Part 4 (1/2)
It took Gey eight years to get through medical school because he kept dropping out to work construction and save for another year's tuition. After he graduated, he and Margaret built their first lab in a janitor's quarters at Hopkins-they spent weeks wiring, painting, plumbing, building counters and cabinets, paying for much of it with their own money.
Margaret was cautious and stable, the backbone of the lab. George was an enormous, mischievous, grown-up kid. At work he was dapper, but at home he lived in flannels, khakis, and suspenders. He moved boulders around his yard on weekends, ate twelve ears of corn in one sitting, and kept barrels full of oysters in his garage so he could shuck and eat them anytime he wanted. He had the body of a retired linebacker, six feet four inches tall and 215 pounds, his back unnaturally stiff and upright from having his spine fused so he'd stop throwing it out. When his bas.e.m.e.nt wine-making factory exploded on a Sunday, sending a flood of sparkling burgundy through his garage and into the street, Gey just washed the wine into a storm drain, waving at his neighbors as they walked to church.
Gey was a reckless visionary-spontaneous, quick to start dozens of projects at once, filling the lab and his bas.e.m.e.nt at home with half-built machines, partial discoveries, and piles of junkyard sc.r.a.ps only he could imagine using in a lab. Whenever an idea hit him, he sat wherever he was-at his desk, kitchen table, a bar, or behind the wheel of his car-gnawing on his ever-present cigar and scribbling diagrams on napkins or the backs of torn-off bottle labels. That's how he came up with the roller-tube culturing technique, his most important invention.
It involved a large wooden roller drum, a cylinder with holes for special test tubes called roller tubes. The drum, which Gey called the ”whirligig,” turned like a cement mixer twenty-four hours a day, rotating so slowly it made only two full turns an hour, sometimes less. For Gey, the rotation was crucial: he believed that culture medium needed to be in constant motion, like blood and fluids in the body, which flow around cells, transporting waste and nutrients.
When Mary finally finished cutting the samples of Henrietta's cervix and dropping them in dozens of roller tubes, she walked into the incubator room, slid the tubes one at a time into the drum, and turned it on. Then she watched as Gey's machine began churning slowly.
Henrietta spent the next two days in the hospital, recovering from her first radium treatment. Doctors examined her inside and out, pressing on her stomach, inserting new catheters into her bladder, fingers into her v.a.g.i.n.a and a.n.u.s, needles into her veins. They wrote notes in her chart saying, ”30 year-old colored female lying quietly in no evident distress,” and ”Patient feels quite well tonight. Morale is good and she is ready to go home.”
Before Henrietta left the hospital, a doctor put her feet in the stirrups again and removed the radium. He sent her home with instructions to call the clinic if she had problems, and to come back for a second dose of radium in two and a half weeks.
Meanwhile, each morning after putting Henrietta's cells in culture, Mary started her days with the usual sterilization drill. She peered into the tubes, laughing to herself and thinking, Nothing's happening. Big surprise. Then, two days after Henrietta went home from the hospital, Mary saw what looked like little rings of fried egg white around the clots at the bottoms of each tube. The cells were growing, but Mary didn't think much of it-other cells had survived for a while in the lab.
But Henrietta's cells weren't merely surviving, they were growing with mythological intensity. By the next morning they'd doubled. Mary divided the contents of each tube into two, giving them room to grow, and within twenty-four hours, they'd doubled again. Soon she was dividing them into four tubes, then six. Henrietta's cells grew to fill as much s.p.a.ce as Mary gave them.
Still, Gey wasn't ready to celebrate. ”The cells could die any minute,” he told Mary.
But they didn't. They kept growing like nothing anyone had seen, doubling their numbers every twenty-four hours, stacking hundreds on top of hundreds, acc.u.mulating by the millions. ”Spreading like crabgra.s.s!” Margaret said. They grew twenty times faster than Henrietta's normal cells, which died only a few days after Mary put them in culture. As long as they had food 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.
CHAPTER 5
”Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside”
Henrietta 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 b.u.t.ter 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 meatb.a.l.l.s she kept going on the stove for whenever cousins dropped by hungry. When Day wasn't working the night s.h.i.+ft, 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 st.u.r.dy 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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, he followed 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, Sadie, and Sadie's sister Margaret spent evenings in Henrietta's living room, playing bingo, yelling, and laughing over a pot of pennies while Henrietta's babies-David Jr., Deborah, and Joe-played with the bingo chips on the carpet beneath the table. Lawrence was nearly sixteen, already out having a life of his own. But one child was missing: Henrietta's oldest daughter, Elsie.