Cooper and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

I recently read Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for another class, and couldn’t help but think of Anna Julia Cooper and her call for greater (in quantity and quality) representation of blacks in the arts. Skloot’s book follows her journey in contacting and researching the lives of Henrietta Lacks and her descendents. The story was important to Skloot because Lacks was the unwitting donor of a cell line now known colloquially as HeLa cells, which have helped save the lives of countless individuals through advancements in medicine achieved with research on these cells. While HeLa cells are well-known to anyone who works in biology, the life (and even name) of Henrietta Lacks has been misremembered by the public.

What struck me as relating to Cooper’s claims was the opening to Skloot’s book. In it she says, "This is a work of nonfiction. no names have been changed, no characters invented, no events fabricated," (Skloot xiii). When reading The Immortal Life you can tell that Skloot took pains to dig deeper when a simple answer to a question would have made her telling of Henrietta's story a little easier. Skloot does not take the easy road, however, and I think that was because she understands the power an author has in telling another person's story.

Another line that stood out to me was a quote from one of Lacks' relatives: "If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that's dishonest. It's taking away their lives, their experiences, and their selves," (Skloot xiii). It is here where I stopped and thought about Cooper's call for black people to have greater visibility in the arts. While Skloot is a white woman who is unrelated to the Lacks family, she does exhibit the sympathy Cooper sees necessary for white authors to try to represent the black subject. Skloot explains to the reader that she leaves quotes from Lacks family members in their original dialect because as the quote about shows, they care that they be shown to the world the same way they are in real life. Furthermore, Skloot makes a point to address the use of the word "colored" throughout the book, which I also appreciated. She explains that while the word is problematic and offensive to some people (including herself) it was used by some in the Lacks family who lived during a time when that was the term used to describe blacks. As a person who constantly reads texts for racial, gender, and other similar implications, I appreciated the time Skloot takes to explain her choices in representation to the reader.