Grand Ballroom, Hilton Chicago | March 2, 2012

Episode 41: A Reading and Conversation with Jaimy Gordon and Rebecca Skloot

(Jaimy Gordon, Donna Seaman, Rebecca Skloot) A reading and conversation by best-selling authors Jaimy Gordon and Rebecca Skloot. The conversation will be moderated by critic and editor Donna Seaman.

Published Date: June 6, 2012

Transcription

Amber:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 2nd, 2012. The recording features Jaimy Gordon and Rebecca Skloot. Now, you'll hear Donna Seaman from the American Library Association provide introductions.

Donna Seaman:

Thank you so much, Amber, and thank you all for being here today for this event. Thank you for joining us in this grand room with two top-of-the-chart writers, two writers who have galvanized critics and readers. That doesn't always go in sync, novelist Jaimy Gordon and science writer Rebecca Skloot. When Jaimy Gordon won the National Book Award for her novel about life at a rundown West Virginia racetrack, journalists could not resist describing Lord of Misrule as a dark horse and it's winning the big prize as a long shot. Even though Lord of Misrule was Jaimy Gordon's fourth published novel. Shamp of the City-Solo is now considered an underground classic. She drove through without stopping, met with great acclaim, and Boogie Woman was named a Los Angeles Times best fiction pick. Readers who love fiction that illuminates the workings of the mind and delectable rich language knew Jaimy already as a winner, but there certainly was stealth to her ambushing triumph, because her national book award-winning novel was published by a small press, McPherson and Company and because Jaimy defies mainstream expectations.

Janet Massillon in the New York Times said, Lord of Misrule is then I quote, "So assured, exotic, and uncategorizable with such an unlikely provenance that it [inaudible 00:01:51] as an incontrovertible winner, a bonafide bolt from the blue". Andre Cojester told the Wall Street Journal that Jaimy has an incredible command of other voices and a sense of music and language that is unequaled. Rosell and Brown praised Jaimy for her unique combination of bitterness and cheer and sexual knowingness, her gutsy authority. Jane Smiley wrote in her Washington Post review, "Gordon has completely mastered the language of the racetrack and formed it into an evocative idiosyncratic style." Born and raised in Baltimore, holding a doctorate from Brown University. Jaimy teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and in the Prague summer program for writers. She has published poetry, plays, short stories, and essays and received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, and an Academy Award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters. Please welcome Jaimy Gordon.

Jaimy Gordon:

Thank you. It's wonderful to be here and I thank the AWP for inviting me. It's wonderful to be doing this. I know that Donna eventually is going to look for a link between Rebecca Skloot and me and it won't be easy. So she gave me a hint yesterday that she's going to talk about fact and fiction and the missing link between the research and I looked for passages that I could read that would in some way reflect on that. One of the reasons that I wrote this book was that I was interested in the old time African-American grooms who dominated the labor force on the racetrack when I worked on the track around 1970, but who were almost gone now by 2010. It was pretty clear that if I didn't write about them, there wouldn't be anybody left to write about them. So I'm going to read mostly from the point of view of one of my four major characters, Medicine Ed. Medicine Ed... Also, well, in the pages that I'm going to read reflect a little bit on just how scientific horse racing is or isn't.

I found that the research that I really needed to do for this book was not about science so much as about magic and Medicine Ed at least fancies that he can do magic. At the start of the section that I'm going to read, he's just found out that the horse that he is holding for a blacksmith is called Mr. Boll Weevil. Since his principal intention in life right now is to find a way off the racetrack at the age of 72, and he knows that the Boll Weevil in the song is looking for a home, he thinks he's got a message that he should play this horse. It was no need for studying and dreaming. Often in the past, if Medicine Ed need to know about a horse, he could sit over a hand made of tail and main hairs of the horse and tied with a red string and a hoof shaving and one green corner bit of his lucky money and push them around in hot candle sperm with a hoof pick under the light of the same white candle and dream until the answer come to him.

