Voices, Micro and Macro, in Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

            Skloot creates a clear distinction between her overarching, naïve and inquisitive authorial voice, and the weary, suspicious, superstitious, yet still faithful voice of the Lack’s family.

           Skloot presents her authorial perspective as someone captivated by the image of Henrietta, her hidden identity as a person, and the abstract concept of her body continuing to perpetuate itself in tiny pieces across the globe. Sloot’s idealistic mission is a rotation between the body, the personality, and the lasting implications of personality on/in bodily remnants. She portrays her journey as one of persistence, embarked upon by others previously but always falling short of fulfilling her specific vantage point, always skirting the true access points. Skloot finds herself literally driving in circles around social circles that she is apart from, until someone reaches out, opens up to her, ever so slightly, growing Henrietta’s identity, bit by bit, like cell by cell.

            “Deborah’s Voice” is our first introduction to Henrietta’s real lasting legacy and influence in the world. Italicized, marked as both authorial and authoritative, rising above it’s marginalization, Deborah’s voice is a starting point, in a place of honor/dedication, reserved for her anger and loss. Deborah and Rebecca share the goal of discovering who Henrietta was, although their emotional motivations are degrees apart.

            Certain local diction patterns which are found in the Lacks family’s conversational speech, repeated as they are throughout the book, could come to be interpreted as figurative language. The unique usage (or grammatically correct mis-usage) of words begins to carry its own meaning in the context of the narrative. There is a consistent lack of possessive noun usage, especially in reference to Henrietta; Deborah refers to her mother’s shoes and clothes as her “mother shoes” and “mother clothes.” David Lacks, Henrietta’s husband, deals with inquisitions into what he terms his “wife cells” as opposed to his “wife’s cells.” In a sense, this seems to be symbolic of all the myriad, larger issues at hand throughout the entire work. What were Henrietta’s ultimate possessions? Did she have any functioning rights when it came to the treatment of her body, living or dead? Do her cells function as part of her identity? Do they somehow lay a claim to her identity? What are the implications in Henrietta’s cells now being labeled as “mother” and “wife” cells? What does it matter that to the scientific community they are merely a semi-personalized acronym?

            Sadly and ironically, all elements of Henrietta’s own cancer and treatment put the wholeness of her body on the fast track of death, while all efforts were made to indiscriminately maintain the life and reproduction of her cells after that untimely death. Henrietta had an awareness of the demise of her body which she summarized in simple terms; her tumor was “a knot”, her harsh chemical treatments a “spreading blackness.” To Henrietta, palpability was paramount, as was perpetuation in terms of her children, her own flesh and blood, not the strange spreading of her invisible cells. That her body could not produce another body was a real tragedy to her.