Like Henrietta’s cells, Rebecca Skloot’s book is heading toward an extended life. By choosing to serve as a facilitator of discussion and awareness about tissue rights—beyond the ten year commitment it took to write The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, she is helping to keep focus on this complex issue and her book. It seems more an answer to the overwhelming response from her readers and others concerned by the topics far-reaching ramifications than a marketing tool, although it certainly accomplishes that. Skloot believes strongly that this discussion must be had and had quickly, and thoughtfully. (Read the prologue here)
Although, the book itself is a long narrative, including Rebecca’s journey, Henrietta’s life and afterlife, the devastation her death wreaked on her motherless children, and the impact that Rebecca’s research has on this insular, justifiably distrustful clan, there is an almost overwhelming measure of family involvement in her research (for Skloot, herself, but also for the reader). Therefore, and rightly so, many of them are clearly drawn and narratively developed characters. We learn of the children’s torture at the hands of a relative, Ethel, after their mother’s death and the choices they made in impossible circumstances to survive and to try to keep each other alive. We get a view of poverty up close and a nonjudgmental, a matter-of-fact account of a younger Deborah bedding her little ones down at home, alone, so that she can work a second job at night to keep a roof over their heads and food in their mouths.
As each family member of significance walks onto the pages of the book, Skloot describes them with just enough detail to allow the reader to seamlessly incorporate a living breathing person into the cast. After several of these introductions, which are each followed by plot building action or interaction, adding tension in the tale, I easily submitted to trusting her choice to add these layers of complexity. Also, the scenes she writes clearly record significant events in authentic dialogue (respectfully using the family’s dialect for direct quotes) and physical surroundings, beginning with Speeds store in a beat-up trailer and ending with the “corpse of Clover” (306), as well as background characters essential to atmosphere, complication, and the intimidating circumstances for a white female doing such in-depth reporting on a poor black family in the South; sticking her nose in painful family business.
Skloot’s voice is scientifically informative, methodical, structuring the narrative beginning with a skeleton of background material, like how she was drawn to this story and the tale of Henrietta’s life, both of which provide grounding. Skloot’s educational interests inform us who is speaking, whose eyes are searching out this story and in the attractive, contagious sparkle and resolute strength that were Henrietta, the person whose cells lived on without her knowledge or hers or her family’s consent. And yet, it must become deeply personal to Skloot as she finds herself dealing with Deborah under the most heart-wrenching physical health and safety compromising circumstances, the trip to discover Elsie’s horrific story and the blood-pressure- spike-induced-hysteria that followed. The author’s guilt at the nearly deadly circumstances is bared for the reader’s compassion or judgment. This stands in contrast to Skloot’s choice to leave out of the book her own father’s illness (Which she reveals in answer to one of the commonly asked question on her site: What sparked your interest...?) and personally unproductive (at least as far as his disease and the promised follow-up) foray into volunteering for medical research. In fact, I wonder if that choice is completely honest because it could color the reporter’s personal investment in bio-ethics issues a bit differently than the school stories she does share.
However that might change the reader’s perceptions, Skloot’s tone is never preachy. In fact, she maintains such deference to the conflicting facts and arguments that her readers report repeated reversals of their opinions through the course of reading the book. Skloot responds to such a comment on a book club chat:
I often hear people saying that their opinions about the ethics and science flip-flopped as they read—that was exactly what I hoped would happen. If there was an easy answer to the question of what to do about tissue rights, experts wouldn’t have been arguing for more than a decade about how to handle the questions raised by the book. (For more on this see: Henrietta Lacks Author Rebecca Skloot Answers Your Questions)
And Skloot privileges another voice, Deborah’s, Henrietta’s youngest daughter—placing her deeply troubling words immediately after the prologue, before the surreal black-and-white image of her mother’s cells that invites the reader into the scientific, and yet, still mysterious world of human tissues:
When people ask—and it seems like people always be askin to where I can’t never get away from it—I say, Yeah, that’s right, my mother name was Henrietta Lacks\...People got rich off my mother without us even knowin…now we don’t get a dime. I used to get so mad…to where it made me sick…But I don’t got it in me no more no more to fight. I just want to know who my mother was. (9)
Skloot carefully chooses the metaphor of the pause button to communicate the revelations of bio-chemical life processes made possible by freezing and thawing cells outside the human body. She also traces death as much as she traces life through her book, starting with Henrietta’s mother, against her better judgment pausing at Elsie’s tortured end, and culminating with Deborah’s quieted smile. Skloot closes her recounting of Deborah’s life finally re-united with the mother she had been seeking her whole life:
Sonny cut a lock of her hair and tucked it inside their mother’s Bible with [those]… from Henrietta and Elsie.
“She’s with them now,” he told me. “You know there’s no place in the world she’d rather be” (308).
Throughout the book, Skloot honors the life force, albeit cancer activated, that propels Henrietta’s unstoppable cells, weaving their impact in lives saved through medical research, with the personal discoveries and consequences of Deborah’s difficult, determination to go along on Skloot’s “reporting” trips; Deborah, adopting the professional use of that term from Skloot and dreaming of an educated future, first to include herself, but later for her children and grandchildren becomes, in her death, a gateway to fresh beginnings for her family.
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