The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Part 37

Deborah stepped away from Gary's embrace, shaking her head, wiping her eyes, and yelling, "Phew!" They both laughed. "Thanks, Cuz," she said, "I feel so light!"

"Some things you got to release," Gary said. "The more you hold them in, the worse you get. When you release them, they got to go somewhere else. The Bible says He can carry all that burden."

She reached up and touched his face. "You always know what I need. You know how to take care of me."

"It's not so much that I see it, but He sees it," Gary said, smiling. "I didn't know all that was coming out my mouth. That was the Lord talking to you."

"Well, hallelujah," Deborah said, giggling. "I'm comin back tomorrow for some more of this! Amen!"

It had been drizzling outside for hours, but suddenly rain pounded the tin roof and turned to hail so loud that it sounded like applause. The three of us walked to the front door to look.

"It's the Lord saying he heard us," Gary said, smiling. "He got the faucet turned on high to clean you out, Cuz!"

"Praise the Lord!" Deborah yelled.

Gary hugged Deborah good-bye, then hugged me. Deborah grabbed her long black raincoat, opened it wide, and raised it above her like an umbrella, nodding for me to come under with her. She let the coat fall onto both of our heads, then put her arm tight around my shoulders.

"You ready for some soul cleansing?" she yelled, opening the door.

CHAPTER 36

Heavenly Bodies

The next morning Deborah's hives had gone down some, but her eyes were still swollen, so she decided she needed to go home to see her doctor. I stayed behind in Clover because I wanted to talk to Gary about the night before. When I walked into his living room he was standing on a plastic folding chair in a bright turquoise s.h.i.+rt, changing a lightbulb.

"I can't get that beautiful song out of my head," I told him. "I've been singing it all morning." Then I hummed a few bars: Welcome into this place ... welcome into this broken vessel.

Gary jumped off the chair, laughing and raising his eyebrows at me.

"Now why do you think that's stuck in your head?" he asked. "I know you don't like to think about it, but that's the Lord telling you something."

He said it was a hymn, then ran from the living room and came back carrying a soft blue Bible with large gold lettering across its front. "I want you to have this," he told me, tapping the cover with his finger. "He died for us that we might have the right to eternal life. A lot of people don't believe that. But you can have eternal life. Just look at Henrietta."

"You believe Henrietta is in those cells?"

He smiled and looked down his nose at me like, silly child. "Those cells are Henrietta," he said, taking back the Bible and opening it to the book of John. "Read that," he said, pointing to a chunk of text. I started reading to myself and he covered the Bible with his hand. "Out loud," he said.

So I read aloud from the Bible, for the first time in my life: "Those who believe in me will live, even though they die; and those who live and believe in me will never die."

Gary flipped to another pa.s.sage for me to read: "Someone will ask, 'How can the dead be raised to life? What kind of body will they have?' You fool! When you plant a seed in the ground, it does not sprout to life unless it dies. And what you plant is a bare seed ... not the full-bodied plant that will later grow up. G.o.d provides that seed with the body he wishes; he gives each seed its own proper body."

"Henrietta was chosen," Gary whispered. "And when the Lord chooses an angel to do his work, you never know what they going to come back looking like."

Gary pointed at another pa.s.sage and told me to keep reading. "There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, the beauty that belongs to heavenly bodies is different from the beauty that belongs to earthly bodies."

When Christoph projected Henrietta's cells on the monitor in his lab a few days earlier, Deborah said, "They're beautiful." She was right. Beautiful and otherworldly-glowing green and moving like water, calm and ethereal, looking precisely like heavenly bodies might look. They could even float through the air.

I kept reading: "This is how it will be when the dead are raised to life. When the body is buried, it is mortal; when raised, it will be immortal. There is, of course, a physical body, so there has to be a spiritual body."

"HeLa?" I asked Gary. "You're saying HeLa is her spiritual body?"

Gary smiled and nodded.

