The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

I’d be accused of conspiracy and slammed into a wall both physically and metaphorically, and I’d eventually find myself on the receiving end of something that looked a lot like an exorcism

“I had enough ’a you people.”

More than anything, she told me, she wanted to learn about her mother and what her cells had done for science. She said people had been promising her information for decades and never delivering it.

But I don’t got it in me no more to fight

Henrietta didn’t tell anyone

no one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting samples or asked if she wanted to be a donor

They all stopped talking about the knot, and no one told Henrietta’s husband David anything about it.

For Henrietta, walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language.

In those days, people didn’t talk about things like cancer

Henrietta stayed until the sixth grade