But today was no need, no time. Soon as he heard the name of the horse Zeno was running, he knew what he must do. He must ride his lucky money on Mr. Boll Weevil who had beckoned to him and somehow he felt he had to touch his lucky money just then. It is, nevermind if it looks strange, he stumbled into the trailer. It was a fifty Zeno gave him last year when they stole a nice little race in the Poconos with small town dock. He kept it pressed flat and neat between the lid and the waxed cardboard seal of a pickle jar of Hedge Beach Leaf. The bill was evenly folded four times, so Ulysses S. Grant looked up thoughtful at you out of the lower left-hand corner. It was no use wishing it was a hundred or a couple of hundreds. He'd seen better years than them with Zeno and worse years. Thing of it was, he had lucky money. Like the boll weevil, he was looking for a home and here was Mr. Boll Weevil in the fourth slot in the fourth race, beckoning to him.

It was not a harming goofer that Medicine Ed knew the makings of. This ghost gray powder had never been meant to undo a horse. It was a root work of strong encouragement of reaching deep into the lost harmony and milking up one drop of what was needed at the last. The gray rolled leaf, which stuck to itself like cobweb, came from a hedge beach in the old Salters' family plot hard by New life Baptist Church in Cambrai, South Carolina. The tree grew sideways out of the grave of his grandfather, Eduardo Salters, greatest jockey ever known in South Carolina, born in slavery, killed in a match race in 1888. It sprung out of the grave dirt, twisted in the shape of a man riding with one straight limb shooting out of it like a whip and its leaves must be collected a dark of moon from that limb only. This jar was dried heart leaf. This one was horse mushroom. This here was bone set.

The fine gray gold sugar with specks of black peat in it was sand and shatters from the infield of Major Long Street Park in that little arc of elderberry bush where cannonball was buried. Finally, he had needed blood of great speed and what he got must was good enough. This was the blood of Platonic who he had rubbed for whirly gig farm and who give him his own bleeding ulcer. Platonic had scratched his fetlock in the gate the day he won the seashell and Ed had scooched down before he let the horse have his bath and scraped every black flake into this little bottle here. That, once he mixed it to his recipe, was Medicine Ed's horse goofer dust, but he had give up doctoring. Come to find out, if you asked by powerful means for more than the animal had to give, you could not manage the results. Some way, that was the last race of the horse, at least the last he ever saw.

Every time he had cast the powder, the horse had won, but won for the last time, and which was why he had let the medicine go, all except his name, which nobody up here was wise to where I come from, and that was a good thing. But now, the peculiar harmony of Mr. Boll Weevil running in the fourth race had beckoned to him. He was 72 years old and tired. He never paid no mind to horses' names, disremembered most of them. This one sneaked up on him. He's looking for a home. He's looking for a home. Must be some kind of home out there looking for him, Medicine Ed. At the beginning of this novel, Medicine Ed wouldn't dream of working for the fly-by-night outfit of Tommy Hansel and his girlfriend, Maggie. But because you can never plan anything very far on the racetrack, he ends up working for them after all. Although, he and Maggie don't get along very well, they end up being in cahoots on a number of things.

But in this particular section, he's trying to teach her a little bit of something about the racetrack and here's where he makes a comment on how scientific horse raising might be. The frizzly hair girl, the young fool's woman was barking up his heels again with Pelter. She would walk a horse fast, that girl. She liked to hurry a horse and him too. Sometimes she got so fresh, she tipped clean out from under the shed row, carried Pelter in the dirt road, and passed Medicine Ed and the horse he was walking on the right-hand side. Not if the young fool was watching, she wouldn't. He'd fuss with her if she tried that. Must be worried he'd stick out enough around here already, and for good reason. Anyhow, he want everything done the old way, according to etiquette. The cleanest hay, timothy and alfalfa, best quality pine tar foot dressing. Zeno used to mix up his own out of used motor oil and turpentine. Best grain, 100% Castile shampoo and the most experienced old time groom fool enough to take his job. Naturally, Pelter go along with the girl just fine.

