![]() In Maryland, the couple would have three more children, all born after the war: David (also known as Sonny), Deborah, and Joseph (later known, just like one of his uncles, as “Crazy” Joe). Day was soon after drafted, but, with some help from Fred, he was able to buy his wife and their children a house. The very next morning, Fred bought Day a bus ticket to Baltimore, and after a few months, Henrietta also moved to Turner Station. Soon after Pearl Harbor, he traveled from Baltimore to Clover to convince them that they should follow his example. One of these workers was Fred Garrett, a cousin of Hennie and Day. ![]() “Bethlehem Steel was a gold mine in a time flush with poverty,” writes Skloot, “especially for black families from the South.” By 1941, there were so many black people working at the steel plant that they had practically built a city for themselves – Turner Station, “a small community of black workers on a peninsula in the Patapsco River, about twenty miles from downtown Baltimore.” During World War I, the increasing demand for steel made the plant one of the largest in the world and caused a surge of migrations from the farms of Virginia and the Carolinas. Henrietta and Day married just a few months before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that unexpectedly changed the lives of many African Americans working at the Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point steel mill, located about 250 miles (402 kilometers) to the north of Clover. Henrietta Lacks: an ordinary death (1941 – 1951) In Clover, Henrietta was widely admired for her beauty. This wasn’t his first attempt to kill himself because of his unrequited love. On the very same day, a cousin of Henrietta – called “Crazy” Joe because he was crazy in love with Hennie – stabbed himself in the chest with a dull pocket knife. ![]() Two years later, on April 10, 1941, Henrietta and Day married in a humble ceremony at their preacher’s house. Henrietta was only 14 when she gave birth to the couple’s first son, Lawrence, and a little over 18 when she brought to the world Elsie, mentally disabled. No one could have guessed back then that Henrietta would spend the rest of her life with Day: first growing up alongside him as a playmate and cousin, then as his wife and the mother of his five children. Henrietta ended up with her grandfather, Tommy Lacks, who was already raising another grandchild left by one of his daughters: Henrietta’s cousin David “Day” Lacks, five years older. Of course, nobody in Clover could afford to take all of the children, so the siblings were split among relatives. Her father wasn’t someone with enough patience to raise a child (let alone 10), so when his wife died, he took all of his children back to Clover, Virginia, “where his family still farmed the tobacco fields their ancestors had worked as slaves.” When she was four, her mother died while giving birth to her tenth child. Nobody knows how and when she became Henrietta – but, not that long after her birth, people started referring to her by her nickname: Hennie. Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia, on August 1, 1920. So, get ready to join Rebecca Skloot on her journey to uncover who Henrietta Lacks was, and prepare to learn why her story is “inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans.” Henrietta Lacks: an ordinary life (1920 – 1941) Her cells, however, are still alive: taken without her knowledge (or the knowledge of her children), they are the “first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.” And they have helped us understand the nature of numerous diseases while leading to the discovery of countless vaccines and cures. ![]() Buried in an unmarked grave, Henrietta Lacks was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who died aged 31 in 1951. ![]()
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