Everybody Loved hennie.
She made life come alive.
She was thogh, nothing scared hennie.
She was beautifull and had a pretty smile.
But no one knew henrietta was sick.
Crazy Joe an over average man
was so in love with henrietta he tried to kill himself
He jumped through the ice of a frozen pond
and stabbed himdelf in the chest.
But she married Day
I got a Knot in my womb.
What if its something bad?
You better take me to the doctor Day
Ain’t nothing serious wrong…
Well, I got cancer.
Henrietta is going to die tonight, I pulled into town
Watching the rain fall
I rolled down the window
That spirit stood rigt there on the road.
She wants you to rake care of them children, I told I’d let you know.
Turner station was a town where you never locked your doors.
Stores nightclubs, cafes and schools had closed.
More and more land was zoned for industries to use
which meant more houses torned down
drug dealer, gang and violence were on the rise.
This was not the Turner station Henrietta lived in.
The dead man jumped ,
dead man didn’t do nothing but run.
Mama got no gun,
She dont need one.
I dont live by the gun.
Carlos Velazquez 072, Tai Zayas 072, Lenna Alvarez 072, Luis Badillo 081
For more than a year Henrietta had been telling her closest girlfriends something didn’t feel right. “Hennie you gotta check that out. What if it’s something bad?””You better take me to the doctor. I’m bleeding and it ain’t my time.””Ain’t nothing serious wrong. Doctors gonna fix me right up.” Yet here she was, three months later, with a full-fledged tumor. Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, Stage I. Hopkins treated all invasive carcinoma with radium, a white radioactive metal that glows an eerie blue. Wharton slipped a tube filled with radium inside Henrietta’s cervix, and sewed it in place. With Henrietta unconscious on the operating table in the center of the room, her feet in stirrups, the surgeon on duty, Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr, sat on a stool between her legs. “Henrietta Lacks. . . Biopsy of cervical tissue. . . Tissue given to Dr. George Gey.” ”the cells could die any minute.” Henrietta knew nothing about her cells growing in a laboratory. “Well, I got cancer.” “I’ve been having treatment at John Hopkins.” Until that moment, Henrietta didn’t know that her treatments had left her infertile. “The cells could die any minute.” But they didn’t. They kept growing like nothing anyone had seen, doubling their numbers every 24 hours. My thought was that if you know how to keep tissue alive, there must be some way of equalizing the reserve supply to the area of the throat and face. “The patient looked chronically ill.” “She is obviously in pain.” The doctors examined her and looked at the X-ray: “Inoperable” They said. Each day the skin on her abdomen burned blacker and blacker, and the pain grew worse. “Her eyes were telling that she wasn’t gonna be alive no more”. Henrietta’s body had become so contaminated with toxins. “Don’t you let anything bad happen to them children when I’m gone”. George leaned over Henrietta’s bed and said: “Your cells will make you immortal.” Henrietta died at 12:15 am on October 4, 1951.
Priscilla Newby, Jorge Rivera, Alejandro Rosa, Carlos Tapia, Hector Rosa
There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I never met
She was born Loretta Pleasant
She loved the city
She worked at tobacco fields
In Roakie, Virginia.
She found a hard lamp deep inside.
She didn’t seem to understand what was
going on, “I got a knot in my wound”
The doctor need to have a look”.
Remember when I said : “ I have knot inside,
well I got cancer”.
There’s nothing wrong with me “
Henrietta went about life as usual.
But her eyes here tellin’ you
She wasn’t going to be alive no more
“This story just got to be told!
Praise the lord”.
“Lord!” Henrietta rose up waitin.
Like she’s been possessed by the devil of pain itself
That’s the memory I’ll take to my grave
Henrietta you best leave
You gonna die tonight.
“I got a knot in my womb”
she told the receptionist.
For more than a year Henrietta
had been telling her girlfriends
something didn’t feel right.
“You better take me to the doctor”
she told her husband.
David drove Henrietta
twenty miles to get there.
