Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Skloot, Rebecca.  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.   New York: Crown Publishers, 2010.

As much as I blasted The Help  for how it handles the ethics of being a listener to and conveyor of someone else’s stories, I would like to laud The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for its respectful handling of the life of Henrietta Lacks, her family, and others associated with the life of the HeLa cells.

But before launching into my encomium on this point, let me assure you that this is a fascinating book for other reasons, as well.  Here's why: 1) You’ll learn about the HeLa cells and lots of other cool medical stuff.  2) You’ll meet people who refuse to tell their stories and appreciate their courage when they relent. 3) You’ll empathize with your narrator who’s trying to make sense of conflicting information amidst reactions of hatred, confusion, and paranoia. 4) You’ll get a glimpse into what can and can’t be done with the fluids and matter taken from you during lab appointments and checkups. 5) You’ll marvel at the immortality of one Mrs. Henrietta Lacks, who now has a name, a history, and a legacy.  You will realize how much we all owe her.

Now for the hospitality encomium.   I marvel at how Skloot simultaneously conveys the frustrations of dealing with one reluctant story teller after the next without suggesting that you should feel sorry for her struggle.  Unlike The Help, The Immortal Life focuses on how hard it is for the Lacks family to trust this journalist, this stranger—for so many valid and invalid reasons—instead of how much patience and determination our beleaguered narrator must have in order to tolerate the misinformed, prejudiced, and uneducated.  From the beginning to the end, Skloot never loses sight of the medical, social, and personal injustices that Henrietta, her family, and her descendents have suffered.  However, and more importantly, Skloot does not depict them as the saints, sinners, and saviors that Trudier Harris objects to in so many African American representations.  Skloot portrays some of the Lacks family members as angry, suspicious, and vengeful.  Although they appear ignoble at times, they appear authentic all the time.  Instead of justifying or condemning them for their flaws, Skloot explains them--without judgment.  Implicitly, she asks us to consider if the medical community had taken, disseminated, profited from, experimented with, and cultivated your mother’s cells during its poorly diagnosing and treating her case, wouldn’t you be furious? On top of that, if you didn’t understand the medical procedures, ethics, and legality, wouldn’t you be confused and even paranoid?  And if you couldn’t pay for your own health insurance while millions of vials of your mother’s cells are being sold for profit and vats of your mother’s cells are being regenerated all over the world without attribution, wouldn’t you be vengeful?  You probably would; and they are, as well.  Their story, Henrietta’s story, her cells’ story, and many others’ are told authentically—flaws and all.  It’s not necessary to admire any of the participants in the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks, including our intrepid narrator/journalist.  It is important, however, to identify and appreciate the concessions and contributions they ultimately make.

I commend Rebecca Skloot for being the perfect host to those whom she has welcomed and the perfect guest to those who have welcomed her in the telling of their stories.  As I consider Skloot’s story of their stories,  I keep reevaluating the hospitality I afford others when I tell my tales and listen to theirs.  Perhaps, we could all regenerate and circulate that hospitality worldwide, creating our own immortal lives of hosts and guests. 

Kathryn Stockett's The Help

    Stockett, Kathryn.  The Help.  New York: Amy Einhorn Books, 2009.

The Help  affords us a plethora of hospitality lessons—mostly proscriptions, mostly obvious ones:  Treat the caretaker of your elderly and children with respect.  Treat the person who maintains the order of your house with respect.  And the most obvious—don’t piss off the person cooking your food.

I’d like to examine a less obvious one: Treat the person telling you her story with respect. 

You can read several hundred pages and still be impressed with how Skeeter navigates the narration of the “Negro” maids’ stories.   Then, you’ll read that she absent mindedly leaves behind the “satchel” with some of those stories at what amounts to a small town Junior League meeting whose leader is a particularly disgusting but typically racist “white” woman advocating for separate toilets in all homes with “Negro” help.   True, Skeeter worries about her transgression—worried about Little Miss “White” Woman getting her hands on these stories.  But this is far more that a transgression.  This could amount to a death sentence for the Help who’ve revealed intimate aspects of their employers’ lives.  The details of their stories need no interpretation to reveal a scathing portrayal of one “white” female wife/mother after the next.  These women could lose their jobs, their lives, and their families’ lives.   For them, Skeeter should be terrified.  But the novel reveals, no worries for Skeeter (or the Help) because she retrieves the satchel without the stories being read.  She hopes. But wait. Her nemesis—Miss Hilly LeLeefolt—does see a book cataloguing Jim Crow laws, which is enough to indicate that her “friend” Skeeter should be watched and simultaneously, shunned.  Thus, Skeeter gets ditched by the bitches.   Instead of a sigh of “Good riddance!” the novel adopts a poor little rich girl sympathy for Skeeter.  This concern is totally misplaced.  We’d do better to extend our sympathies to these maids who are about to be discovered blabbing their deepest resentments.

