The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

I just finished the wildest story that I have ever read, and all of it was true.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot tells a tale I was unlikely to be interested in, at first, since its focus is the origin of the HeLa cell, one of only a few cells that not only grows in culture, but multiplies. I don't really care much about nonfiction science stories, but this one was different.

Skloot tells the story of a young black woman from the South who had her cancer cells taken and experimented upon; neither she nor her family were the wiser, even long after Henrietta had died and the cells had become so remarkably important that every lab in the nation had a sample of them, leading to the development of vaccinations and treatments for polio, AIDS, syphilis, and a number of other diseases. The book is about the fight over the cells but also about the family tormented by their mother's "immortality." It's a story of eugenics, degeneracy, lies, rocket-ships, violence, forgiveness, trust, and faith.

Since most of the surviving Lackses never had more than a third-grade education, Skloot's journey to find the truth about Henrietta is long and hard, as she fought to win the trust of a group of people who both never understood and couldn't trust the science that made their mother immortal. Plagued by their own demons, the Lacks family members suffered from paranoia, depression, anxiety, rage, and high blood pressure -- none of which, ironically, they could afford to have treated, despite their mother's important contributions to science. Their story is hopeful and heart-wrenching. I would strongly recommend it, even if neither science nor nonfiction are genres you typically embrace.

Warming Up to the Kindle

I'm a bibliophile. I love everything about books: the smell of their pages, the triumphant feeling of turning that last sheet of paper at the end of a good story, the escape. So when the Kindle came out, I frowned and shook my head. "Not for me," I said. "I spend 3/4 of my day staring at a computer screen. Why would I want to spend my evenings doing that, too?"

At least, I felt that way until I filled my house up with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, cramming books into hallways and stuffing them under beds. If there's one thing I like more than books, it's a decluttered house. Clutter makes me unable to think; people who keep things for sentimental reasons baffle me, since a memory is worth much more than the thing with which that memory is associated. If I have too much stuff in my home, I feel anxious and sweaty. But I wasn't about to give up reading -- so, I turned, finally, to the Kindle.

No, the Kindle doesn't have that glorious smell of old dusty pages, but let me talk about what it does have. First of all, every time it goes to sleep (it is remarkably energy efficient), it digitally weaves a new "cover," made of art, the faces of familiar authors and poets, or classic book titles. It's a constant surprise and I find it delightful. As for the "computer" screen, it isn't one. Amazon has manufactured "digital ink," which reads like a book page, doesn't promote eye strain, and doesn't have a glare. I am no more fatigued after reading from it than I am from a paper-and-ink page.

But the best part is the giant online selection of books, which I can peruse from my own home, in a big comfy chair. I recently finished Mockingjay sooner in the evening than I'd hoped, which left me without a book to read for the rest of the week. My schedule is so busy that bookstore perusal can only happen on Saturdays, if I'm very lucky. But because of the Kindle, I was able to download 3 previews of books I'm considering reading and read 20 pages of each as a trial run before committing to buy. I can spread out my trial all week long, something I don't have the luxury of doing in the hour I might have to spend in the bookstore.

I can see this wireless / 3g feature working out really well on holidays, when I visit family with space to spare only for Christmas presents and not for the 4 books I think I might be able to read in two weeks. The newest version is as thin as a comic book and twice as light; it slid into my purse without adding a bit of extra weight, making it ideal to take to the many doctor's visits I have these days.

Did I mention brand-new hardbacks are $9.99? If for no other reason -- sold.

Reality News

So, this weekend at a monster truck rally, a truck went out of control and smashed 8 people in the crowd, killing them. While I was eating breakfast, the news decided to play it for me, causing me to immediately hit the power button to switch off the grizzly scene. At what point did it become necessary and acceptable to show scenes like that on TV? And why can't I become desensitized to it?

I trace the moment I became disgusted with sensationalist news to 9/11, when CNN ran a close-up shot of people hurling their bodies out of the windows of the towers before they completely collapsed. Their free-fall to the jagged stones of concrete below is something I will never be able to erase. If I'd been warned, I would have looked away; I did not need to store that image for instant recall, nor can I see how it added to the reporting of the atrocity in any way.

The Digital Age makes video so accessible that I rarely hear anyone talking about the appropriateness of screening a shot before considering airing it. On iphones, digital cameras, flips, and laptops, cameras are ubiquitous. The 24-hour news cycle makes the eyewitness account imperative, since it ostensibly keeps viewers from switching to another channel to get a summary, rather than an up-close-and-personal view, of the story. But what's lost in the fight to be first? Sure, it's the verifiability of the story, but it's also the respect of the subjects and the subjects' families being filmed, not to mention that of the viewers.

Dreams

Lately, I have had some very odd dreams. Last night, I dreamed that an old friend of mine was held hostage in the attic of a suburban home and she was traded for me and my dog Sierra. The couple who kidnapped me wanted me to be their maid so that they could throw dinner parties and look richer than they really were. When the wife was out of the room, the husband would try to slash my wrists with scissors, and when she was in the room, he'd pretend I did it to myself. At the dinner party, my parents showed up and began helping me wash knives and forks, trying to figure out why I couldn't leave. I kept slipping them tiny paring knives to hide under dishtowels and trivets so that I could stab my keepers and escape after the party, but my parents kept exposing the knives, shining them, and putting them into drawers. I woke up before I could escape the house.

