praise the Lord!” Deborah yelled.

Gary hugged Deborah good-bye, then hugged me. Deborah grabbed her long black raincoat, opened it wide, and raised it above her like an umbrella, nodding for me to come under with her. She let the coat fall onto both of our heads, then put her arm tight around my shoulders.

“You ready for some soul cleansing?” she yelled, opening the door.

T
he next morning Deborah’s hives had gone down some, but her eyes were still swollen, so she decided she needed to go home to see her doctor. I stayed behind in Clover because I wanted to talk to Gary about the night before. When I walked into his living room he was standing on a plastic folding chair in a bright turquoise shirt, changing a lightbulb.

“I can’t get that beautiful song out of my head,” I told him. “I’ve been singing it all morning.” Then I hummed a few bars:
Welcome into this place … welcome into this broken vessel
.

Gary jumped off the chair, laughing and raising his eyebrows at me.

“Now why do you think that’s stuck in your head?” he asked. “I know you don’t like to think about it, but that’s the Lord telling you something.”

He said it was a hymn, then ran from the living room and came back carrying a soft blue Bible with large gold lettering across its front. “I want you to have this,” he told me, tapping the cover with his finger. “He died for us that we might have the right to eternal life.
A lot of people don’t believe that. But you
can
have eternal life. Just look at Henrietta.”

“You believe Henrietta is in those cells?”

He smiled and looked down his nose at me like,
silly child
. “Those cells
are
Henrietta,” he said, taking back the Bible and opening it to the book of Romans. “Read that,” he said, pointing to a chunk of text. I started reading to myself and he covered the Bible with his hand. “Out loud,” he said.

So I read aloud from the Bible, for the first time in my life: “Those who believe in me will live, even though they die; and those who live and believe in me will never die.”

Gary flipped to another passage for me to read: “Someone will ask, ‘How can the dead be raised to life? What kind of body will they have?’ You fool! When you plant a seed in the ground, it does not sprout to life unless it dies. And what you plant is a bare seed … not the full-bodied plant that will later grow up. God provides that seed with the body he wishes; he gives each seed its own proper body.”

“Henrietta was chosen,” Gary whispered. “And when the Lord chooses an angel to do his work, you never know what they going to come back looking like.”

Gary pointed at another passage and told me to keep reading. “There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, the beauty that belongs to heavenly bodies is different from the beauty that belongs to earthly bodies.”

When Christoph projected Henrietta’s cells on the monitor in his lab a few days earlier, Deborah said, “They’re beautiful.” She was right. Beautiful and otherworldly—glowing green and moving like water, calm and ethereal, looking precisely like heavenly bodies might look. They could even float through the air.

I kept reading: “This is how it will be when the dead are raised to life. When the body is buried, it is mortal; when raised, it will be immortal. There is, of course, a physical body, so there has to be a spiritual body.”

“HeLa?” I asked Gary. “You’re saying HeLa is her spiritual body?”

Gary smiled and nodded.

In that moment, reading those passages, I understood completely how some of the Lackses could believe, without doubt, that Henrietta had been chosen by the Lord to become an immortal being. If you believe the Bible is the literal truth, the immortality of Henrietta’s cells makes perfect sense.
Of course
they were growing and surviving decades after her death,
of course
they floated through the air, and
of course
they’d led to cures for diseases and been launched into space. Angels are like that. The Bible tells us so.

For Deborah and her family—and surely many others in the world—that answer was so much more concrete than the explanation offered by science: that the immortality of Henrietta’s cells had something to do with her telomeres and how HPV interacted with her DNA. The idea that God chose Henrietta as an angel who would be re born as immortal cells made a lot more sense to them than the explanation Deborah had read years earlier in Victor McKusick’s genetics book, with its clinical talk of HeLa’s “atypical histology” and “unusually malignant behavior.” It used phrases like “the tumor’s singularity” and called the cells “a reservoir of morphologic, biochemical, and other information.”

Jesus told his followers, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never die.” Plain, simple, to the point.

“You better be careful,” Gary told me. “Pretty soon you’re gonna find yourself converted.”

“I doubt it,” I told him, and we both laughed.

He slid the Bible from my hands and flipped to another passage, then handed it back, pointing at one sentence: “Why do you who are here find it impossible to believe that God raises the dead?”

“You catch my drift?” he said, smiling a mischievous grin.

I nodded, and Gary closed the Bible in my hands.

W
hen Deborah got to her doctor’s office, her blood pressure and blood sugar were so high, her doctor was amazed she hadn’t had a stroke or heart attack while we were in Clover. With levels like hers, he said, she could still have one any minute. Suddenly her strange behavior on the trip seemed less strange. Confusion, panic, and incoherent speech are all symptoms of extremely high blood pressure and blood sugar, which can lead to heart attack and stroke. So is redness and swelling, which could explain why her red welts didn’t go away despite all the Benadryl she drank.

The doctor told her she needed to avoid stress completely, so we decided she should stop coming on research trips with me. But she insisted I call her from the road to tell her what she was missing. For the next several months, as I continued my research, I told Deborah only the good things I found: stories about Henrietta dancing and watching the boys play baseball at Cliff’s house, details about her family history from county records and wills.

But we both knew the break from HeLa wouldn’t last—Deborah was still scheduled to give a talk at the National Foundation for
Cancer Research conference in honor of Henrietta. She was determined to do it, even though she was terrified by the idea of getting up on stage, so she started spending her days planning her speech.