Summary
Chapter 5. “Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside” … 1951
Henrietta went back to her life as usual after the treatments, taking her children back to Clover, Virginia, every weekend. She cooks for her children and relatives, plays cards with her husband, and go out dancing with her cousin Sadie. Henrietta was a beautiful young woman who dressed well and always kept her nails painted a rich red.
Henrietta is friendly and popular; the only person who dislikes her is Ethel, the wife of her cousin Galen. Sadie thinks this is because Galen was sexually and romantically interested in Henrietta, and Ethel hates her because of jealousy.
However, Henrietta’s oldest daughter Elsie is no longer in the picture. Despite receiving Henrietta’s love and attention, Elsie remains nonverbal and had become more impulsive and dangerous as she grew older. Doctors had told Henrietta to send Elsie to the Crownsville State Hospital, which broke her heart. She visited her daughter as often as possible, and took good care of her other children. The only time anyone could ever remember her getting mad at them was when her oldest child, Lawrence, would go diving off an old pier.
Henrietta’s radium treatments went well, but the second part of her illness was X-ray therapy, which meant visiting Hopkins every weekday for a month. Henrietta’s husband couldn’t drive her there every day, so she told her cousins Margaret and Sadie, who lived nearby. She informed them of her cancer when they were riding a Ferris Wheel, but insisted that her illness wasn’t serious.
Indeed, Henrietta’s cancer seemed to be cured. The ulcer on her cervix had vanished, and they couldn’t detect any tumors elsewhere. Henrietta dealt with heavy vaginal bleeding, but otherwise tolerated her treatments well. However, when Henrietta asks when she will be healthy enough to have more children and is told that she is now infertile from the treatments, she is horrified and her medical records indicate that she says she wouldn’t have gone through with this if she had been told that this was the case.
To compound matters, Henrietta is diagnosed with gonorrhea, likely attributable to Day’s “running around.” Henrietta becomes weaker and is no longer able to walk to her cousins’ home. She showed them her skin, and her skin is horribly burnt from her radiation treatments.
Chapter 6. “Lady’s on the Phone” … 1999
In the present day, Rebecca Skloot hears about the HeLa Cancer Control Symposium in Atlanta, at Morehouse School of Medicine. She excitedly calls the organizer, Roland Patillo, who had been one of Gey’s only Black students. He is skeptical of her motivations and interest in Henrietta and her family, especially since she is white. He asks her what she knows about African-Americans and science, and she tells him about the Tuskegee study, in which researchers from the US Public Service of Health allowed African-American men to die slow, preventable deaths from syphilis in order to study the course of the disease. Rebecca also describes the Mississippi Appendectomies, in which young black women received hysterectomies in order to prevent them from having children. She also relays the lack of funding for sickle-cell anemia.
She seems to have passed Roland's first test. Roland says it’s ironic that Rebecca called just then, because he’d just typed the name “Henrietta Lacks” into his computer screen. He says he isn’t ready to put her in touch with Henrietta’s family just yet, but tells her to call back later. After three days of interviews, he gives her Deborah’s phone number, but tells her not to be aggressive or clinical or superior, and above all to have patience.
Rebecca calls Deborah, and excitedly exclaims that she’s been writing a book about her mother for years. Unfortunately, Deborah is nearly deaf and has an extremely hard time understanding her. Rebecca explains that she wants to write a book about Deborah’s mother, and Deborah is delighted about this idea. Deborah begins to relate seventy years of Lacks family history at breakneck speed, puzzling over the gap in information left in her life. She doesn’t know where her mother’s clothes are, or her medical records. She doesn’t know what her mother was like or if she breastfed her. Deborah interrupts the call when someone walks in the door and tells her that she has mail, but insists that Rebecca call back on Monday.
However, when Rebecca calls back on Monday, it is almost as though she’s speaking to a different person. Deborah says she can’t tell Rebecca anything until she speaks to “the men” – Deborah’s father, her oldest brother Lawrence, and her younger brother David Jr.
Rebecca calls these numbers repeatedly to no avail, until a young boy picks up the phone. When Rebecca introduces herself, the boy yells for his pop, but another woman picks up the phone before finally handing it to Day. Day, slurring his words, asks if Rebecca has his wife’s cells and if she knows she’s calling him. Rebecca confusedly answers yes, and Day snaps that his old lady’s cells should talk to Rebecca and she should leave him alone.