Pelter was a game animal. He was always that, bit of a clown. Even before he was born, he had jumped around the usual etiquette of the business, but he was an unusual creature on the racetrack, even if you'd been around as long as Medicine Ed, namely a field bred horse or that was the story. Some stud horse, maybe not the one officially certified on the papers, who knew, had sneaked around or over a fence somewhere and went with his mother. Some name like Home Cookin'. She wasn't much of a mare and nobody wasn't expecting much out of her and she got this witch-eyed, long-backed colt who turned into a legend, Pelter, and which if he could talk and Medicine Ed wouldn't put it past him, why? Why couldn't the two of them say about the type of folks they had fell in with now? The girl, the young fool's woman, she didn't know nothing and she couldn't do nothing, but she would work. He'd give her that much. Haul them buckets, sling them bales just like a man, better than a man if you look at what they got from men around here anymore.

If she didn't know nothing to do, she'd find something to do and get all in your hair or climb up your heels like now. She'd make it up as she'd go along and the hole in her head where experience would've stacked up, if she had any experience, that's where she must find them, her chucklehead ideas. "You can't gallop an old horse every day, am I right," she'd say. "Hm. So he gets walked, correct?" Medicine Ed would just eyeball her. "Okay. If it keeps Pelter sound to walk, isn't it reasonable that walking him fast is a little better than walking him slow?" "Don't you be putting off your heebie jeebies on Pelter there. He ain't nervous. You nervous. He ain't in a hurry. You in a hurry." "I didn't say he was nervous. I said maybe it'd be good for him to go a little faster." "Good for you, you mean." "Good for you too, you old Halloween boon boons. Get your appetite up," and she grinned, evilly. "I had a stick leg since before you was born, young woman."

This wasn't quite true, but somehow the vintage of an injury seemed like it ought to get some respect, like what he used to have for his granddaddy who still limped from the war. "Does I go around calling you four eyes?" "You probably call me worse than that behind my back." "What I call you, ignorant, green. You's all of that." Finally, it was nothing else to do but show her, learn her a thing or two in self-defense. He taught her how to rub down the horse's leg and put on the cottons and bandage, smooth and not too tight, without poking it through with the pin and putting a hole in the animal. Then she thought she knows something, then she'd want to bandage everything in sight. She'd go around bandaging, young and old, lame and sound on her own say so and Medicine Ed come around behind her unbandaging. "What can it hurt," she'd say.

"Young woman, it is a price on everything. Every change make some other change that you can't see. I know some trainers have never bandaged a horse and they got horses outrun the word of God. When you run against them horses, you better have your tap dancing shoes on." "Well, you're talking about somebody's $50,000 horse. We've got nothing but cripples." "You think stakes horses [inaudible 00:14:55] sound?" He shook his head at the pure foolishness of her. Naturally, he was thinking of Platonic and his feet that used to remind Medicine Ed of gluing together two broken China soup plates from little pieces. Him and the horse sure worked on them so much. Them two front feet coming up to the seashell was one long bellyache, probably worth two weeks in the butcher shop, Sinai Hospital, all by their selves. "Stake horses like all the rest," she added. "So how do you know what to do?" "You follow custom, young woman. There is no I know, he know like what you're talking about. Until you have put some years in this business, you watch the old grooms and do like they do."

"That doesn't sound very scientific to me," she say. "I tell you a secret. Horse racing is not no science. Some of them tries to make it a science with the drugs and the chemicals and that, but matter of fact, it's more like a religion. It's a clouded thing. You can't see through it. It come down to a person's beliefs. One person believe this and the other person believe that. It's like the National Baptist bandage and the Southern Baptist [inaudible 00:16:11]. You see what I'm trying to say? Nobody exactly know." His cheeks ached under his eyes. She made him talk too much, made him say peculiar things he was sorry later that he give up. He slipped around the corner of the shed row and faded away from her behind wagons and buildings in a certain way he had learned to do long ago. Thank you.