So when the nurse called Henrietta
she led her through a single door
to a colored only exam room.
Henrietta lay back on the table,
feet pressed hard in stirrups.
And Jones found a lump
exactly where she’d said he would.
“She had a term delivery here on this hospital”
he said.
“No note is made in the history
that there is any abnormality of the cervix”
Yet here she was, three months later,
with a full-fleged tumor.
Either the doctors had missed it
or it had grown at a terifying rate.
After Jones got Henrietta’s biopsy report
he called and told her it was malignant.
Henrietta didn’t told anyone,
and no one asked.
That night Henrietta told her husband
” I need to go to the doctor tomorrow”
“He wants to do some tests.
give me some medicine.”
The next morning she climbed
from the Buick outside Hopkins.
Went straight to the desk
and told the receptionist
she was there for her treatment.
On her second night at the hospital,
a doctor put her under anesthetic.
Henrietta’s tumor was the invasive type.
and Hopkins treated cervical carcinomas with radium.
Warton slipped a tube filled with radium
inside Henrietta’s cervix.
When Wharton finished,
a nurse wheeled Henrietta
back into the ward.
Henrietta spent the next two days in the hospital
recovering from her radium treatment.
For a month and a half
no one knew Henrietta was sick.
She only had to go back to Hopkins once,
for a check up and a second radium treatment.
One afternoon, she lifted her shirt
to show Margaret and Sadie
what the treatments had done to her.
The skin from Henrietta;s breast to her pelvis
was charred a deep black from the radiation.
“They burnt you black as tar.”
Henrietta nodded and said
“It just feels like that blackness
be spreading all inside me”
This was the era of Jim Crow when black people had colored-only fountains.
For more than a year, Henrietta had been telling her closest girlfriends something didn’t feel right.
She knew about harvesting tobacco and butchering a pig, but she never heard the words Cervix or Biopsy.
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia on August 1,1920.
Sixth or seven-grade education, mother of five.
Lord, I know you didn’t mean to take away this baby.
As Henrietta and Day grew older, they braded ring-around-the rosy for horse races along the dirt road.
Day stopped in the fourth grade.
Two –dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta’s Cervix spreading like crabgrass.
Henrietta knew nothing about her cells growing in a Laboratory.
His lab might have grown the first immortal human cells.
Henrietta spent her time cooking; she made her famous rice pudding.
Hennie made life come alive-being with her was like being with fun.
On the nights Day worked, Hennie and Sadie put on dancing cloth and sneak out of the house down the street to the dance floors.
Henrietta had walnut eyes.
Always wearing the sulky slip she loved so much she has washed it each night.
You remember when I said I had a knot inside me?
Well I got Cancer.
Lord, It just feels like that blackness spreading all inside me.
Henrietta started radiation therapy.
How the normal cells become cancerous is still a mystery.
Henrietta Lack’s cells began growing in Gey’s lab.
In fact, no one paid much attention to it at all.
The cancer was spreading; she could feel it moving through her.
They found nothing wrong.
Doctors knew best and patients didn’t question that.
Henrietta got the same care any White patient would have.
She returned complaining once again of pain.
A doctor pressed her abdomen and felt a “stony hard mass”.
The patient looks chronically ill.
She was lovey dovey, always smiling, always taking care of us.
Never was a person who say I feel bad.
Her eyes were telling you that she wasn’t gonna be alive no more.
Stone hard tumors filled the inside of her abdomen; the only option:
further irradiation.
Henrietta died at 12:15am on October 4, 1951.
Eleven Years Later…You got my wife cells?
Well, so let my old Lady cells talk to you and leave me alone.
When I asked him to put me in touch with the family in Clover, he laughed and wished me luck.
Everything about Henrietta dead except them cells.
Her cancer wasn’t no regular cancer.
Regular cancer don’t keep on growing after a person die.