Chapter 7. The Death and Life of Cell Culture … 1951
Shortly after Henrietta begins radiation therapy, George Gey appears on a local television network to explain his research on cancer. He explains that they still don't know why some cells become cancerous. He shows a diagram of one cell exploding into five cancer cells.
He holds up a bottle and says that he has grown massive quantities of cancer cells in this bottle. He says that his lab hopes to use these cells to treat and even cure cancer. The bottle is likely filled with Henrietta's cells.
Gey has started shipping Henrietta's cells to anyone who asks for them. This can be a struggle sometimes, as it is not possible to ship live cells in the mail. Sometimes he sends them with stewards or pilots who keep them tucked close to their bodies to keep them alive. Other times he packs them in holes carved into blocks of ice. Gey ships HeLa cells all over the world, to Texas, India, New York, Amsterdam, and many others.
The HeLa line is useful because they allow scientists to experiment on human tissue without harming a living human. They can subject HeLa cells to radiation, drugs, and other harsh agents.
Despite the spurts in research generated by this new cell line, there were no major news stories on it. This was probably because cell culture had gotten a bad name due to the antics of an early 20th-century French surgeon named Alexis Carrel. Carrel had created a technique for performing coronary bypass surgeries, and he hoped one day to grow organs in a lab for the purposes of transplantation. He was able to keep alive a chicken heart, which the press interpreted as the first step towards immortality. Scientists were certain that cell culture could unlock major medical mysteries.
However, Carrel was also a eugenicist, and he saw organ transplant as a way to benefit the white race, which he believed was superior. He supported immortality for "racially superior" people and death for everyone else. He also believed in telepathy and clairvoyance. He gave lectures in his apartment, where he described his dream of moving to South America and becoming a dictator. Fellow researchers derided him as a fake, but mainstream America loved his ideas. One of his books sold more than two million copies.
Through all of this, the chicken heart cells that Carrell had created stayed alive. His assistants lined up every year to sing happy birthday to the cells. The chicken heart took on its own mythology in popular culture as well - a radio horror show dedicated an episode to a massive chicken heart that consumed and destroyed everything in its path.
After Carrel's death, however, another scientist named Hayflick discovered that he had faked his famed chicken heart. This fakery, along with the failure of cell culture to produce any real breakthroughs and its association with eugenicists and Nazis, had tarnished the field by the time of the Geys.
Chapter 8. “A Miserable Specimen” … 1951
Henrietta tells her doctors that she thinks her cancer is spreading all through her, but her medical records indicate they saw no evidence of recurrence and they assure her that she is fine.
Most patients don't question their doctors, and certainly not African-American patients. It's not clear if Henrietta's treatment would have differed if she had been white. However, only a few weeks later, her medical records indicate that Henrietta was in agonizing pain and unable to urinate. X-rays show a massive inoperable tumor in her pelvis. Her case is now considered terminal.
Henrietta tells the rest of her family about her illness. Her doctors continue to give her radiation, but this is only to relieve her pain rather than to cure her disease. New tumors sprout inside her body almost everyday. Henrietta's relatives don't know that she is terminal; they think her doctors will cure her.
Finally, Henrietta is checked into the hospital as an inpatient, so that she doesn't have to travel. Her husband and children come to visit her, and Henrietta cries when they leave. The nurses say that Day shouldn't bring the children to visit anymore because it upsets Henrietta, so he takes them to a little park outside Henrietta's window and let them play where their mother can see them.
Henrietta's body is riddled with tumors, and she is in constant pain. However, one anecdote offers a bit of hope in this miserable time. Laure Aurelian, a microbiologist and colleague of George Gey, says that Gey came to visit Henrietta in the hospital. She also says that Gey told Henrietta that her cells would make her immortal and help save the lives of countless people. Henrietta smiled at that.
Chapter 9. Turner Station … 1999
After Rebecca's first conversation with Day, she drives to Baltimore to meet his soon, David "Sonny" Lacks Jr. She sits at the hotel and tries to page Sonny, but receives no response. She looks out the window at a tall tower with silver letters spelling out BROMOSELTZER. After this, she looks through all the Lackses in the phonebook.
She takes out her yellowed copy of the 1976 Rolling Stones interview about the Lacks family. She is shocked when the author of the interview describes sitting in a hotel room in Baltimore, flipping through all the Lackses in the phonebook and gazing out at a tall tower with silver letters spelling BROMOSELTZER.
