The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Part 19

He pulled into an empty alley behind a row of red brick town-houses and looked at me for the first time since we'd gotten in the car.

"This is where we take scientists and reporters wanting to know about our mother. It's where the family gangs up on them," he said, laughing. "But you seem nice, so I'll do you a favor and not go get my brother Zakariyya this time."

I got out of the car and Sonny drove away, yelling, "Good luck!" out the window.

All I knew about Sonny's brothers was that they were angry and one of them had murdered someone-I wasn't sure which one, or why. A few months earlier, when Deborah gave me Lawrence's phone number and swore she'd never talk to me, she'd said, "Brother gets mad when white folks come askin about our mother."

As I walked through a narrow, half-cement yard from the alley to Lawrence's house, a wisp of smoke seeped through the screen door of his kitchen, where static blared from a small television on a folding table. I knocked, then waited. Nothing. I stuck my head into the kitchen, where fat pork chops sat burning on the stove. I yelled h.e.l.lo. Still nothing.

I took a deep breath and walked inside. As I closed the door be hind me, Lawrence appeared, seeming bigger than two of me, his 275-pound, six-foot frame spanning the width of the narrow kitchen, one hand on the counter, the other on the opposite wall.

"Well h.e.l.lo there, Miss Rebecca," he said, giving me a once-over. "You wanna taste the meat I cooked?"

It had been a decade or so since I'd eaten pork, but suddenly that seemed irrelevant. "How could I resist?" I said.

A sweet grin spread across Lawrence's face. He was sixty-four, but aside from his gray curls, he seemed decades younger, with smooth hazelnut-brown skin and youthful brown eyes. He hiked up his baggy blue jeans, wiped his hands on his grease-stained T-shirt, and clapped.

"Okay then," he said, "that's good. That's real good. I'm gonna fry you up some eggs too. You're too d.a.m.n skinny."

While he cooked, Lawrence talked about life down in the country. "When older folks went to town to sell tobacco, they'd come back with a piece of bologna for us kids to share. And sometimes if we were good, they'd let us sop up the bacon grease with a piece of bread." His memory for detail was impressive. He drew pictures of the horse-drawn wagon Day had made out of two-by-fours. He showed me, with string and napkins, how he tied tobacco into bundles for drying when he was a child.

But when I asked about his mother, Lawrence fell silent. Eventually he said, "She was pretty." Then he went back to talking about tobacco. I asked about Henrietta again and he said, "My father and his friends used to race horses up and down Lacks Town road." We went in circles like this until he sighed and told me he didn't remember his mother. In fact, he said, he didn't remember most of his teen years.

"I blacked it out of my mind because of the sadness and hurting," he told me. And he had no intention of unblocking it.

"The only memory I have about my mother is her being strict," he told me. He remembered her making him hand-wash diapers in the sink; he'd hang them to dry, then she'd dump them back in the water, saying they weren't clean enough. But the only times she whipped him were for swimming off the pier in Turner Station. "She'd make me go fetch a switch to get a beatin with, then send me back out sayin get a bigger one, then a bigger one, then she'd wrap all them together and haul off on my tail."

As he talked, the kitchen filled with smoke again-we'd both forgotten he was cooking. Lawrence shooed me from the kitchen table into the living room, where he sat me in front of a plastic Christmas place mat with a plate of fried eggs and a chunk of charred pork the size of my hand, only thicker. Then he collapsed into a wooden chair beside me, put his elbows on his knees, and stared at the floor in silence while I ate.

"You're writing a book about my mama," he said finally.

I nodded as I chewed.

"Her cells growin big as the world, cover round the whole earth," he said, his eyes tearing as he waved his arms in the air, making a planet around him. "That's kinda weird ... They just steady growin and growin, steady fightin off whatever they fightin off."

He leaned forward in his chair, his face inches from mine, and whispered, "You know what I heard? I heard by the year 2050, babies will be injected with serum made from my mama's cells so they can live to eight hundred years old." He gave me a smile like, I bet your mama can't top that. "They're going to get rid of disease," he said. "They're a miracle."

Lawrence fell back in his chair and stared into his lap, his smile collapsing. After a long quiet moment, he turned and looked into my eyes.

"Can you tell me what my mama's cells really did?" he whispered. "I know they did something important, but n.o.body tells us nothing,"

When I asked if he knew what a cell was, he stared at his feet as if I'd called on him in cla.s.s and he hadn't done his homework.

"Kinda," he said. "Not really."

