The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (36 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     
Z
akariyya’s apartment was a small studio with a sliver of a kitchen where Deborah and the boys had been watching us from a window. Zakariyya’s belongings could have fit into the back of a pickup truck: a small Formica table, two wooden chairs, a full-sized mattress with no frame, a clear plastic bed skirt, and a set of navy sheets. No blankets, no pillows. Across from his bed sat a small television with a VCR balanced on top.

Zakariyya’s walls were bare except for a row of photocopied pictures. The one of Henrietta with her hands on her hips hung next to the only other known picture of her: in it, she stands with Day in a studio sometime in the forties, their backs board-straight, eyes wide and staring ahead, mouths frozen in awkward non-smiles. Someone had retouched the photo and painted Henrietta’s face an unnatural yellow. Beside it was a breathtaking picture of his sister Elsie, standing in front of a white porch railing next to a basket of dried flowers. She’s about six years old, in a plaid jumper dress, white T-shirt, bobby socks and shoes, her hair loose from its braids, right hand gripping something against her chest. Her mouth hangs slightly open, brow creased and worried, both eyes looking to the far right of the frame, where Deborah imagines her mother was standing.

Zakariyya pointed to several diplomas hanging near the photos, for welding, refrigeration, diesel. “I got so many damn diplomas,” he said, “but jobs pass me by because of my criminal record and everything, so I still got all kind of troubles.” Zakariyya had been in and out of trouble with the law since he got out of jail, with various charges for assault and drunk and disorderly conduct.

“I think them cells is why I’m so mean,” he said. “I had to start fightin before I was even a person. That’s the only way I figure I kept them cancer cells from growin all over me while I was inside my mother. I started fightin when I was just a baby in her womb, and I never known nothin different.”

Deborah thinks it was more than that. “That evil woman Ethel taught him hate,” she said. “Beat every drop of it into his little body—put the hate of a murderer into him.”

Zakariyya snorted when he heard Ethel’s name. “Livin with that abusive crazy woman was worse than livin in prison!” he yelled, his eyes narrowing to slits. “It’s hard to talk about what she did to me. When I get to thinkin about them stories, make me want to kill her, and my father. Cause of him I don’t know where my mother buried. When that fool die, I don’t wanna know where he buried neither. He need to get to a hospital? Let him catch a cab! Same with the rest of the so-called family who buried her. I don’t never wanna see them niggers no more.”

Deborah cringed. “See,” she said, looking at me. “Everybody else never let him talk because he speak things the way he want to. I say let him talk, even if we be upset by what he’s sayin. He’s mad, gotta get it out, otherwise he gonna keep on keeping it, and it’s gonna blow him right on up.”

“I’m sorry,” Zakariyya said. “Maybe her cells have done good for some people, but I woulda rather had my mother. If she hadn’t been sacrificed, I mighta growed up to be a lot better person than I am now.”

Deborah stood from the bed where she’d been sitting with her grandsons’ heads on her lap. She walked over to Zakariyya and put her arm around his waist. “Come on walk us out to the car,” she said. “I got something I want to give you.”

Outside, Deborah threw open the back of her jeep and rummaged through blankets, clothes, and papers until she turned around holding the photo of Henrietta’s chromosomes that Christoph Lengauer had given her. She smoothed her fingers across the glass, then handed it to Zakariyya.

“These supposed to be her cells?” he asked.

Deborah nodded. “See where it stained bright colors? That’s where all her DNA at.”

Zakariyya raised the picture to eye level and stared in silence. Deborah rubbed her hand on his back and whispered, “I think if anybody deserve that, it’s you, Zakariyya.”

Zakariyya turned the picture to see it from every angle. “You want me to have this?” he said finally.

“Yeah, like you to have that, put it on your wall,” Deborah said.

Zakariyya’s eyes filled with tears. For a moment the dark circles seemed to vanish, and his body relaxed.

“Yeah,” he said, in a soft voice unlike anything we’d heard that day. He put his arm on Deborah’s shoulder. “Hey, thanks.”

Deborah wrapped her arms as far around his waist as she could reach, and squeezed. “The doctor who gave me that said he been working with our mother for his whole career and he never knew anything about where they came from. He said he was sorry.”