So far, Skeeter has jeopardized only her social standing among bigots.  However, amidst racist assaults and murder, the Help and their neighbors risk far more—their jobs, their homes, and their lives.  Not  Skeeter.  Instead of taking more precautions for insuring the Help’s privacy and secrecy, Skeeter deliberately puts them at risk when she divulges her project to her boyfriend—a Senator’s son, an alcoholic, and probably a racist—all of which she knows.  The novel should have cut her loose at this point, wagging a finger in shame as it stood arms akimbo over her.  Rather, the novel just moves on.

Disaster strikes after the book of stories is published and advertised on television.  When someone recognizes a detail that clearly reveals a particular dining room table in a particular house of a particular “white” female racist employer, the town’s identity is determined, as well as the identity of the Help.  They suffer, of course.  But they are triumphant in their cause, so goes the novel. And Skeeter?  She leaves this small town hell hole for the big city publishing paradise.

I know that you’re primed for my diatribe.  Once again a great story becomes mired in solipsism.  Like Clive Cleeve’s Little Bee,  here’s another novel that releases the “white” woman from responsibility while glorifying  the “black” woman’s struggles and suffering.  If you think I’m off-track here, read Trudier Harris’s Saints, Sinners, and Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature.  She admonishes, “Seldom have we stopped to think, however, that this thing called strength, this thing we applaud so much in black women, could also have detrimental effects or consequences” (10).  She explains further, “The landscape of African American literature is peopled with black female characters who are almost too strong for their own good, whether that strength is moral or physical, or both” (11).  Harris catalogues these stereotypically strong African American characters: “more suprahuman than human, more introspective—indeed, at times, isolated—than involved, more silently working out what she perceived to be best for her children than actively and warmly communicating those desires to them” (11).  I agree with Harris that what’s lauded by our narrator is achieved at too high of a price—the price of self-actualizing. 

We need to be careful that we authentically depict the stories of others rather than eulogize their miseries and struggles, which so often keeps them ensnared in a master narrative of pity more than understanding, of sympathy more than appreciation, and of shame more than honor.  The Help  tells more than the story of these female characters.  It implies a slice of life during the American Civil Rights Movement.  As such, it should attempt to break the mold of the stereotypically strong, enduring, and sacrificing “black” woman.  Rather, it should respect the hospitality of guest and host—in this case, teller and listener—by treating stories as vehicles for female self-actualizing.

Note: As usual, I’ve interwoven my interest in hospitality with my interest in female hospitality.  Later, I may bifurcate this essay, delineating between the two.  Until then, I’ll leave it as it stands, pondering the overlap.

Note: I’m not a fan of the “white” and “black” distinction because it’s invalid and perpetuates insider/outsider divisions.  See Paul Gilroy’s Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, in which he contends that racism is fascism. Gilroy insists that we must rethink our “intellectual, ethical, & political projects in the critical scholarship

of ‘races’”.  We must ask ourselves, as intellectuals if we have “become complicit in the reification of racial difference?” Scholars must pursue their studies as ethical members of the human “race.”  I agree.  So if you can suggest a better rhetoric, please do.

Vowel, Sarah. The Wordy Shipmates

     Vowel, Sarah. The Wordy Shipmates. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

 “The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don’t mean thought-provoking.  I mean: might get people killed” (1).  So begins Sarah Vowel’s rendition of the American “Puritans who fall between the cracks of 1620 Plymouth and  1692 Salem, the ones who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then Rhode Island during what came to be called the Great Migration” (23).  Admittedly, she’s no Perry Miller although she has read his works.  Rather, Vowel is funny, often irreverent, and always fact-oriented.  She’s done her homework and then some—travelling to many historic sights for an often disappointing but usually enlightening view of how we have memorialized (or failed to) these historic figures and events.

For the most part, Vowel navigates a hate-love interpretation of the Puritans.  Specifically, Roger Williams, Anne Hatchcock, and John Winthrop inspire and disappoint her.  More generally, she admires the pluckiness and literariness of the Pilgrims but detests their treatment of Native Americans, who are burned in their homes, deliberately infected, cheated, deceived, and scorned.  Step aside the mythology of Thanksgiving that merely reveals our nostalgic need to rewrite our inhospitality to our hosts and later, guests.