By: Silvia Esteves, Monica Galvan, Glory Velázquez,
Francisco Pérez, Ghildres N. Tejedor, Paola Colón
Henrietta Lacks Poem
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia, on August 1, 1920
No one could have guessed she’d spend the rest of her life with Day – first as a cousin growing up in their grandfather’s home, then as his wife.
For more than one year Henrietta had been telling her closest friends something didn’t feel right.
“I got a knot inside me”
With the door closed to her children, husband and cousins, Henrietta slid a finger inside herself and rubbed it across her cervix until she found what she somehow knew she’d find: a hard lump, deep inside, as though someone had lodged a marble just to the left of the opening to her womb.
Jones found a lump exactly where she’d said he would. He described it as an eroded, hard mass about the size of a nickel.
All cancer cells originate from one going wrong
After her visit to Hopkins, Henrietta went about life as usual, cleaning and cooking for her husband, for her children.
Back then, they used patients from the public wards for research usually without their knowledge.
Soon, George told a few of his closest colleagues that he thought his lab might grow the first immortals human cells.
To which they replied, Can I have some? And George said yes.
Henrietta knew nothing about her cells growing in a laboratory.
Her doctors were so sure of her recovery that while she was in the hospital for her second radiu, treatment, they’d perform reconstructive surgery on her nose, fitting the deviated septum that had given her sinus infection, and headaches how whole life.
One afternoon, as Henrietta was on the couch, she lifted her shirt to show Margaret and Sadie what her treatment had done to her.
Sadie gasped; “Hennie,” she whispered, “they burnt you black as tar.”
Eleven years after learning about Henrietta in Defler’s classroom, I stumbled on a collection of scientific papers from something called “The HeLa cancer control simpsium”
“How the normal cells became cancerous is still a mystery”
Gey began sending Henrietta’s cells to any scientist who might use them for cancer research.
If the cells died in the process, it didn’t matter; scientists could just go back to their eternally growing HeLa stock and start over again.
Tissue culture was the stuff of racism, creepy science fiction, Nazis, and snake oil. It wasn’t something to be celebrated. In fact, no one paid much attention to it at all.
Each day, Henrietta’s doctors increased her dose of radiation, hoping it would shrink the tumors and ease the pain until her death.
New tumors seemed to appear daily-on her lumph nodes, hipbones labia- and she spent most daus with a fever up to 105. “Henrietta is still a miserable specimen.”
A few days after my first conversation with Day, I drove from Pittsbrugh to Baltimore to meet his son, David “Soony” Lacks Jr.
Dialed Soony, no reply.
It turned out Turner Station wasn’t just hidden on the map. To get there, I had to drive past the cement wall and fence that blocked it from the interstate.
Finally, I saw a dark wodden sign saying WELCOME TO TURNER STATION.
Mama, She’s Miss Rebecca she is here to talk to you.
You have to watch this tape. What rolled in front of my eyes on that tv screen was a one-hour BBC documentary about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, called The Way Of All Flesh.
By: Pedro Berrios, Rafael Chaparro, Saiska Caraballo, Roberto Carrera, Silkya Ramos, Kellyam Valle (Sec. 072)
There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met
Beneath the photo a caption says her name is Henrietta Lacks
Often she has no name at all
No one knows anything about her
She’s simply called HeLa
The code name given to the worlds first immortal cells-her cells
No one knows how she became Henrrieta
Hennie didn’t fade away
Hennie made life come alive
HeLa’s were omnipresent
That’s a miracle
“I got a knot on my womb”
Jones listened as Henrietta told
About the pain and the blood
Biopsy result: “Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix”
She knew about butchering pigs
…but she’d never heard the word cervix
Jones and Telinde debate over how best to treat it
He insisted only Telinde could
Deborah spoke
Going to the doctor for my checkups I always said: My mother was HeLacks
Mother was on the moon
Mother was on a lab
They tell me every time
We don’t get a dime
People got rich taking her cells
Now…my mother is in everywhere
She’s simply called HeLa,
No one knows how she became Henrietta,
Her doctor took one look inside her,
Saw the lump and sent her to John Hopkins gynecology clinic,
Here she was, with a full-fledged tumor,
After her visit to Hopkins,
Henrietta went about life as casual,
“Nothin serious wrong with me,”
Three weeks after starting X-ray therapy,
She began burning inside,
“Lord, it just feels like that blackness be spreading all inside me.”