The night before that, I dreamed I wanted to visit a former professor and friend at my alma mater, but instead of looking for him in the Foreign Languages building, where he worked, I ended up in the English building. It had been turned into a corporate office with suits and filing cabinets and papers everywhere and not one familiar face. Someone did tell me that my friend now worked in the elongated glass Toyokyo Building (a combination of Toyota and Tokyo, though I don't know why -- this building isn't real) and that I could find him there. But when I entered Toyokyo, all I could find was an underground basketball stadium with hundreds of Japanese businessmen everywhere. Above the concession stand, Baylor had submerged about five athletes in a "water coma" so that they could recuperate. You could watch them hooked up to underwater monitors being operated on by surgeons. I never did find my friend.

At least I no longer have insomnia.

The Cross-Dressing Patriot

As you lift your beer and sparklers in celebration of our nation's independence this 4th of July, don't forget to give a toast to Deborah Sampson Gannett, the crossdressing patriot. Although present-day Tea Partiers would probably write her out of the history books if they could, she's certainly someone to remember.

Gannett was about 20 years old in the late 18th century when she strapped her breasts tight to her body with a strip of cloth and donned a man's suit she'd been secretly sewing in a barn for months. One would imagine she sidled into the New England tavern where Revolutionary troops went to sign up for combat and collect their reward money for doing so. The story goes that, upon collecting this large sum, she drank herself into oblivion, passed out in her bedroom, and missed next morning's roll call, thereby invoking the ire of her superiors, who searched for her in her house and, apparently, discovered she was a woman.

Gannett wasn't to be deterred, though. Sick of farm chores and suitors, she put on her suit and ran away to another New England town, where she signed up for the Revolutionary War again, this time assuming her brother's name, Robert Shurtleff, and began her 3-year service with fellow patriots.

As with all cross-dressing war stories, this one gets complicated when she gets a small bullet (read: miniature cannon ball) in her upper thigh. As her body is carried into the tent where the doctor is going to take off her pants to dress her wound and, thereby, discover her secret, she tries to shoot herself in the head, but the gun is too unwieldy and her resolve fails her. She goes with plan B instead. She distracts the doctor by telling him she just needs to sleep, and when he leaves the room to tend to the others, she steals his surgical instruments and cuts the ball out of her own thigh. She then hobbles back to the battlefield, telling her comrades, "I'm just fine, boys; let's get moving."

So they do, and she serves well for the remainder of the war -- at least, until she reaches the fever epidemic in Philadelphia and comes so close to death that her body is dumped on a wheelbarrow intended for a row of cold unmarked graves. Doctor Binney notices her movement and plunges his hand into the front of her shirt, immediately coming to two realizations: (a) Soldier Gannett/Shurtleff's heart is still beating and (b) He has breasts.

Binney carries her to his house where he "leaves out" the fact that Shurtleff is a woman and allows her to recuperate there. He then parades her as a Revolutionary war hero to his friends, still maintaining her disguise. "Shurtleff" is courted by a lovely young 17 year old woman, who baffles Gannett in her ardor. After accepting loads of gifts from the young girl, Gannett finally tells her the truth and takes off with the other troops. Her biographer maintains that Gannett/Shurtleff and the scorned lover "remained friends," but, woman-to-woman?, I doubt this is true.

Binney rats out Gannett to her superior officers only after Gannett has moved on. She is honorably discharged and provided a sum for the remainder of her life from the American government. It isn't enough, though, and to make a little dough on the fascination with the war shortly after its close, she acts out her biography onstage at the Boston Federal Street Theatre. Each night, she paced through 27 military exercises before giving her speech to a packed house. Audiences loved and hated her.

So this fourth of July, as you celebrate all that the red, white, and blue stands for, don't forget to the thank the crossdressing soldiers who made this holiday possible.

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8,172 views and perhaps a total of 6 comments over the lifetime of this blog? Is anyone out there?

Back in Boston: Other People's Mail

Imagine the fall rolls around and my students and I are playing "my summer vacation." Sally went to the Virgin Islands to play Carnival and visit her folks. Rufus hiked the Himalayas, and Joan studied abroad in Prague. It's my turn and, giddy, I say, "I spent the summer in a library!" It probably wouldn't win me any awesome professor points, would it?

And yet, there's something wonderful about the library I spent the past 2 weeks in, researching for my book project. The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) is a cool, quiet marble shrine to everything that means anything to people who want to preserve early American culture. The first time I sat down under the librarian's watchful eyes to touch Abigail Adams' letters -- to trace the worry for her husband in her slanted penmanship, to wonder if the paper's softness came, at least in part, from John's propensity to read her missives over and over again -- I became addicted. The yellowed pages, smudges, stains, misspellings, crossouts and cracked red wax seals made the clean, crisp, white, ellided, footnoted, neatly edited published versions of these letters look like lies. The letter's body often tells as much about the correspondence as the words on the page do. There is no substitute for the Real Thing.

This time around, I was visiting the MHS to read loyalist's letters -- you know, women who sided for the "wrong team," the Brits, in the Revolutionary War. And by the end of it, I was with the Tories. According to their version of the story, the Patriots were undisciplined, ungrateful, unfaithful children. The American soldiers were rude, vile, indecent men who barged into women's homes, often drunk, to make a spectacle of themselves before stealing wood and valuables to take with them back to camp. Those that fled the war took agonizing journeys to Nova Scotia to establish towns like Halifax that would become safe havens for British sympathizers, but they often did so while leaving behind brothers, husbands, and sons, who stayed behind to defend land the families would eventually have taken from them by the eighteenth-century version of Homeland Security (then called Committees of Safety).

At any rate, the whole trip got me to thinking about the death of letter-writing, and how letters and journals, like this blog, are at best semipermanent, so easily taken down and deleted that I ache for the archivists and historians who will want to know anything about millenials in the Digital Age. What will we leave behind?