Unfortunately, the Puritans didn’t always treat their neighbors much better.  They exiled them in the middle of brutally cold winters, severed their ears, withheld spiritual comfort, and publically scorned them.  So don’t look for halos or pedestals from Vowel. 

Vowel is particularly drawn to Winthop’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity” and in particular, to his famous line: “We shall be as a city upon a hill” (11).  How many others—politicians, clergy, educators, and writers—have quoted and appropriated that metaphor of “a city upon a hill”?  Many, many.  Why is it such an attractive metaphor, lending itself to manipulation and the illusion of freshness?  A city upon a hill is an image that we see upon approach—with our dreams and expectations.  It’s on a hill to protect its inhabitants, to stand apart from those below, to establish a focal point, and to afford long-reaching vision.  All that’s obvious, I know.  Being upon a hill, the city is raised—as an apparition and an inspiration.  Think Mont—St.-Michel.  You’re on a crowded bus, driving in the middle of flat country, after you’ve taken the long train ride from Paris.  Bam. There it appears.  Not just eking out of the ground but suddenly looming over the landscape.  It doesn’t appear gradually.  One minute, there’s nothing interesting ahead.  The next, there’s the entire city upon the hill.  It grabs you unexpectedly.  The city upon the hill overpowers and excites.  Moreover, it welcomes you.  It promises hospitality.

That was the idea behind the early Pilgrim settlements—welcoming like-minded religious folks into a stable governance.  The founders see themselves as “God’s chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire” (24).  Ergo, the origins of “Manifest Destiny” that licensed the Trail of Tears, the genesis of Westward Expansion, Guantanamo Bay, and one invasion after the next in the name of Christianity and democracy—whether ethical or not so much.

What if the origins of the US trajectory to all things “American” had maintained its hospitality?  No Calvinism that G/god did not create all men equal.  What if Winthrop—not a minister but a governor—had maintained his conviction that “Man is commanded to love his neighbor as himself”?  What if Winthrop’s leadership had sustained his conviction, per Romans 12:20, that if “thine enemy hunger, feed them”?  (46) What if, instead of banishing dissenters, he had held to his own conviction:  “We must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body”? (51).

Would there have been no Pequot War?  No Mystic Fort Massacre? No Salem Village witch trials? No Bear River Massacre of the Shoshone?  No Sand Creek Massacre?  No Wounded Knee Massacre? No slavery?  No Civil War?  No Japanese internment camps? No President Regan’s apologizing “for his underlings’ secret and illegal weapons sales to Iran in exchange for hostages and to purchase weapons for anticommunist Nicaraguan death squads” (64)?  No Abu Ghraib?

Vowel’s book is as much an inspection of where the US went wrong as it is and examination of the Puritans.  What Vowel speculates is that the basic conflict of life in the US is “between public and private, between the body politic and the individual, between we the people and each person’s pursuit of happiness” (128).  This is Aristotle’s struggle of eudaemonia—the tug for self-interest against the tug for something more than self-interest.  Such a conflict fuels self-actualization, which—unlike coming of age—requires us to know ourselves without defining ourselves by master narratives and requires us to act for others without jeopardizing our self-fashioning.  Thus, we self-actualize amidst, against, and for about others.  This is the essence of hospitality.

Not only did Winthrop and other otherwise good Puritan folk fail to negotiate how to flourish in private and public, politically and personally, but they failed to preserve their original sense of hospitality.  And without hospitality between host and guest, between friend and enemy, and between stranger and acquaintance, we cannot self-actualize.  Winthrop and his followers succumbed to fear and intolerance because they failed to allow others to reject their master narrative just as they had rejected England’s.  The Puritan who came closest to such egalitarian tolerance was Roger Williams, who embraced religious freedom.  But that just got him banished.

Sarah Vowell believes that President Kennedy afforded the US a “new beginning and he is not alone” (248).  Those are her final thoughts.  I can’t understand that ending, for so much has gone wrong in JFK’s wake (and during his presidency, for that matter). 

Is it too late for the US to become hospitable?  Can the US learn to tolerate those who authentically refute its religious, economic, and political master narratives?  Can the US learn to accept those who don’t accept Christianity, capitalism, and “democracy”?  Is it too late for the US to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, . . .promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. . .?”  Is it too late to interpret “We the People of the United States” as those of us with and without citizenship, those of us who are poor and rich, those of us who are educated and uneducated, and those of us we admire and don’t?