On January 29, 1951
That day Henrietta didn’t stop
She went straight to the waiting room
“I got a knot on my womb”
“The doctor needs to have a look”
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke
No one knows how she became Henrietta.
Henrietta’s father, Johnny Pleasant, was a squat man
Her mother, Eliza Lacks Pleasant, died giving birth to her tenth child.
Johnny didn’t have the patience for raising children
So when Eliza died
He took them all back to the tobacco fields
Henrietta ended up with her grandfather
Cancer experts in the country
Reputation was international; he insisted only
Doctors in the field believed that invasive carcinoma was deadly
Few knew how to interpreted the results accurately
Discovered radium and its ability to destroy
Mary pretended not to notice
Mary knew she shouldn’t wait
Gey hire Mary for her hands
Mary was handling most of the tissue
Samples that came through the door
Mary would run over and collect umbilical cord blood
She returned complain once again of pain
Doctor told her she was fine
She went to Hopkins complained about an “ache” in both sides
New tumors seemed to appear daily
Her doctors tried in vain to ease her suffering
“Your cells will make you immortal”
Her pain would come to some good for someone
On January 17, 1912, Alexis Carrel grew an immortal chicken heart.
Euphoria, their samples had always died.
Though she did not know, Henrietta played an important part.
Yes, she did not know, to Henrietta, they had lied.
Doctors knew best, patients didn’t question that.
Taking advantage of many patients, because they were black.
This was a time of benevolent deception.
Lie, cheat, steal; anything for organ conception.
She never understood her now immortal life.
She only wanted to be a good mother and wife.
ingl3104 
Everybody Loved hennie.
She made life come alive.
She was thogh, nothing scared hennie.
She was beautifull and had a pretty smile.
But no one knew henrietta was sick.
Crazy Joe an over average man
was so in love with henrietta he tried to kill himself
He jumped through the ice of a frozen pond
and stabbed himdelf in the chest.
But she married Day
I got a Knot in my womb.
What if its something bad?
You better take me to the doctor Day
Ain’t nothing serious wrong…
Well, I got cancer.
Henrietta is going to die tonight, I pulled into town
Watching the rain fall
I rolled down the window
That spirit stood rigt there on the road.
She wants you to rake care of them children, I told I’d let you know.
Turner station was a town where you never locked your doors.
Stores nightclubs, cafes and schools had closed.
More and more land was zoned for industries to use
which meant more houses torned down
drug dealer, gang and violence were on the rise.
This was not the Turner station Henrietta lived in.
The dead man jumped ,
dead man didn’t do nothing but run.
Mama got no gun,
She dont need one.
I dont live by the gun.
Carlos Velazquez 072, Tai Zayas 072, Lenna Alvarez 072, Luis Badillo 081
For more than a year Henrietta had been telling her closest girlfriends something didn’t feel right. “Hennie you gotta check that out. What if it’s something bad?””You better take me to the doctor. I’m bleeding and it ain’t my time.””Ain’t nothing serious wrong. Doctors gonna fix me right up.” Yet here she was, three months later, with a full-fledged tumor. Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, Stage I. Hopkins treated all invasive carcinoma with radium, a white radioactive metal that glows an eerie blue. Wharton slipped a tube filled with radium inside Henrietta’s cervix, and sewed it in place. With Henrietta unconscious on the operating table in the center of the room, her feet in stirrups, the surgeon on duty, Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr, sat on a stool between her legs. “Henrietta Lacks. . . Biopsy of cervical tissue. . . Tissue given to Dr. George Gey.” ”the cells could die any minute.” Henrietta knew nothing about her cells growing in a laboratory. “Well, I got cancer.” “I’ve been having treatment at John Hopkins.” Until that moment, Henrietta didn’t know that her treatments had left her infertile. “The cells could die any minute.” But they didn’t. They kept growing like nothing anyone had seen, doubling their numbers every 24 hours. My thought was that if you know how to keep tissue alive, there must be some way of equalizing the reserve supply to the area of the throat and face. “The patient looked chronically ill.” “She is obviously in pain.” The doctors examined her and looked at the X-ray: “Inoperable” They said. Each day the skin on her abdomen burned blacker and blacker, and the pain grew worse. “Her eyes were telling that she wasn’t gonna be alive no more”. Henrietta’s body had become so contaminated with toxins. “Don’t you let anything bad happen to them children when I’m gone”. George leaned over Henrietta’s bed and said: “Your cells will make you immortal.” Henrietta died at 12:15 am on October 4, 1951.
