“Yeah, like you to have that, put it on your wall,” Deborah said.
Zakariyya’s eyes filled with tears. For a moment the dark circles seemed to vanish, and
his body relaxed.
“Yeah,” he said, in a soft voice unlike anything we’d heard that day. He put his arm on De-
borah’s shoulder. “Hey, thanks.”
Deborah wrapped her arms as far around his waist as she could reach, and squeezed.
“The doctor who gave me that said he been working with our mother for his whole career and
he never knew anything about where they came from. He said he was sorry.”
Zakariyya looked at me. “What’s his name?”
I told him, then said, “He wants to meet you and show you the cells.”
Zakariyya nodded, his arm still around Deborah’s shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “That sounds
good. Let’s go for it.” Then he walked slowly back to his building, holding the picture in front of
him at eye level, seeing nothing ahead but the DNA in his mother’s cells.
The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks
The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks
31
Hela, Goddess of DeathT
he day after I got home from our marathon visit, a man Deborah didn’t know called her ask-
ing if she’d ride on a HeLa float in a black rodeo. He told her to be careful of people looking to
find out where Henrietta’s grave was because they might want to steal her bones, since her
body was so valuable to science. Deborah told the man she’d been talking to me for a book,
and he warned her not to talk to white people about her story. She panicked and called her
brother Lawrence, who told her the man was right, so she left me a message saying she
couldn’t talk to me anymore. But by the time I got the message and called her back, she’d
changed her mind.