trunk.
The muffler on my beat-up black Honda had fallen off somewhere between Pittsburgh and Clover, which meant everyone in Lacks Town heard each time I passed. They walked onto porches and peered through windows as I drove by. Finally, on my third or fourth pass, a man who looked like he was in his seventies shuffled out of a green two-room wooden cabin wearing a bright green sweater, a matching scarf, and a black driving cap. He waved a stiff arm at me, eyebrows raised.
“You lost?” he yelled over my muffler.
I rolled down my window and said not exactly.
“Well where you tryin to go?” he said. “Cause I know you’re not from around here.”
I asked him if he’d heard of Henrietta.
He smiled and introduced himself as Cootie, Henrietta’s first cousin.
His real name was Hector Henry—people started calling him Cootie when he got polio decades earlier; he was never sure why. Cootie’s skin was light enough to pass for Latino, so when he got sick at nine years old, a local white doctor snuck him into the nearest hospital, saying Cootie was his son, since the hospitals didn’t treat black patients. Cootie spent a year inside an iron lung that breathed for him, and he’d been in and out of hospitals ever since.
The polio had left him partially paralyzed in his neck and arms, with nerve damage that caused constant pain. He wore a scarf regardless of the weather, because the warmth helped ease the pain.
I told him why I was there, and he pointed up and down the road. “Everybody in Lacks Town kin to Henrietta, but she been gone solong, even her memory pretty much dead now,” he said. “Everything about Henrietta dead except them cells.”
He pointed to my car. “Turn this loud thing off and come inside. I’ll fix you some juice.”
His front door opened into a tiny kitchen with a coffeemaker, a vintage toaster, and an old woodstove with two cooking pots on top, one empty, the other filled with chili. He’d painted the kitchen walls the same dark olive green as the outside, and lined them with power strips and fly swatters. He’d recently gotten indoor plumbing, but still preferred the outhouse.
Though Cootie could barely move his arms, he’d built the house on his own, teaching himself construction as he went along, hammering the plywood walls and plastering the inside. But he’d forgotten to use insulation, so soon after he finished it, he tore down the walls and started over again. A few years after that, the whole place burned down when he fell asleep under an electric blanket, but he built it back up again. The walls were a bit crooked, he said, but he’d used so many nails, he didn’t think it would ever fall down.
Cootie handed me a glass of red juice and shooed me out of the kitchen into his dark, wood-paneled living room. There was no couch, just a few metal folding chairs and a barber’s chair anchored to the linoleum floor, its cushions covered entirely with duct tape. Cootie had been the Lacks Town barber for decades. “That chair cost twelve hundred dollars now, but I got it for eight dollars back then,” he yelled from the kitchen. “Haircut wasn’t but a dollar—sometimes I cut fifty-eight heads in one day.” Eventually he quit because he couldn’t hold his arms up long enough to cut.
A small boom box leaned against one wall blaring a gospel call-in show, with a preacher screaming something about the Lord curing a caller of hepatitis.
Cootie opened a folding chair for me, then walked into his bedroom. He lifted his mattress with one arm, propped it on his head, and began rummaging through piles of paper hidden beneath it.
“I know I got some information on Henrietta in here somewhere,”he mumbled from under the mattress. “Where the hell I put that… You know other countries be buying her for twenty-five dollars, sometimes fifty? Her family didn’t get no money out of it.”
After digging through what looked like hundreds of papers, he came back to the living
The muffler on my beat-up black Honda had fallen off somewhere between Pittsburgh and Clover, which meant everyone in Lacks Town heard each time I passed. They walked onto porches and peered through windows as I drove by. Finally, on my third or fourth pass, a man who looked like he was in his seventies shuffled out of a green two-room wooden cabin wearing a bright green sweater, a matching scarf, and a black driving cap. He waved a stiff arm at me, eyebrows raised.
“You lost?” he yelled over my muffler.
I rolled down my window and said not exactly.
“Well where you tryin to go?” he said. “Cause I know you’re not from around here.”
I asked him if he’d heard of Henrietta.
He smiled and introduced himself as Cootie, Henrietta’s first cousin.
His real name was Hector Henry—people started calling him Cootie when he got polio decades earlier; he was never sure why. Cootie’s skin was light enough to pass for Latino, so when he got sick at nine years old, a local white doctor snuck him into the nearest hospital, saying Cootie was his son, since the hospitals didn’t treat black patients. Cootie spent a year inside an iron lung that breathed for him, and he’d been in and out of hospitals ever since.
The polio had left him partially paralyzed in his neck and arms, with nerve damage that caused constant pain. He wore a scarf regardless of the weather, because the warmth helped ease the pain.
I told him why I was there, and he pointed up and down the road. “Everybody in Lacks Town kin to Henrietta, but she been gone solong, even her memory pretty much dead now,” he said. “Everything about Henrietta dead except them cells.”
He pointed to my car. “Turn this loud thing off and come inside. I’ll fix you some juice.”
His front door opened into a tiny kitchen with a coffeemaker, a vintage toaster, and an old woodstove with two cooking pots on top, one empty, the other filled with chili. He’d painted the kitchen walls the same dark olive green as the outside, and lined them with power strips and fly swatters. He’d recently gotten indoor plumbing, but still preferred the outhouse.
Though Cootie could barely move his arms, he’d built the house on his own, teaching himself construction as he went along, hammering the plywood walls and plastering the inside. But he’d forgotten to use insulation, so soon after he finished it, he tore down the walls and started over again. A few years after that, the whole place burned down when he fell asleep under an electric blanket, but he built it back up again. The walls were a bit crooked, he said, but he’d used so many nails, he didn’t think it would ever fall down.
Cootie handed me a glass of red juice and shooed me out of the kitchen into his dark, wood-paneled living room. There was no couch, just a few metal folding chairs and a barber’s chair anchored to the linoleum floor, its cushions covered entirely with duct tape. Cootie had been the Lacks Town barber for decades. “That chair cost twelve hundred dollars now, but I got it for eight dollars back then,” he yelled from the kitchen. “Haircut wasn’t but a dollar—sometimes I cut fifty-eight heads in one day.” Eventually he quit because he couldn’t hold his arms up long enough to cut.
A small boom box leaned against one wall blaring a gospel call-in show, with a preacher screaming something about the Lord curing a caller of hepatitis.
Cootie opened a folding chair for me, then walked into his bedroom. He lifted his mattress with one arm, propped it on his head, and began rummaging through piles of paper hidden beneath it.
“I know I got some information on Henrietta in here somewhere,”he mumbled from under the mattress. “Where the hell I put that… You know other countries be buying her for twenty-five dollars, sometimes fifty? Her family didn’t get no money out of it.”
After digging through what looked like hundreds of papers, he came back to the living
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