Yanira Santiago Perez
Priscilla Newby, Jorge Rivera, Alejandro Rosa, Carlos Tapia, Hector Rosa
There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I never met
She was born Loretta Pleasant
She loved the city
She worked at tobacco fields
In Roakie, Virginia.
She found a hard lamp deep inside.
She didn’t seem to understand what was
going on, “I got a knot in my wound”
The doctor need to have a look”.
Remember when I said : “ I have knot inside,
well I got cancer”.
There’s nothing wrong with me “
Henrietta went about life as usual.
But her eyes here tellin’ you
She wasn’t going to be alive no more
“This story just got to be told!
Praise the lord”.
“Lord!” Henrietta rose up waitin.
Like she’s been possessed by the devil of pain itself
That’s the memory I’ll take to my grave
Henrietta you best leave
You gonna die tonight.
Lorelis Gonzalez, Carlos Acevedo Cajigas, Michelle Lopez, Cristian Garcia, Ricardo Batlle
“I got a knot in my womb”
she told the receptionist.
For more than a year Henrietta
had been telling her girlfriends
something didn’t feel right.
“You better take me to the doctor”
she told her husband.
David drove Henrietta
twenty miles to get there.
So when the nurse called Henrietta
she led her through a single door
to a colored only exam room.
Henrietta lay back on the table,
feet pressed hard in stirrups.
And Jones found a lump
exactly where she’d said he would.
“She had a term delivery here on this hospital”
he said.
“No note is made in the history
that there is any abnormality of the cervix”
Yet here she was, three months later,
with a full-fleged tumor.
Either the doctors had missed it
or it had grown at a terifying rate.
After Jones got Henrietta’s biopsy report
he called and told her it was malignant.
Henrietta didn’t told anyone,
and no one asked.
That night Henrietta told her husband
” I need to go to the doctor tomorrow”
“He wants to do some tests.
give me some medicine.”
The next morning she climbed
from the Buick outside Hopkins.
Went straight to the desk
and told the receptionist
she was there for her treatment.
On her second night at the hospital,
a doctor put her under anesthetic.
Henrietta’s tumor was the invasive type.
and Hopkins treated cervical carcinomas with radium.
Warton slipped a tube filled with radium
inside Henrietta’s cervix.
When Wharton finished,
a nurse wheeled Henrietta
back into the ward.
Henrietta spent the next two days in the hospital
recovering from her radium treatment.
For a month and a half
no one knew Henrietta was sick.
She only had to go back to Hopkins once,
for a check up and a second radium treatment.
One afternoon, she lifted her shirt
to show Margaret and Sadie
what the treatments had done to her.
The skin from Henrietta;s breast to her pelvis
was charred a deep black from the radiation.
“They burnt you black as tar.”
Henrietta nodded and said
“It just feels like that blackness
be spreading all inside me”
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
This was the era of Jim Crow when black people had colored-only fountains.
For more than a year, Henrietta had been telling her closest girlfriends something didn’t feel right.
She knew about harvesting tobacco and butchering a pig, but she never heard the words Cervix or Biopsy.
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia on August 1,1920.
