When the operator couldn’t find a record of a patient named Henrietta Lacks in the hospital, Lawrence hung up and didn’t know who else to call. Lawrence called the main switchboard at Hopkins, saying, “I’m calling about my mother, Henrietta Lacks-you got some of her alive in there.” Or maybe they did something to her during that autopsy? He’d seen her body at the funeral in Clover himself.
Lawrence called his father to tell him what Bobbette had heard, and Day didn’t know what to think. Like most researchers, he’d never thought about whether the woman behind HeLa cells had given them voluntarily.īobbette excused herself and ran home, bursting through the screen door into the kitchen, yelling for Lawrence, “Part of your mother, it’s alive!” If they’re doing research on Henrietta, she thought, it’s only a matter of time before they come for Henrietta’s children, and maybe her grandchildren.Gardenia’s brother-in-law told Bobbette that Henrietta’s cells had been all over the news lately because they’d been causing problems by contaminating other cultures.īut Bobbette just kept shaking her head and saying, “How come nobody told her family part of her was still alive?” It was like all those terrifying stories she’d heard about Hopkins her whole life were suddenly true, and happening to her. She’d read in the paper about the syphilis study at Tuskegee, which had just been stopped by the government after forty years, and now here was Gardenia’s brother-in-law, saying Hopkins had part of Henrietta alive and scientists everywhere were doing research on her and the family had no idea. “I ordered them from a supplier just like everybody else.” He held his hands up, like Whoa, wait a minute. “What you mean you got her cells in your lab?” “They’re from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks who died of cervical cancer at Hopkins in the fifties.”īobbette yelled, jumping up from her chair. “Those cells in my lab have to be hers,” he said. “Henrietta Lacks is your mother-in-law?” he asked, suddenly excited.īobbette stopped smiling and snapped, “How’d you know that?” “My mother-in-law’s Henrietta Lacks but I know you’re not talking about her-she’s been dead almost twenty-five years.” I’ve never heard that name anywhere else.” “It’s funny,” he said, “I’ve been working with these cells in my lab for years, and I just read this article that said they came from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. “Well, it was Cooper, but my married name is Lacks.”
“Those things would die in my house,” Bobbette said, and they laughed.
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They talked about medicine and Gardenia’s plants, which covered the windows and counters. I work at the National Cancer Institute.” When she told him she was a patient aide at Baltimore City Hospital, he said, “Really? Gardenia’s brother-in-law was in town from Washington, D.C., and they’d all just finished having lunch.Īs Gardenia clanked dishes in the kitchen, her brother-in-law asked Bobbette what she did for a living. On a hazy day in 1973, in a brown brick row house five doors down from her own, Bobbette Lacks sat at her friend Gardenia’s dining room table.
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