The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Part 8

It turned out Turner Station wasn't just hidden on the map. To get there, I had to drive past the cement wall and fence that blocked it from the interstate, across a set of tracks, past churches in old storefronts, rows of boarded-up houses, and a buzzing electrical generator as big as a football field. Finally I saw a dark wooden sign saying WELCOME TO TURNERS STATION in the parking lot of a fire-scorched bar with pink ta.s.seled curtains.

To this day no one's entirely sure what the town is actually called, or how to spell it. Sometimes it's plural (Turners Station), other times possessive (Turner's Station), but most often it's singular (Turner Station). It was originally deeded as "Good Luck," but never quite lived up to the name.

When Henrietta arrived there in the forties, the town was booming. But the end of World War II brought cutbacks at Sparrows Point. Baltimore Gas and Electric demolished three hundred homes to make room for a new power plant, leaving more than 1,300 homeless, most of them black. More and more land was zoned for industrial use, which meant more houses torn down. People fled for East Baltimore or back to the country, and the population of Turner Station dropped by half before the end of the fifties. By the time I got there, it was about one thousand and falling steadily, because there were few jobs.

In Henrietta's day, Turner Station was a town where you never locked your doors. Now there was a housing project surrounded by a 13,000-foot-long brick-and-cement security wall in the field where Henrietta's children once played. Stores, nightclubs, cafes, and schools had closed, and drug dealers, gangs, and violence were on the rise. But Turner Station still had more than ten churches.

The newspaper article where I'd gotten Henrietta's address quoted a local woman, Courtney Speed, who owned a grocery store and had created a foundation devoted to building a Henrietta Lacks museum. But when I got to the lot where Speed's Grocery was supposed to be, I found a gray, rust-stained mobile home, its broken windows covered with wire. The sign out front had a single red rose painted on it, and the words REVIVING THE SPIRIT TO RECAPTURE THE VISION. PROVERBS 29:18. Six men gathered on the front steps, laughing. The oldest, in his thirties, wore red slacks, red suspenders, a black s.h.i.+rt, and a driving cap. Another wore an oversized red and white ski jacket. They were surrounded by younger men of various shades of brown in sagging pants. The two men in red stopped talking, watched me drive by slowly, then kept on laughing.

Turner Station is less than a mile across in any direction, its horizon lined with skysc.r.a.per-sized s.h.i.+pping cranes and smokestacks billowing thick clouds from Sparrows Point. As I drove in circles looking for Speed's Grocery, children stopped playing in the streets to stare and wave. They ran between matching red-brick houses and past women hanging fresh laundry, following me as their mothers smiled and waved too.

I drove by the trailer with the men out front so many times, they started waving at me with each pa.s.s. I did the same with Henrietta's old house. It was a unit in a brown brick building divided into four homes, with a chain-link fence, several feet of gra.s.s out front, and three steps leading up to a small cement stoop. A child watched me from behind Henrietta's old screen door, waving and playing with a stick.

I waved back at everyone and feigned surprise each time the group of children following me appeared on various streets grinning, but I didn't stop and ask for help. I was too nervous. The people of Turner Station just watched me, smiling and shaking their heads like, What's that young white girl doing driving around in circles?

Finally I saw the New s.h.i.+loh Baptist Church, which the newspaper article had mentioned as the site of community meetings about the Henrietta Lacks museum. But it was closed. As I pressed my face to the tall gla.s.s out front, a black town car pulled up, and a smooth, handsome man in his forties jumped out, with gold-tinted gla.s.ses, black suit, black beret, and the keys to the church. He slid his gla.s.ses to the end of his nose and looked me over, asking if I needed help.

I told him why I was there.

"Never heard of Henrietta Lacks," he said.

"Not many people have," I said, and told him I'd read that someone had hung a plaque in Henrietta's honor at Speed's Grocery.

"Oh! Speed's?" he said, suddenly all smiles and a hand on my shoulder. "I can take you to Speed's!" He told me to get in my car and follow him.

Everyone on the street waved and yelled as we pa.s.sed: "Hi Reverend Jackson!" "How you doin, Reverend?" He nodded and yelled right back, "How you doin!" "G.o.d bless you!" Just two blocks away, we stopped in front of that gray trailer with the men out front and the Reverend jammed his car into park, waving for me to get out. The cl.u.s.ter of men on the steps smiled, grabbed the pastor's hand, and gave it two-handed shakes, saying, "Hey Reverend, you brought a friend?"

"Yes I did," he told them. "She's here to talk to Ms. Speed."

The one in the red pants and red suspenders-who turned out to be Speed's oldest son, Keith-said she was out, and who knew when she'd be back, so I may as well grab a seat on the porch with the boys and wait. As I sat down, the man in the red and white ski jacket smiled a big bright smile, then told me he was her son Mike. Then there were her sons Cyrus and Joe and Tyrone. Every man on that porch was her son; so was nearly every man that walked in the store. Pretty soon, I'd counted fifteen sons and said, "Wait a minute. She's got fifteen kids?"

