The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (29 page)

In the midst of all this, someone told Deborah that as Henrietta’s next of kin, she could request a copy of her mother’s records from Hopkins to learn about her death. But Deborah didn’t do it, because she was afraid of what she might find and how it might affect her. Then, in 1985, a university press published a book by Michael Gold, a reporter from
Science 85
magazine, about Walter Nelson-Rees’s campaign to stop HeLa contamination. It was called
A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman’s Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused
.

No one in the Lacks family remembers how they learned about Gold’s book, but when Deborah got a copy, she flipped through it as fast as she could, looking for her mother. She found the photo of Henrietta, hands on hips, at the front of the book, and her name at the end of the first chapter. Then she read the passage out loud to herself, shaking with excitement:

In the ten-page chapter that followed, Gold quoted extensively from her medical records: the blood spotting her underwear, the
syphilis, her rapid decline. No one in Henrietta’s family had ever seen those medical records, let alone given anyone at Hopkins permission to release them to a journalist for publication in a book the whole world could read. Then, without warning, Deborah turned the pages of Gold’s book and stumbled on the details of her mother’s demise: excruciating pain, fever, and vomiting; poisons building in her blood; a doctor writing, “Discontinue all medication and treatments except analgesics;” and the wreckage of Henrietta’s body during the autopsy:

After reading that passage, Deborah fell apart. She spent days and nights crying, imagining the pain Henrietta must have been in. She couldn’t close her eyes without seeing her mother’s body split in half, arms askew, and filled with tumors. She stopped sleeping. And soon she was as angry at Hopkins as her brothers. She stayed up nights wondering,
Who gave my mother medical records to a reporter?
Lawrence and Zakariyya thought Michael Gold must have been related to George Gey or some other doctor at Hopkins—how else could he have gotten their mother’s records?

When I called Michael Gold years later, he didn’t remember who’d given him the records. He said he’d had “good long conversations” with Victor McKusick and Howard Jones, and was pretty sure Jones had given him the photo of Henrietta. But he wasn’t sure about the records. “They were in somebody’s desk drawer,” he told me. “I don’t remember if it was Victor McKusick or Howard Jones.” When I talked
to Jones, he had no memory of Gold or his book, and denied that either he or McKusick ever gave Henrietta’s medical records to anyone.

Henrietta and David Lacks, circa 1945.

Left:
Elsie Lacks, Henrietta’s older daughter, about five years before she was committed to Crownsville State Hospital, with a diagnosis of “idiocy.”
Right:
Deborah Lacks at about age four.

The home-house where Henrietta was raised, a four-room log cabin in Clover, Virginia, that once served as slave quarters, 1999.

Henrietta’s mother, Eliza Pleasant, died when Henrietta was four. Henrietta is buried somewhere in the clearing beside her mother’s tombstone, in an unmarked grave.

South Boston tobacco auction, circa 1920s. Henrietta and her family sold their crops at this auction house.

Sparrows Point workers cleaning a furnace by removing “slag,” a toxic by-product of molten metal, sometime in the 1940s.
COURTESY OF THE DUNDALK-PATAPSKO NECK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Howard W. Jones, the gynecologist who diagnosed Henrietta’s tumor, sometime in the 1950s.