CHAPTER 34

The Medical Records

A few minutes later, Deborah pounded on my door. She'd changed into an enormous white T-shirt that hung past her knees-on it was a picture of a stick-figure woman taking cookies out of an oven, and the word GRANDMA in big childlike print.

"I decided I'm not going to bed," she said matter-of-factly. "I want to look at that stuff with you." She was jittery and twitchy, like she'd just had several shots of espresso. In one hand she clutched the Crownsville picture of Elsie; with the other she grabbed the bag filled with her mother's medical records off the dresser where I'd put it. She dumped the bag's contents on my bed just as she'd done the first night we met.

"Let's get busy," she said.

There were more than a hundred pages, many of them crumpled, folded, or torn, all of them out of order. I stood staring for a long moment, stunned and overwhelmed, then said maybe we could sort through it together, then I could find somewhere to photocopy what I'd need.

"No!" Deborah yelled, then smiled a nervous smile. "We can just read it all here and you can take notes."

"That would take days," I said.

"No it won't," Deborah said, climbing on all fours across the pile of papers, and sitting cross-legged in the center of the bed.

I pulled up an armchair, opened my laptop, and started sorting. There was a land deed from the small chunk of Clover property Deborah bought with two thousand dollars from her father's asbestos settlement. There was a 1997 newspaper mug shot of Lawrence's son with a caption that said, WANTED. LAWRENCE LACKS, ROBBERY W/DEADLY WEAPON. There were order forms for buying HeLa cells online, receipts, newsletters from Deborah's church, and seemingly endless copies of the photo of Henrietta, hands on hips. And there were dozens of notebook pages where Deborah had written definitions of scientific and legal terms, and poems about her life:

cancer

check up

can't afford

white and rich get it

my mother was black

black poor people don't have the money to

pay for it

mad yes I am mad

we were used by taking our blood and lied to

We had to pay for our own medical, can you

relieve that.

John Hopkin Hospital and all other places,

that has my mother cells, don't give her

Nothing.

As I read, Deborah grabbed several photocopied pages from a genealogy how-to book and held them up for me to see, saying, "That's how I knew to get power of attorney and bring all that stuff to get my sister information at Crownsville. They didn't know who they was foolin' with!" As she talked, she watched my hands moving through the pile of papers.

I held a page of the records close to my face to make out the small script, then began reading out loud, " 'This twenty-eight-year-old' ... something ... I can't read the handwriting ... 'positive Rh.'" The entry was dated November 2, 1949.

"Oh wow!" I said suddenly. "This is three days before you were born-your mom's pregnant with you here."

"What? Oh my G.o.d!" Deborah screamed, s.n.a.t.c.hing the paper and staring at it, mouth wide. "What else does it say?"

It was a normal checkup, I told her. "Look here," I said, pointing at the page. "Her cervix is two centimeters dilated ... She's getting ready to have you."

Deborah bounced on the bed, clapped her hands, and grabbed another page from the medical records.

"Read this one!"

The date was February 6, 1951. "This is about a week after she first went to the hospital with her cervical cancer," I said. "She's waking up from anesthesia after getting her biopsy. It says she feels fine."

For the next few hours, Deborah pulled papers off the pile for me to read and sort. One moment she'd screech with joy over a fact I'd found, the next she'd panic over a new fact that didn't sit well, or at the sight of me holding a page of her mother's medical records. Each time she panicked, she'd pat the bed and say, "Where's my sister autopsy report?" or "Oh no, where'd I put my room key?"

Occasionally she stashed papers under the pillow, then pulled them out when she decided it was okay for me to see them. "Here's my mother autopsy," she said at one point. A few minutes later she handed me a page she said was her favorite because it had her mother's signature on it-the only piece of Henrietta's handwriting on record. It was the consent form she'd signed before her radium treatment, when the original HeLa sample was taken.

Eventually, Deborah grew quiet. She lay on her side and curled herself around the Crownsville picture of Elsie for so long, I thought she'd fallen asleep. Then she whispered, "Oh my G.o.d. I don't like the way she got her neck." She held up the picture and pointed to the white hands.

"No," I said. "I don't like that either."

"I know you was hopin I didn't notice that, weren't you?"

"No. I knew you noticed."