“’Like I’m always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can’t do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.’” (Immortal Life, p. 276) Henrietta’s daughter Deborah Lacks, said this with tears in her eyes, as she and writer Rebecca Skloot left the Crownsville Hospital Center. In the 1940s and 1950s, Crownsville was known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane, where Deborah’s sister Elsie had been institutionalized.
As a historian who specializes in twentieth-century southern and African American history, I was struck by Deborah’s comment. She reminds us that even though the events in Immortal Life happened in the recent past – just a little over 60 years ago – even that past was in many ways fundamentally different from our present. The modern civil rights movement of the 1960s toppled legalized segregation and expanded the definitions of freedom and equality for all Americans. As a result, the kind of discrimination that Henrietta and Elsie endured because of their race, socio-economic class, gender, and mental capabilities is no longer acceptable today, and at times it’s hard to believe they happened at all.
But they did happen, and Deborah and her brothers lived with the various ways the past can intrude on the present. As the southern author William Faulkner said in his 1950 novel Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” As children, Deborah and her brothers never truly understood why or how their mother died. Denied a stable home life, they also didn’t have access to quality education, jobs, or health care; this led to some family members engaging in violence and crime. No wonder they didn’t want to talk about the past or couldn’t help but feel hateful about what happened. We must admire Deborah for her insight about letting go of the hate, but uncovering the past was still a deeply unsettling and physically destructive experience for her.
Students protest school closings in downtown Farmville, 1963
In reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I can’t help but think of how the past continues to influence the present here in Farmville and Prince Edward County. Prince Edward County was the site of one of the five cases that comprised the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared segregation in public education unconstitutional. In response to a 1959 federal court order to desegregate, the Prince Edward County government chose not to fund the public schools, effectively closing them. It took another five years, until 1964, for the Supreme Court to order their reopening. In that time, over 2000 children were denied access to public schools. Many parents found ways to provide their children with education during the court challenge, but many did not. Ironically, Prince Edward County Schools were desegregated earlier than many other school districts in Virginia, but it was the only place in the nation to close its schools for as long as it did. We continue to struggle with the legacy of the school closings – as the high illiteracy and poverty rates in our county reveal. Many don’t want to talk about this past, and many continue to struggle with the emotional burden of being denied an education and never really understanding why it happened.
Recognizing the fundamental difference between the past and our present, while also being sensitive to the ways in which the past still resonates in people’s everyday lives – these are habits of thought that are not only essential to being a good historian, but even more importantly, to being an educated citizen. These are habits of thought we try to encourage here among our students at Longwood.
Courtesy Visiting Nurses Association of Greater Philadelphia
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot:
Wow, what an awesome book at many levels! There were points in the story that I felt true interest, joy, sadness, anger, and understanding, not unlike what I expect Deborah and the Lacks family felt as they moved through the journey of dealing with their mother, wife, and/or relative Henrietta ‘s life, illness, death, and then eternal legacy. This story unfolds and is dichotomous. A young African American Woman dies of cervical cancer (caused by Human Papilloma Virus 18 “HPV-18” that is in current day preventable), and then her very own cells taken from her cancerous tumor contributes to science and research to save others and prevent /treat disease worldwide. Yet, while Henrietta’s “HeLa” cells continued to help science, her very own family suffered the fallout of her death including sexual, emotional, and physical abuse growing up without their mother, and a life full of poverty, discrimination, and social injustice.
As for the medical system during the timeframe of Henrietta and her family’s journey, it appeared broken and segregated at many levels in which informed consent and self-determination was not mandated or even considered. Elsie’s experience at Crownsville Hospital for the Negro Insane was eye-opening. Consider the fact that the Lacks family finds out for the first time that Henrietta’s cells are still alive and being used for science in 1973, when her name was revealed and linked to “HeLa cells” in print at least two years prior, and then portions of her medical records were published in 1985. This violates current Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations that all health care related agencies are now mandated to follow.
In my opinion, Henrietta Lacks was an amazingly woman. Consider her journey throughout her short life, and experiences from the time she learned of her cervical cancer and the last eight months between her diagnosis and death. She was devoted to her children and family. She was used to hard work. She continued her normal routine for as long as possible. At the same time, people close to her indicated that they thought she knew what was facing her.
Questions:
What is your impression of Henrietta and why?
Examine the social justice and equity issues that Henrietta and the Lacks family experienced when seeking and obtaining health care. Do you feel that the family should have received automatic health and financial benefits from the “HeLa” cell contribution to society? Explain your answer.
In current day, what information would physicians at Johns Hopkins have to provide to Henrietta related to use of a tissue sample of her cervix for use in research? Discuss whether or not you feel Henrietta would have provided consent for this purpose and why.
Distinguish how the current health care system would have differed in the care that Henrietta and her family received.