Zakariyya looked at me. “What’s his name?”

I told him, then said, “He wants to meet you and show you the cells.”

Zakariyya nodded, his arm still around Deborah’s shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “That sounds good. Let’s go for it.” Then he walked slowly back to his building, holding the picture in front of him at eye level, seeing nothing ahead but the DNA in his mother’s cells.

31
Hela, Goddess of Death

T
he day after I got home from our marathon visit, a man Deborah didn’t know called her asking if she’d ride on a HeLa float in a black rodeo. He told her to be careful of people looking to find out where Henrietta’s grave was because they might want to steal her bones, since her body was so valuable to science. Deborah told the man she’d been talking to me for a book, and he warned her not to talk to white people about her story. She panicked and called her brother Lawrence, who told her the man was right, so she left me a message saying she couldn’t talk to me anymore. But by the time I got the message and called her back, she’d changed her mind.

“Everybody always yellin, ‘Racism! Racism! That white man stole that black woman’s cells! That white man killed that black woman!’ That’s crazy talk,” she told me. “We all black and white and everything else—this isn’t a race thing. There’s two sides to the story, and that’s what we want to bring out. Nothing about my mother is truth if it’s about wantin to fry the researchers. It’s not about punish the doctors or slander the hospital. I don’t want that.”

Deborah and I would go on like this for a full year. Each time I visited, we’d walk the Baltimore Harbor, ride boats, read science books together, and talk about her mother’s cells. We took Davon and Alfred to the Maryland Science Center, where they saw a twenty-foot wall covered floor to ceiling with a picture of cells stained neon green and magnified under a microscope. Davon grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the wall of cells, yelling, “Miss Rebecca! Miss Rebecca! Is that Great-Grandma Henrietta?” People nearby stared as I said, “Actually, they might be,” and Davon pranced around singing, “Grandma Henrietta famous! Grandma Henrietta famous!”

At one point, as Deborah and I walked along the cobblestone streets of Fell’s Point late at night, she turned to me and without prompting said, “I’ll bring them medical records out on my terms and when I think is right.” She told me that the night she tackled her mother’s medical records and ran home, she’d thought I was trying to steal them. She said, “I just need somebody I can trust, somebody that will talk to me and don’t keep me in the dark.” She asked me to promise I wouldn’t hide anything from her. I promised I wouldn’t.

Between trips, Deborah and I would spend hours each week talking over the phone. Occasionally someone would convince her she couldn’t trust a white person to tell her mother’s story, and she’d call me in a panic, demanding to know whether Hopkins was paying me to get information from her like people said. Other times she’d get suspicious about money, like when a genetics textbook publisher called offering her $300 for permission to print the photo of Henrietta. When Deborah said they had to give her $25,000 and they said no, she called me demanding to know who was paying me to write my book, and how much I was going to give her.

Each time I told her the same thing: I hadn’t sold the book yet, so at that point I was paying for my research with student loans and credit cards. And regardless, I couldn’t pay her for her story. Instead, I said, if the book ever got published, I would set up a scholarship fund for descendants of Henrietta Lacks. On Deborah’s good days, she was excited about the idea. “Education is everything,” she’d say. “If I’d had more of it, maybe this whole thing about my mother wouldn’t have been so hard. That’s why I’m always tellin Davon, ‘Keep on studyin, learnin all you can.’” But on bad days, she’d think I was lying and cut me off again.

Those moments never lasted long, and they always ended with Deborah asking me to promise yet again that I’d never hide anything from her. Eventually I told her she could even come with me when I did some of my research if she wanted, and she said, “I want to go to centers and colleges and all that. Learning places. And I want to get the medical record and autopsy report on my sister.”

I began sending her stacks of information I uncovered about her mother—scientific journal articles, photos of the cells, even an occasional novel, poem, or short story based on HeLa. In one, a mad scientist used HeLa as a biological weapon to spread rabies; another featured yellow house paint made of HeLa cells that could talk. I sent Deborah news of exhibits where several artists projected Henrietta’s cells on walls, and one displayed a heart-shaped culture she’d grown by fusing her own cells with HeLa. With each packet, I sent notes explaining what each thing meant, clearly labeling what was fiction and what wasn’t, and warning her about anything that might upset her.