In that moment, reading those pa.s.sages, I understood completely how some of the Lackses could believe, without doubt, that Henrietta had been chosen by the Lord to become an immortal being. If you believe the Bible is the literal truth, the immortality of Henrietta's cells makes perfect sense. Of course they were growing and surviving decades after her death, of course they floated through the air, and of course they'd led to cures for diseases and been launched into s.p.a.ce. Angels are like that. The Bible tells us so.

For Deborah and her family-and surely many others in the world-that answer was so much more concrete than the explanation offered by science: that the immortality of Henrietta's cells had something to do with her telomeres and how HPV interacted with her DNA. The idea that G.o.d chose Henrietta as an angel who would be reborn as immortal cells made a lot more sense to them than the explanation Deborah had read years earlier in Victor McKusick's genetics book, with its clinical talk of HeLa's "atypical histology" and "unusually malignant behavior." It used phrases like "the tumor's singularity" and called the cells "a reservoir of morphologic, biochemical, and other information."

Jesus told his followers, "I give them eternal life, and they shall never die." Plain, simple, to the point.

"You better be careful," Gary told me. "Pretty soon you're gonna find yourself converted."

"I doubt it," I told him, and we both laughed.

He slid the Bible from my hands and flipped to another pa.s.sage, then handed it back, pointing at one sentence: "Why do you who are here find it impossible to believe that G.o.d raises the dead?"

"You catch my drift?" he said, smiling a mischievous grin.

I nodded, and Gary closed the Bible in my hands.

CHAPTER 37

"Nothing to Be Scared About"

When Deborah got to her doctor's office, her blood pressure and blood sugar were so high, her doctor was amazed she hadn't had a stroke or heart attack while we were in Clover. With levels like hers, he said, she could still have one any minute. Suddenly her strange behavior on the trip seemed less strange. Confusion, panic, and incoherent speech are all symptoms of extremely high blood pressure and blood sugar, which can lead to heart attack and stroke. So is redness and swelling, which could explain why her red welts didn't go away despite all the Benadryl she drank.

The doctor told her she needed to avoid stress completely, so we decided she should stop coming on research trips with me. But she insisted I call her from the road to tell her what she was missing. For the next several months, as I continued my research, I told Deborah only the good things I found: stories about Henrietta dancing and watching the boys play baseball at Cliff's house, details about her family history from county records and wills.

But we both knew the break from HeLa wouldn't last-Deborah was still scheduled to give a talk at the National Foundation for Cancer Research conference in honor of Henrietta. She was determined to do it, even though she was terrified by the idea of getting up on stage, so she started spending her days planning her speech.

One afternoon, in the midst of preparing for the conference, she called me to say she'd decided she wanted to go to school. "I keep thinkin, maybe if I understood some science, then the story about my mother and sister wouldn't scare me so much," she said. "So I'm just gonna do it." Within days, she'd called several local community centers and found one that offered adult education cla.s.ses, and signed up to take math and reading placement tests.

"Once I get tenth-grade level, I'm ready to go on to college!" she told me. "Can you imagine? Then I can understand all that science about my mother!" She thought about becoming a dental a.s.sistant, but was leaning toward radiation technologist so she could study cancer and help patients who were getting radiation treatment like her mother.

As the conference approached, Deborah was calm, but I wasn't. I kept asking, "Are you sure you want to do this?" and "How's your blood pressure?" and "Does your doctor know you're doing this?" She kept telling me she was fine, that even her doctor said so.

Deborah took her placement tests for school and registered for the cla.s.ses she'd need to get herself up to tenth-grade level and qualify for the community college cla.s.ses she wanted to take. She called me, giddy, screaming, "I start a week from today!"

But everything else seemed to be spiraling in the wrong direction. A few days before the conference, Lawrence and Zakariyya called yelling again about how she shouldn't talk to anyone, and saying they wanted to sue every scientist who'd ever worked on Henrietta's cells. Sonny told them to stay out of it, saying, "All she doin now is goin places to speak and learn-y'all don't want to do that, so just leave her alone." But Lawrence insisted Deborah give him the records she'd gathered on their mother.