Donna Seaman:

Thank you so much, Jaimy. When I spoke with the great scientist, writer, and humanist, Edward O. Wilson about writing his first novel, Anthill, at age 80, Dr. Wilson said, "I think that creative writing is one of the most satisfying experiences available to a human being. I've done it in nonfiction primarily and now in fiction, and I do believe that we have scarcely begun in creative writing to explore the possibilities of achieving what literature is meant to achieve. The biological world that humanity is part of has just not begun to be explored by our best writers." With notable exceptions, Jaimy Gordon, an award-winning narrative science writer, Rebecca Skloot, among them. Rebecca has brought just the sort of curios, zest, and literary passion to her work that Ed Wilson hopes to foster in other young writers. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, O, the Oprah Magazine, Discover, and many other venues. Rebecca has written about goldfish surgery, tissue ownership rights, race and medicine, food politics, and wild dogs in Manhattan.

She has worked as a correspondent for PBS's Nova Science Now and she and her father, Floyd Skloot, were co-editors of Best American Science Writing in 2011. You can find video footage of Rebecca dancing with a cockatoo. Snowball? Yes. Then there's Rebecca's gripping first book, the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, one of those resounding books that seems to have been hovering in some sort of limbo waiting for precisely the right writer to come along. Rebecca worked for more than 10 years on this complex and, in many ways, harrowing tragedy about a strangely embodied, hijacked, and invaluable form of immortality. The book seems to grow and multiply with the same determined energies as the unstoppable cells that were taken from cancer ravaged Henrietta Lacks, then a young life loving wife and mother. The [inaudible 00:19:03] hela cells that have fueled so much medical research live on in Rebecca's book.

Like its cellular subject, this bestseller has enlightened readers all around the world while Rebecca has traveled far and wide to speak to a dazzling array of audiences and became a television star appearing on everything from CBS Sunday Morning to the Colbert Report. The Washington Post named Rebecca as one of five surprising leaders of 2010. Reviewed everywhere the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was named Best Book of the Year by more than 60 newspapers, magazines, and other media, including my own book list. An edition for young readers was published last fall and the Immortal Life is being made into an HBO movie produced by Oprah Winfrey and Allen Ball. With a degree in biological sciences and an MFA in creative writing, Rebecca has taught creative writing and science journalism at the University of Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University. Please welcome Rebecca Skloot.

Rebecca Skloot:

Thank you. Thank you. I'm very glad to be here. Thank you AWP for this and thank you Donna for that. That was great. I did not know you could find footage of me on YouTube dancing with a cockatoo. That was from a little... No, it's good to know. I wrote this story about this cockatoo that dances and it turned out to be this big scientific breakthrough because scientists forever have thought that humans were the only species that danced. Then this bird appeared that actually dances and they clocked his dancing and I went and was writing a story about him and the scientist was there with me while I was watching the parrot and he asked me to dance with him as part of a new leg of the study to see if the parrot cared who he danced with. In the background, they were videotaping this as part of the research. In the background of this video, you can hear him saying, "Someday this is going to go on YouTube." I didn't know it had, so that's very funny.

Anyways, so I'm going to do a combination of reading and talking to give you an overview of the book and a sample of the different kinds of writing in it. Just from what Jaimy was saying in the intro, I too was curious to see how Donna was going to pull these two very disparate writings together. Something you said in your intro just made it all make sense to me, which was you said you were, if you didn't write about these people in this culture, they were going to vanish. I think that's something that we obviously have in common that as I was working on this book, I had this sense of scrambling to gather a history that was vanishing as I was doing the work. The generation of scientists and other people I was writing about were in their eighties and nineties, a lot of them. I think we can probably talk about that, the experience of trying to capture recent history as it's going away and feelings and burden that can come along with that. I'm going to just start off reading right at the beginning of the book.

