The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

and warmth, Henrietta’s cancer cells seemed unstoppable.
    Soon, George told a few of his closest colleagues that he thought his lab might have grown the first immortal human cells.
    To which they replied, Can I have some? And George said yes.



5
“Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside”

    H enrietta knew nothing about her cells growing in a laboratory. After leaving the hospital, she went back to life as usual. She’d never loved the city, so almost every weekend she took the children back to Clover, where she worked the tobacco fields and spent hours churning butter on the steps of the home-house. Though radium often causes relentless nausea, vomiting, weakness, and anemia, there’s no record of Henrietta having any side effects, and no one remembers her complaining of feeling sick.
    When she wasn’t in Clover, Henrietta spent her time cooking for Day, the children, and whichever cousins happened to be at her house. She made her famous rice pudding and slow-cooked greens, chitlins, and the vats of spaghetti with meatballs she kept going on the stove for whenever cousins dropped by hungry. When Day wasn’t working the night shift, he and Henrietta spent evenings at home, playing cards and listening to Bennie Smith play blues guitar on the radio after the kids went to sleep. On the nights Day worked, Henrietta and Sadie would wait until the door slammed, count to one hundred, then jump out of bed, put on their dancing clothes, and sneak out of the house,careful not to wake the children. Once they got outside, they’d wiggle their hips and squeal, scampering down the street to the dance floors at Adams Bar and Twin Pines.
    “We used to really swing out heavy,” Sadie told me years later. “We couldn’t help it. They played music that when you heard it just put your soul into it. We’d two-step across that floor, jiggle to some blues, then somebody maybe put a quarter in there and play a slow music song, and Lord we’d just get out there and shake and turn around and all like that!” She giggled like a young girl. “It was some beautiful times.” And they were beautiful women.
    Henrietta had walnut eyes, straight white teeth, and full lips. She was a sturdy woman with a square jaw, thick hips, short, muscular legs, and hands rough from tobacco fields and kitchens. She kept her nails short so bread dough wouldn’t stick under them when she kneaded it, but she always painted them a deep red to match her toenails.
    Henrietta spent hours taking care of those nails, touching up chips and brushing on new coats of polish. She’d sit on her bed, polish in hand, hair high on her head in curlers, wearing the silky slip she loved so much she hand-washed it each night. She never wore pants, and rarely left the house without pulling on a carefully pressed skirt and shirt, sliding her feet into her tiny, open-toed pumps, and pinning her hair up with a little flip at the bottom, “just like it was dancin toward her face,” Sadie always said.
    “Hennie made life come alive—bein with her was like bein with fun,” Sadie told me, staring toward the ceiling as she talked. “Hennie just love peoples. She was a person that could really make the good things come out of you.”
    But there was one person Henrietta couldn’t bring out any good in. Ethel, the wife of their cousin Galen, had recently come to Turner Station from Clover, and she hated Henrietta—her cousins always said it was jealousy.
    “I guess I can’t say’s I blame her,” Sadie said. “Galen, that husband of Ethel’s, he was likin Hennie more than he like Ethel. Lord, hefollowed Hennie! Everywhere she go, there go Galen—he tried to stay up at Hennie house all the time when Day gone to work. Lord, Ethel
was
jealous—made her hateful to Hennie somethin fierce. Always seemed like she wanted to hurt Hennie.” So Henrietta and Sadie would giggle and slip out the back to another club anytime Ethel showed up.
    When they weren’t sneaking out, Henrietta,