Part 20 (1/2)

Day clenched his three remaining teeth. ”I didn't sign no papers,” he said. ”I just told them they could do a topsy Nothin else. Them doctors never said nuthin about keepin her alive in no tubes or growin no cells. All they told me was they wanted to do a topsy see if they could help my children. And I've always just knowed this much: they is the doctor, and you got to go by what they say. I don't know as much as they do. And them doctors said if I gave em my old lady, they could use her to study that cancer and maybe help my children, my grandchildren.”

”Yeah!” Sonny yelled. ”They said it would help his kids in case they come down with cancer. He had five kids, what was he going to do?”

”They knew them cells was already growin when I come down there after she died,” Day said, shaking his head. ”But they didn't tell me nuthin bout that. They just asked if they could cut her up see about that cancer.”

”Well what do you expect from Hopkins?” Bobbette yelled from the kitchen, where she sat watching a soap opera. ”I wouldn't even go there to get my toenails cut.”

”Mmm hmm,” Day yelled back, thumping his silver cane on the floor like an exclamation point.

”Back then they did things,” Sonny said. ”Especially to black folks. John Hopkins was known for experimentin on black folks. They'd s.n.a.t.c.h em off the street...”

”That's right!” Bobbette said, appearing in the kitchen door with her coffee. ”Everybody knows that.”

”They just s.n.a.t.c.h em off the street,” Sonny said.

”s.n.a.t.c.hin people!” Bobbette yelled, her voice growing louder.

”Experimentin on them!” Sonny yelled.

”You'd be surprised how many people disappeared in East Baltimore when I was a girl,” Bobbette said, shaking her head. ”I'm telling you, I lived here in the fifties when they got Henrietta, and we weren't allowed to go anywhere near Hopkins. When it got dark and we were young, we had to be on the steps, or Hopkins might get us.”

The Lackses aren't the only ones who heard from a young age that Hopkins and other hospitals abducted black people. Since at least the 1800s, black oral history has been filled with tales of ”night doctors” who kidnapped black people for research. And there were disturbing truths behind those stories.

Some of the stories were conjured by white plantation owners taking advantage of the long-held African belief that ghosts caused disease and death. To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research. Those sheets eventually gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan.

But night doctors weren't just fictions conjured as scare tactics. Many doctors tested drugs on slaves and operated on them to develop new surgical techniques, often without using anesthesia. Fear of night doctors only increased in the early 1900s, as black people migrated north to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and Baltimore, and news spread that medical schools there were offering money in exchange for bodies. Black corpses were routinely exhumed from graves for research, and an under ground s.h.i.+pping industry kept schools in the North supplied with black bodies from the South for anatomy courses. The bodies sometimes arrived, a dozen or so at a time, in barrels labeled turpentine.

Because of this history, black residents near Hopkins have long believed the hospital was built in a poor black neighborhood for the benefit of scientists-to give them easy access to potential research subjects. In fact, it was built for the benefit of Baltimore's poor.

Johns Hopkins was born on a tobacco plantation in Maryland where his father later freed his slaves nearly sixty years before Emanc.i.p.ation. Hopkins made millions working as a banker and grocer, and selling his own brand of whiskey, but he never married and had no children. So in 1873, not long before his death, he donated $7 million to start a medical school and charity hospital. He wrote a letter to the twelve men he'd chosen to serve as its board of trustees, outlining his wishes. In it he explained that the purpose of Hopkins Hospital was to help those who otherwise couldn't get medical care:

The indigent sick of this city and its environs, without regard to s.e.x, age, or color, who require surgical or medical treatment, and who can be received into the hospital without peril to other inmates, and the poor of the city and State, of all races, who are stricken down by any casualty, shall be received into the hospital without charge.

He specified that the only patients to be charged were those who could easily afford it, and that any money they brought in should then be spent treating those without money. He also set aside an additional $2 million worth of property, and $20,000 in cash each year, specifically for helping black children:

It will be your duty hereafter to provide ... suitable buildings for the reception, maintenance and education of orphaned colored children. I direct you to provide accommodations for three or four hundred children of this cla.s.s; you are also authorized to receive into this asylum, at your discretion, as belonging to such cla.s.s, colored children who have lost one parent only, and in exceptional cases to receive colored children who are not orphans, but may be in such circ.u.mstances as to require the aid of charity.

Hopkins died not long after writing that letter. His board of trustees-many of them friends and family-created one of the top medical schools in the country, and a hospital whose public wards provided millions of dollars in free care to the poor, many of them black.

But the history of Hopkins Hospital certainly isn't pristine when it comes to black patients. In 1969, a Hopkins researcher used blood samples from more than 7,000 neighborhood children-most of them from poor black families-to look for a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior. The researcher didn't get consent. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit claiming the study violated the boys' civil rights and breached confidentiality of doctor-patient relations.h.i.+ps by releasing results to state and juvenile courts. The study was halted, then resumed a few months later using consent forms.

And in the late nineties, two women sued Hopkins, claiming that its researchers had knowingly exposed their children to lead, and hadn't promptly informed them when blood tests revealed that their children had elevated lead levels-even when one developed lead poisoning. The research was part of a study examining lead abatement methods, and all families involved were black. The researchers had treated several homes to varying degrees, then encouraged landlords to rent those homes to families with children so they could then monitor the children's lead levels. Initially, the case was dismissed. On appeal, one judge compared the study to Southam's HeLa injections, the Tuskegee study, and n.a.z.i research, and the case eventually settled out of court. The Department of Health and Human Services launched an investigation and concluded that the study's consent forms ”failed to provide an adequate description” of the different levels of lead abatement in the homes.

But today when people talk about the history of Hopkins's relations.h.i.+p with the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks-a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists.

Sitting in Lawrence's living room, Sonny and Bobbette yelled back and forth for nearly an hour about Hopkins s.n.a.t.c.hing black people. Eventually, Sonny leaned back in his chair and said, ”John Hopkin didn't give us no information about anything. That was the bad part. Not the sad part, but the bad part, cause I don't know if they didn't give us information because they was making money out of it, or if they was just wanting to keep us in the dark about it. I think they made money out of it, cause they were selling her cells all over the world and s.h.i.+pping them for dollars.”