The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph. —ELIE WIESEL

slowly, without realizing it, I’d become a character in her story, and she in mine.

They played music that when you heard it just put your soul into it.

She giggled like a young girl. “It was some beautiful times.” And they were beautiful women.

Sadie would later describe Henrietta’s decline like this: “Hennie didn’t fade away, you know, her looks, her body, it didn’t just fade. Like some peoples be sick in the bed with cancer and they look so bad. But she didn’t. The only thing you could tell was in her eyes. Her eyes were tellin you that she wasn’t gonna be alive no more.”