Sixth or seven-grade education, mother of five.
Lord, I know you didn’t mean to take away this baby.
As Henrietta and Day grew older, they braded ring-around-the rosy for horse races along the dirt road.
Day stopped in the fourth grade.
Two –dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta’s Cervix spreading like crabgrass.
Henrietta knew nothing about her cells growing in a Laboratory.
His lab might have grown the first immortal human cells.
Henrietta spent her time cooking; she made her famous rice pudding.
Hennie made life come alive-being with her was like being with fun.
On the nights Day worked, Hennie and Sadie put on dancing cloth and sneak out of the house down the street to the dance floors.
Henrietta had walnut eyes.
Always wearing the sulky slip she loved so much she has washed it each night.
You remember when I said I had a knot inside me?
Well I got Cancer.
Lord, It just feels like that blackness spreading all inside me.
Henrietta started radiation therapy.
How the normal cells become cancerous is still a mystery.
Henrietta Lack’s cells began growing in Gey’s lab.
In fact, no one paid much attention to it at all.
The cancer was spreading; she could feel it moving through her.
They found nothing wrong.
Doctors knew best and patients didn’t question that.
Henrietta got the same care any White patient would have.
She returned complaining once again of pain.
A doctor pressed her abdomen and felt a “stony hard mass”.
The patient looks chronically ill.
She was lovey dovey, always smiling, always taking care of us.
Never was a person who say I feel bad.
Her eyes were telling you that she wasn’t gonna be alive no more.
Stone hard tumors filled the inside of her abdomen; the only option:
further irradiation.
Henrietta died at 12:15am on October 4, 1951.
Eleven Years Later…You got my wife cells?
Well, so let my old Lady cells talk to you and leave me alone.
When I asked him to put me in touch with the family in Clover, he laughed and wished me luck.
Everything about Henrietta dead except them cells.
Her cancer wasn’t no regular cancer.
Regular cancer don’t keep on growing after a person die.
By: Silvia Esteves, Monica Galvan, Glory Velázquez,
Francisco Pérez, Ghildres N. Tejedor, Paola Colón
Henrietta Lacks Poem
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia, on August 1, 1920
No one could have guessed she’d spend the rest of her life with Day – first as a cousin growing up in their grandfather’s home, then as his wife.
For more than one year Henrietta had been telling her closest friends something didn’t feel right.
“I got a knot inside me”
With the door closed to her children, husband and cousins, Henrietta slid a finger inside herself and rubbed it across her cervix until she found what she somehow knew she’d find: a hard lump, deep inside, as though someone had lodged a marble just to the left of the opening to her womb.
Jones found a lump exactly where she’d said he would. He described it as an eroded, hard mass about the size of a nickel.
All cancer cells originate from one going wrong
After her visit to Hopkins, Henrietta went about life as usual, cleaning and cooking for her husband, for her children.
Back then, they used patients from the public wards for research usually without their knowledge.
Soon, George told a few of his closest colleagues that he thought his lab might grow the first immortals human cells.
To which they replied, Can I have some? And George said yes.
Henrietta knew nothing about her cells growing in a laboratory.
Her doctors were so sure of her recovery that while she was in the hospital for her second radiu, treatment, they’d perform reconstructive surgery on her nose, fitting the deviated septum that had given her sinus infection, and headaches how whole life.
One afternoon, as Henrietta was on the couch, she lifted her shirt to show Margaret and Sadie what her treatment had done to her.
Sadie gasped; “Hennie,” she whispered, “they burnt you black as tar.”
Eleven years after learning about Henrietta in Defler’s classroom, I stumbled on a collection of scientific papers from something called “The HeLa cancer control simpsium”
“How the normal cells became cancerous is still a mystery”
Gey began sending Henrietta’s cells to any scientist who might use them for cancer research.
If the cells died in the process, it didn’t matter; scientists could just go back to their eternally growing HeLa stock and start over again.