Chilled by this eerie coincidence, Rebecca starts calling all the Lackses listed in the phone book - however, none of them answer her. She finds an old article listing Henrietta's address in Turner Station, so she decides to go there.
Turner station is a rough neighborhood replete with boarded-up storefronts. The neighborhood has declined steadily since Henrietta's day, especially since the steel mill closed.
Rebecca drives all around Turner Station, attracting a great deal of attention and curiosity in this majority-Black neighborhood. When she stops in front of a church, a well-dressed man asks her if she needs help. She mentions a woman named Courtney Speed, who owns a local grocery and led efforts to create a Henrietta Lacks museum. The man happily offers to take her there.
At Speed's grocery, Rebecca waits with a group of young men. Though there are fifteen of them, they all claim to be Courtney's sons. One of them tells a humorous story about a robber who threatened Courtney, saying he was going to jump across the counter and get him. Courtney told him to try it, but the man got scared and left.
Courtney Speed herself appears, a beautiful older woman with soft brown eyes. She welcomes Rebecca warmly. Courtney's shop is filled with hand-written signs advertising community events. She explains that she has dozens of "spiritual sons," whom she treats no differently than her six biological sons. She gives candy to children who are able to do addition and subtraction correctly.
She chats with Rebecca happily until Rebecca mentions that she wants to learn more about Henrietta Lacks. Courtney turns serious and asks if Mr. Cofield sent her. Rebecca says no; Courtney asks if she's talked to Henrietta's family yet. Courtney explains she can't tell Rebecca anything until she gets the support of the family.
Relenting, Courtney says Rebecca has kind eyes and takes her to the local library, where Courtney asks for a tape. She then takes Rebecca back to a small salon she owns and plays the tape: it's a BBC documentary about the HeLa cell line called The Way of All Flesh, which Rebecca had been trying to find for months. It shows Henrietta's childhood home in Clover, and the family cemetery where Henrietta's body lays in an unmarked grave. Rebecca decides that she'll go to Clover and talk to Henrietta's cousins.
That night, Sonny calls back and says he's decided not to meet with Rebecca, but he won't explain why. This increases Rebecca's determination to meet their cousins in Clover.
Analysis
In this section, readers find the first hints of the themes of religion and the supernatural. Deborah will later insist that Henrietta's spirit guided Rebecca Skloot to write her book, and the fact that Roland Patillo has just written Henrietta's name when Rebecca calls seems to be more evidence of that. Additionally, the eerie coincidence Rebecca that is staying in perhaps the exact same room and doing the exact same things as another writer nearly twenty-five years ago seems evidence of wider forces guiding her research. Like this writer, she will be one of the very few people to come to know the Lacks family intimately.
The inclusion of Rebecca as a character in her own work of non-fiction is somewhat surprising, but she may have chosen to include this unusual literary element because her own experiences of making contact with members of the Lacks family tells the reader a great deal about their experiences. As a white reporter, she is meant with deep suspicion and mistrust from the family, and must begin a long quest to earn their trust and prove that she wants to elevate their voices, not exploit them.
The inclusion of Alexis Carrell, the originator of the chicken heart experiment and a proud eugenicist, may seem to divert from the wider story about Henrietta Lacks. However, Carrell's fame is evidence that even prominent scientists were not immune to deeply unscientific thinking (Carrell believed in telepathy as well as in the inferiority of certain races). Though science is dedicated to the testing of hypothesis and the rejection of ideas that cannot be conclusively proven, individual scientists do not always adhere perfectly to these ideas.
This section also introduces readers to the historical discrimination against African-Americans in modern medicine, including the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study and the Mississippi Appendectomies. In the Tuskegee study, researchers recruited Black men who were infected with syphilis. However, they did not provide treatment to these men or even tell them what disease they had and how it could be transmitted. They took regular biological samples from the men, but even when an effective and safe treatment for syphilis had been developed, did not disclose this information to the research subjects. The purpose of the study was to observe the progression of syphilis. Eventually, a large number of the men died, and an even larger number infected their wives and children, causing numerous health problems. When the details of the study came to light, the enormous outcry led to the establishment of more robust medical ethics guidelines and review boards. (for more information, see the Books Citation Links in this note).