For those of you who don't know what hela cells are, the name is spelled H-E-L-A, which is an abbreviation for Henrietta's name. It's H-E for Henrietta and L-A for Lacks. I'm going to start at the beginning and if it sounds like I'm skipping around at all, it's because I am. This is condensed scenes. On January 29th, 1951, David Lacks sat behind the wheel of his old Buick, watching the rainfall. He was parked under a towering oak tree outside Johns Hopkins Hospital with three of his children, two still in diapers, waiting for their mother, Henrietta. A few minutes earlier, she jumped out of the car, pulled her jacket over her head and scurried into the hospital past the Colored bathroom, the only one she was allowed to use. In the next building under an elegant domed copper roof, a 10-and-a-half-foot marble statue of Jesus stood, arms spread wide, holding court over what was once the main entrance of Hopkins. No one in Henrietta's family ever saw a Hopkins doctor without visiting the Jesus statue, laying flowers at his feet, saying a prayer, and rubbing his big toe for good luck.

But that day, Henrietta didn't stop. She went straight to the waiting room of the gynecology clinic, a wide open space empty, but for rows of long, straight back benches that looked like church pews. "I got a knot on my womb," she told the receptionist. "The doctor needs to have a look." The day before Henrietta went to the bathroom and found blood spotting her underwear. She filled her bathtub, lowered herself into the warm water, and spread her legs. 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. Henrietta climbed out of the bathtub, dried herself off, and dressed. Then she told her husband, "You better take me to the doctor. I'm bleeding and it ain't my time." Hopkins was one of the top hospitals in the country. It was built in 1889 as a charity hospital for the sick and poor.

It covered more than a dozen acres where a cemetery and insane asylum once sat in East Baltimore. The public wards at Hopkins were filled with patients, most of them Black and unable to pay their medical bills. David drove Henrietta nearly 20 miles to get there, not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major hospital for miles that treated Black patients. This was the era of Jim Crow. When Black people showed up at white-only hospitals, the staff was likely to send them away, even if it meant they might die in the parking lot. Even Hopkins, which did treat Black patients, segregated them in Colored wards and had Colored-only fountains. So when the nurse called Henrietta from the waiting room, she led her through a single door to a Colored-only exam room, one in a long row of rooms divided by clear glass walls that let nurses see from one to the next. Henrietta undressed, wrapped herself in a starched white hospital gown, and laid down on a wooden exam table waiting for Howard Jones, the gynecologist on duty. Jones was thin and graying. His deep voice softened by a faint southern accent.

He listened as Henrietta told him about the pain, the blood. She laid back on the table, feet pressed in stirrups as she stared at the ceiling. Sure enough, 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. He'd seen easily a thousand cervical cancer lesions, but never anything like this, "Shiny and purple like grape jello," he wrote later, "And so delicate at bled at the slightest touch." Jones, cut a small sample and sent it to the pathology lab down the hall for diagnosis, then told Henrietta to go home. Soon after he dictated notes about her. "Her history is interesting in that she had a term delivery here at this hospital, September 19th, 1950," he said. No note is made in the history at that time or at the six weeks return visit that there's any abnormality of the cervix. Yet here she was just three months later with a full-fledged tumor. Either her doctors had missed it during her last exams, which seemed impossible, or it had grown at a terrifying rate.

So Henrietta went home and, a few days later, she got a call from Howard Jones telling her that the biopsy came back as cervical cancer. She was 30 years old, she had five kids, and he called her back in for what was the standard treatment of the day, which was radium therapy, where they would take tubes of radium, which is radioactive material, and sew those to the surface of the cervix and leave them there for a few days to essentially burn off the cancer. They did this under anesthesia. So she came in and they put her under and, without telling her, before applying the radium to her cervix, her doctor just cut a little piece of her tumor and put that in a dish. He sent that down the hall to George Guy who was the head of tissue culture research at Hopkins. George Guy along with researchers all around the world had been trying to grow human cells outside the body for decades. It had never worked. They could keep them alive for a few days, maybe a week, but they all died pretty quickly.

No one knows exactly why to this day, but Henrietta's cells just never died. So within less than a day of her leaving the hospital, her cells were doubling their numbers every 24 hours. So they went from one dish to two, to four, to eight, to 16, and so on. So pretty quickly, took over the lab. George Guy started contacting scientists saying, "I think I have the first immortal human cell line," which is what they're called, which means they will basically just grow forever as long as you feed them and keep them warm. T the reaction that scientists had was, "Great. Can we have some?" Because scientists had been wanting these cells to do research on any number of things. We didn't know what cells really were, like how they operated. We didn't know what DNA was. They didn't know the difference between a cancer cell and a normal cell. I mean, they needed live cells they could look at under the microscope. So George Guy just started sending them to anyone who wanted them.