"Oh!" Mike yelled. "You don't know Mama Speed, do you?! Oooh, I look up to Mama-she tough! She keep Turners Station in line, boy! She fears no man!"

The men on the porch all nodded and said, "That's right."

"Don't you get scared if anybody come in here try to attack Mama when we're not around," Mike said, "cause she'll scare them to death!" Speed's sons let out a chorus of amens as Mike told a story, saying, "This man came in the store once yellin, 'I'm gonna come cross that counter and get you.' I was hidin behind Mama I was so scared! And do you know what Mama did? She rocked her head and raised up them arms and said, 'Come on! Come onnnnnn! If you think you crazy, you just try it!' "

Mike slapped me on the back and all the sons laughed.

At that moment, Courtney Speed appeared at the bottom of the steps, her long black hair piled loose on her head, strands hanging in wisps around her face, which was thin, beautiful, and entirely ageless. Her eyes were soft brown with a perfect halo of sea blue around the edges. She was delicate, not a hard edge on her. She hugged a grocery bag to her chest and whispered, "But did that man jump across that counter at me?"

Mike screamed and laughed so hard he couldn't answer.

She looked at him, calm and smiling. "I said, Did that man jump?"

"No, he did not!" Mike said, grinning. "That man didn't do nuthin but run! That's why Mama got no gun in this store. She don't need one!"

"I don't live by the gun," she said, then turned to me and smiled. "How you doin?" She walked up the stairs into the store, and we all followed.

"Mama," Keith said, "Pastor brought this woman in here. She's Miss Rebecca and she's here to talk to you."

Courtney Speed smiled a beautiful, almost bashful smile, her eyes bright and motherly. "G.o.d bless you, sweetie," she said.

Inside, flattened cardboard boxes covered most of the floor, which was worn from years of foot traffic. Shelves lined each wall, some bare, others stacked with Wonder Bread, rice, toilet paper, and pigs' feet. On one, Speed had piled hundreds of editions of the Baltimore Sun dating back to the 1970s, when her husband died. She said she'd given up replacing the windows each time someone broke in because they'd just do it again. She'd hung handwritten signs on every wall of the store: one for "Sam the Man s...o...b..a.l.l.s," others for sports clubs, church groups, and free GED and adult literacy cla.s.ses. She had dozens of "spiritual sons," who she treated no different than her six biological sons. And when any child came in to buy chips, candy, or soda, Speed made them calculate how much change she owed them-they got a free Hershey's kiss for each correct answer.

Speed started straightening the items on her shelves so each label faced out, then yelled over her shoulder at me, "How did you find your way here?"

I told her about the four maps, and she threw a box of lard onto the shelf. "Now we got the four-map syndrome," she said. "They keep trying to push us off the earth, but G.o.d won't let them. Praise the Lord, he brings us the people we really need to talk to."

She wiped her hands on her white s.h.i.+rt. "Now that He brought you here, what can I do for you?"

"I'm hoping to learn about Henrietta Lacks," I said.

Courtney gasped, her face suddenly ashen. She took several steps back and hissed, "You know Mr. Cofield? Did he send you?"

I was confused. I told her I'd never heard of Cofield, and no one had sent me.

"How did you know about me?" she snapped, backing away further.

I pulled the old crumpled newspaper article from my purse and handed it to her.

"Have you talked to the family?" she asked.

"I'm trying," I said. "I talked to Deborah once, and I was supposed to meet Sonny today, but he didn't show up."

She nodded, like I knew it. "I can't tell you anything until you got the support of the family. I can't risk that."

"What about the plaque you got for the museum?" I asked. "Can I see that?"

"It's not here," she snapped. "Nothing's here, because bad things happened around all that."

She looked at me for a long moment, then her face softened. She took my hand in one of hers, and touched my face with the other.

"I like your eyes," she said. "Come with me."

She hurried out the door and down the stairs to her old brown station wagon. A man sat in the pa.s.senger seat, staring straight at the road as if the car were moving. He didn't look up as she jumped in, saying, "Follow me."

We drove through Turner Station to the parking lot of the local public library. As I opened my car door, Courtney appeared, clapping, grinning, and bouncing on her tiptoes. Words erupted from her: "February first is Henrietta Lacks day here in Baltimore County," she said. "This February first is going to be the big kickoff event here at the library! We're still trying to put a museum together, even though the Cofield situation did cause so many problems. Terrified Deborah. We were supposed to be almost done with the museum by now-we were so close before all that horribleness. But I'm glad He sent you," she said, pointing to the sky. "This story just got to be told! Praise the Lord, people got to know about Henrietta!"

"Who's Cofield?" I asked.

She cringed and slapped her hand over her mouth. "I really can't talk until the family says it's okay," she said, then grabbed my hand and ran into the library.

"This is Rebecca," she told the librarian, bouncing on her toes again. "She's writing about Henrietta Lacks!"

"Oh, that's wonderful!" the librarian said. Then she looked at Courtney. "Are you talking to her?"

"I need the tape," Courtney said.