I tore a piece of paper from my notebook, drew a big circle with a small black dot inside, and explained what a cell was, then told him some of the things HeLa had done for science, and how far cell culture had come since.

"Scientists can even grow corneas now," I told him, reaching into my bag for an article I'd clipped from a newspaper. I handed it to him and told him that, using culturing techniques HeLa helped develop, scientists could now take a sample of someone's cornea, grow it in culture, then transplant it into someone else's eye to help treat blindness.

"Imagine that," Lawrence said, shaking his head. "It's a miracle!"

Suddenly, Sonny threw open the screen door, yelling, "Miss Rebecca still alive in here?" He leaned in the doorway between the kitchen and living room.

"Looks like you pa.s.sed the test," he said, pointing at my half-empty plate.

"Miss Rebecca telling me about our mother cells," Lawrence said. "She told me fascinating stuff. Did you know our mother cells gonna be used to make Stevie Wonder see?"

"Oh, well, actually, it's not her cells being put into people's eyes," I said, stammering. "Scientists are using technology her cells helped develop to grow other people's corneas."

"That's a miracle," Sonny said. "I didn't know about that, but the other day President Clinton said the polio vaccine is one of the most important things that happened in the twentieth century, and her cells involved with that too."

"That's a miracle," Lawrence said.

"So is this," Sonny said, slowly spreading his arms and stepping aside to reveal his eighty-four-year-old father, Day, teetering on unsteady legs behind him.

Day hadn't left the house in nearly a week because of a nosebleed that wouldn't stop. Now he stood in the doorway in faded jeans, a flannel shirt, and blue plastic flip-flops, even though it was January. He was thin and frail, barely able to hold himself upright. His light brown face had grown tough with age, cracked but soft, like a pair of well-worn work boots. His silver hair was covered with a black driving cap identical to Sonny's.

"He's got the gangrene in his feet," Sonny said, pointing to Day's toes, which were several shades darker than the rest of him and covered with open sores. "His feet hurt too much in regular shoes." Gangrene was spreading from Day's toes to his knee; his doctor said his toes needed amputating, but Day refused. He said he didn't want doctors cutting on him like they did Henrietta. At fifty-two, Sonny felt the same way; his doctors said he needed angioplasty, but he swore he'd never do it.

Day sat beside me, brown plastic sungla.s.ses shading his constantly tearing eyes.

"Daddy," Lawrence yelled, "did you know mama's cells gonna make Stevie Wonder see?"

Day shook his head in what looked like slow motion. "Nope," he mumbled. "Didn't know that till just now. Don't surprise me none though."

Then there was a thump on the ceiling and the rustling of someone walking around, and Lawrence jumped from the table and ran into the kitchen. "My wife is a fire dragon without morning coffee," he said. "I better make some." It was two in the afternoon.

A few minutes later, Bobbette Lacks walked down the stairs and through the living room slowly, wearing a faded blue terry-cloth robe. Everyone stopped talking as she pa.s.sed and headed into the kitchen without saying a word or looking at anyone.

Bobbette seemed like a loud person being quiet, like a woman with an enormous laugh and temper who might erupt with either at any moment. She exuded Don't mess with me, her face stern and staring straight ahead. She knew why I was there, and had plenty to say on the subject, but seemed utterly exhausted at the idea of talking to me, yet another white person wanting something from the family.

She disappeared into the kitchen and Sonny slid a crumpled piece of paper into Day's hand, a printout of the picture of Henrietta with her hands on her hips. He grabbed my tape recorder from the center of the table, handed it to Day, and said, "Okay, Miss Rebecca got questions for you, Pop. Tell her what you know."

Day took the recorder from Sonny's hand and said nothing.

"She just want to know everything Dale always askin you about," Sonny said.

I asked Sonny if maybe he could call Deborah to see if she'd come over, and the Lacks men shook their heads, laughing.

"Dale don't want to talk to n.o.body right now," Sonny said.

"That's cause she's tired of it," Day grumbled. "They always askin questions and things, she keep givin out information and not gettin nuthin. They don't even give her a postcard."

"Yep," Sonny said, "that's right. All they wants to do is know everything. And that's what Miss Rebecca wants too. So go on Daddy, tell her, just get this over with."

But Day didn't want to talk about Henrietta's life.

"First I heard about it was, she had that cancer," he said, repeating the story he'd told dozens of reporters over the years, almost verbatim. "Hopkins called me, said come up there cause she died. They asked me to let them have Henrietta and I told them no. I said, 'I don't know what you did, but you killed her. Don't keep cuttin on her.' But after a time my cousin said it wouldn't hurt none, so I said okay."