He would do this by either he or his wife or his assistant would go to the airport with a tube of cells and find a flight attendant or a pilot and say, "Would you put this in your pocket and fly this," to whatever city they wanted the cells to go to, and they would do this, which is amazing in today's era of airport security. I think about this every time I go through an airport security line. Then on the other end, the scientists would be waiting for the cells and they would grab the vials, run back to the lab, and grow them, give them to their friends who'd give them to their friends. Pretty soon hela cells spread all over the world this way, and this is not the most efficient method for transporting cells or growing them. So pretty soon, a factory was set up at the Tuskegee Institute where they started mass-producing her cells assembly line style to the tune of about six trillion cells a week and sending those out to laboratories around the world.

So just within a few months of her death, the number of cells that had grown from that one tiny sample, inconceivable. To this day, one scientist estimated that if you could have saved them all and gathered them onto a scale that by now they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons, which is more than 150 Empire State buildings and cells weigh nothing. They're just these little microscopic things. So it's impossible to imagine how many cells we're talking about. Henrietta had no idea. So the science that came from these cells was immediately just revolutionary. It changed medicine completely. The greatest hits are that her cells were used to help develop polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity. Her cells were the first ever cloned. Her genes were the first ever mapped. They were used to create our most important cancer medications like vincristine and Tamoxifen. I bet there are many people in this room who've either taken one of those drugs or know somebody who has. The HPV vaccine can be traced back to her cells.

The list just goes on and on. One of the things that made them so valuable for science was that they grew with this incredible intensity and they did the same thing in her body that they did in the lab. So the thing that made them so valuable for science made them very deadly for her. So within just a few months of being diagnosed, right after her 31st birthday, Henrietta died and that little tumor had spread to almost every organ in her body. When she died, no one told her husband or her kids that these cells were out there all around the world. Her family just went on with their lives and they were very difficult lives. They lived in poverty in East Baltimore. Scientists continued using the cells for the next several decades. They also started growing cells from lots of other people. So they thought, well, since they used the techniques they'd used to grow hela and started taking cells from anyone and those cells would grow. So they created this library of other tissues to use for different kinds of research.

Then in the late seventies, this one young researcher started doing some genetic mapping on these cells. So this was the early days of genetics, and he was looking at a prostate cancer cell line, and he noticed that it had two X chromosomes in it. For those of you who remember your basic biology, women have two Xs and men have an X and a Y, and women don't have prostate. So you can't have a prostate cancer cell line with two X chromosomes. He thought, "Well, that's weird." He started looking for other genetic markers in these cells and he found that they had this gene for a very rare enzyme, really only found in African-Americans. Even among African-Americans, it was very rare. So he was like, "That's odd, this white guy's prostate seems to be from a Black woman." So then he started testing all these other tissues that were out there, and sure enough, they all seemed to be from a Black woman. What had happened was scientists didn't know it at the time, but when you grow cells in culture, they can actually travel on dust particles in the air.

If you touch a dish and don't wash your hands and touch another dish, you can transfer the cells from one place to another. So without anyone knowing, hela cells had just taken over everything. Hela cells are so powerful that if one of them drops in a dish, they'll just kill off the other cells basically. You can't tell from looking with a naked eye because you can't see the cells. So this scientist announced this at a conference saying, "All these cells you guys have been working with for the past few decades, they're all hela cells," which caused an enormous controversy. It would mean millions of wasted research dollars. A lot of people said, "Well, that would be sloppy technique, and that would've never happened in my lab." So to settle this debate, this researcher decided to track down Henrietta's kids. The way that he figured it was he could treat this like a crime scene. If you got DNA from her kids, you could test all these other cells. If they were from Henrietta, the DNA would match her kids.