Hospitality in the Digital Age

   I decided to go “home” for Christmas even though I don’t like Christmas.  Of all the hospitality issues that I pondered discussing here—my sister’s irritation with her husband (the “ghost host,”), unofficially co-hosting a dinner in someone else’s kitchen, and more—I decided to address texting during our “circle of death” multi-family gatherings.  Let me go on record as confessing that I am no Luddite.  I’m obsessed with my smart phone, laptop, Ipod, blogs, podcasts, apps, Kindle, etc.  However, I just couldn't condone couch-texting while visiting family members whom you haven’t seen in months.  That was a week ago.

Last night, during a lull in my email searching, listening to a French jazz Pandora station, I relayed my revulsion for this rudeness to my husband who patiently listened, waited for my arms-akimbo tone of voice to relax, and remarked that I do the same thing.  Rifling through my well-seasoned repertoire of spouse retorts, I demanded one example.  He gave it to me.  Time and place.  He recalled what he was communicating, or trying to, and how I was searching my Droid 2 Global phone.  What else could I do but admit that I had been rude.  If you know anything about marriage, you’ll know that this only kindled his dispute.  He continued.  “I don’t get it. You hate it when your students…You hate it when your sister…When your mother…”  I forget the rest of his litany, but I assure you that 1) I was listening and 2) he was eloquent.

OK, OK.  I was wrong.  I was rude.  I was inhospitable.  I admitted it.  Let it go, I insisted. 

Unfortunately, I had missed his real point.  More than breaching some hospitality code or violating some ethic, I had hurt his feelings. My actions had said to him, “You are not as important as some random piece of information that might possibly emerge from my search.”  (BTW, do you know the difference between a web browser and an search engine?  Do you know what the “fi” in “Wi-fi” stands for?  I do!)

For Christmas, my step-daughter gave me William Powers's Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.* I was puzzled.  But she explained, "You love Hamlet and you love technology."  After reading the first 50 pages, I’m not sure that her choice was so innocent.  By that point, I realized that the author, no Luddite himself, is pleading with me to pay attention to the gaps between our tech connections.  “Gaps,” remember that concept.  Here’s the story he tells at the beginning of the book: 

While driving to see his mother, Powers calls to tell her that (as usual) he’s going to be late.  He mashes one button, which triggers his mom’s photo to appear, and the call goes through.  It’s a short call but accomplishes the notification he desires.  Thereafter, as he drives on, he muses about his mother—what he thinks of her, how he feels about her, what they've done together, and how much he’s looking forward to their upcoming dinner. 

Powers explains the significance of his illustration:  “The total number of mobile phones in the world went from about 500 million at the beginning of this century to approaching 5 billion today.  But there’s a missing piece: the real magic of these tools, the catalyst that transforms them from utilitarian devices into instruments of creativity, depth, and transcendence, likes in the gap that occurred between my phone call to Mom and the powerful experience that followed.  That gap was the linchpin, the catalyst.  It allowed me to take a run-of-the-mill outward experience and go onward.  It’s the same for every kind of digital task.  If you pile them on so fast that screen life becomes a blur and there are no gaps in your connectedness, you never get to that place where the most valuable benefits are.  We’re eliminating the gaps, when we should be creating them.” 31

How does his advice apply to my Christmas scenario?  Powers has me wondering that if we truly struggle to converse with each other, given the difference in our lives and values, maybe one tech connect could serve as a catalyst for a conversation starter.  But just one.  Perhaps, someone could check the NPR news stories of the day or another’s face book page, stop with that search, and inject that information into the conversation. Does that sound like a practical philosophy for "building a good life in the digital age?"  

Let's move downstairs to where the guys are watching that once-in-a-lifetime football game and erupting with elations and condemnations like the audience of an auto de fe.  I could argue that watching the game and talking about it was the perfect screen-to-gap combination that Powers espouses.  In that case, my brother-in-law—whom my sister branded “the ghost host” because he did not greet guests at the door and faithfully refill drinks—afforded his guests true hospitality.  He made them feel welcome, comfortable, and taken care of.  Moreover, he modeled that olde hospitality adage that a host needs to enjoy his own party if he wants his guests to have a good time.  It seems that there's something to be learned from his less-is-more approach to hospitality. 

To recap…Maybe creating the gaps within tech connects--discussing a search or responding to a football play--can foster meaningful interactions.  Perhaps people who attend to the gaps (instead of the screens) are our new practical hosts in the expanding digital age. I’m not sure, but I'm willing to consider that.  

What I am sure of is that there’s no excuse for privileging my Smart Phone over my husband’s conversation.  Bad, bad hospitality maven.  


* I discuss Hamlet's Blackberry  in more detail in ReadandExceed.blogspot.com