Tissue culture was the stuff of racism, creepy science fiction, Nazis, and snake oil. It wasn’t something to be celebrated. In fact, no one paid much attention to it at all.
Each day, Henrietta’s doctors increased her dose of radiation, hoping it would shrink the tumors and ease the pain until her death.
New tumors seemed to appear daily-on her lumph nodes, hipbones labia- and she spent most daus with a fever up to 105. “Henrietta is still a miserable specimen.”
A few days after my first conversation with Day, I drove from Pittsbrugh to Baltimore to meet his son, David “Soony” Lacks Jr.
Dialed Soony, no reply.
It turned out Turner Station wasn’t just hidden on the map. To get there, I had to drive past the cement wall and fence that blocked it from the interstate.
Finally, I saw a dark wodden sign saying WELCOME TO TURNER STATION.
Mama, She’s Miss Rebecca she is here to talk to you.
You have to watch this tape. What rolled in front of my eyes on that tv screen was a one-hour BBC documentary about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, called The Way Of All Flesh.
By: Pedro Berrios, Rafael Chaparro, Saiska Caraballo, Roberto Carrera, Silkya Ramos, Kellyam Valle (Sec. 072)
There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met
Beneath the photo a caption says her name is Henrietta Lacks
Often she has no name at all
No one knows anything about her
She’s simply called HeLa
The code name given to the worlds first immortal cells-her cells
No one knows how she became Henrrieta
Hennie didn’t fade away
Hennie made life come alive
HeLa’s were omnipresent
That’s a miracle
“I got a knot on my womb”
Jones listened as Henrietta told
About the pain and the blood
Biopsy result: “Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix”
She knew about butchering pigs
…but she’d never heard the word cervix
Jones and Telinde debate over how best to treat it
He insisted only Telinde could
Deborah spoke
Going to the doctor for my checkups I always said: My mother was HeLacks
Mother was on the moon
Mother was on a lab
They tell me every time
We don’t get a dime
People got rich taking her cells
Now…my mother is in everywhere
She’s simply called HeLa,
No one knows how she became Henrietta,
Her doctor took one look inside her,
Saw the lump and sent her to John Hopkins gynecology clinic,
Here she was, with a full-fledged tumor,
After her visit to Hopkins,
Henrietta went about life as casual,
“Nothin serious wrong with me,”
Three weeks after starting X-ray therapy,
She began burning inside,
“Lord, it just feels like that blackness be spreading all inside me.”
On January 29, 1951
That day Henrietta didn’t stop
She went straight to the waiting room
“I got a knot on my womb”
“The doctor needs to have a look”
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke
No one knows how she became Henrietta.
Henrietta’s father, Johnny Pleasant, was a squat man
Her mother, Eliza Lacks Pleasant, died giving birth to her tenth child.
Johnny didn’t have the patience for raising children
So when Eliza died
He took them all back to the tobacco fields
Henrietta ended up with her grandfather
Cancer experts in the country
Reputation was international; he insisted only
Doctors in the field believed that invasive carcinoma was deadly
Few knew how to interpreted the results accurately
Discovered radium and its ability to destroy
Mary pretended not to notice
Mary knew she shouldn’t wait
Gey hire Mary for her hands
Mary was handling most of the tissue
Samples that came through the door
Mary would run over and collect umbilical cord blood
She returned complain once again of pain
Doctor told her she was fine
She went to Hopkins complained about an “ache” in both sides
New tumors seemed to appear daily
Her doctors tried in vain to ease her suffering
“Your cells will make you immortal”
Her pain would come to some good for someone
On January 17, 1912, Alexis Carrel grew an immortal chicken heart.
Euphoria, their samples had always died.
Though she did not know, Henrietta played an important part.
Yes, she did not know, to Henrietta, they had lied.
Doctors knew best, patients didn’t question that.
Taking advantage of many patients, because they were black.
This was a time of benevolent deception.
Lie, cheat, steal; anything for organ conception.
She never understood her now immortal life.
She only wanted to be a good mother and wife.