So he called Henrietta's husband one day, it was the early seventies, and Henrietta's husband had a third grade education. He didn't know what a cell was. The way he understood this call was, "We've got your wife, she's alive in a laboratory. We've been doing research on her for the last 25 years, and now we have to test your children to see if they had the cancer that killed her," none of which was what the scientist said at all, who said, "We need to look at your HLA markers and compare those to the hela cells." He thought they had her in a cell, like a prison cell. That was the only kind of cell he'd ever heard of. So her family got sucked into this world of research that they didn't understand and the scientists didn't realize the family didn't understand. This went on for a very long time. Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, was right around the age of 30 when this happened. So for her, this confirmed her worst fears because she'd lived in fear of her 30th birthday her whole life.

She knew Henrietta had died. She didn't know why, and she knew it happened at 30. So she just figured the same thing would happen to her. So having these scientists show up at that point to test her, everyone just figured they were all dying. So scientists would come to the house and take these samples and leave, and the family would wait for their results, which would never come. Pretty soon, they figured out that she wasn't alive. You couldn't go visit her in the lab the way they could have when she was alive, but what it meant to have part of her alive was really unclear to them, and particularly Deborah, who was a very deeply spiritual woman. She believed her mother's soul was alive in these cells. So the scientists would come to the house and say things like, and Deborah would ask them things like, "Can my mother rest in peace if you're shooting these cells up to the moon and injecting them with all these chemicals? Does this somehow cause her pain in the afterlife when you infect her with these diseases?"

The scientists had no idea how to respond to her. At one point, one of them gave her a medical school genetics textbook and said, "Here, read this. This will tell you what you need to know about your mother." Henrietta's kids were all deaf and hard of hearing, and no one realized this until they were adults. They went through their entire education without being able to hear the teacher. So they couldn't really read or write. They also never really learned to question people in positions of authority, especially white people. So they just went along with this research for years. Pretty soon, Henrietta's sons found out that in addition to all this research being done, these cells are being bought and sold. So they launched what's now a multi-billion dollar industry of buying and selling genes or buying and selling cells and patenting genes. That all can be traced back to hela cells, which were the first human biological materials ever commercialized. Henrietta's family to this day lives, they're quite poor.

They would often say, "So if our mother cells are so important to medicine, why can't we go to the doctor? If people are buying and selling these things, essentially, where's our cut?" No one really was able to answer that for them. So then I came along a couple of decades later, a 20-some-odd year old MFA student wanting to write this story that I had been obsessed with since I was 16 when I first learned about the cells. I called them up and said, "Hi, I want to write a book about your mother." They said, "No, you're not." I didn't understand where I fit into their story. I didn't know her children had been used in research. Not long before I contacted them, their medical records had been released to the press without their permission and published. I mean, the number of things that this family had gone... I know. The number of things this family had gone through to that point was really astonishing, and I didn't know any of it. So it took about 10 years to do the book.

A lot of, especially the first about year-and-a-half after I contacted the family, was trying to win their trust and figure out why they were so afraid to talk to me and what had happened to them. In the end, I do end up winning the trust, particularly of Deborah. One of the things that I said to her as I was talking to her and trying to understand their story was, "I'm not trying to hide anything from you. If you want to come with me when I do my research, you can," because it was clear to me from our conversations that the family still didn't really understand what these cells were, and they wanted to know what had happened with them. I don't think I ever really thought Deborah was going to take me up on that, but she did. So the book becomes this almost like a travel story with Deborah and I traveling around doing things like going and seeing the cells and her trying to come to terms with all of this and move on.

So I'm going to read one more short scene, and this is one of the first things she and I did together was go into a lab at Hopkins so she could see her mother's cells for the first time. The other person who's there with us is Zakaria, who's Deborah's youngest brother. Henrietta was pregnant with him when she found the tumor. So she died when he was a newborn. We went into this lab. It was a scientist who had read a short article that I'd written in a magazine just about the family and their experience with the cells. He had the reaction most scientists have when they hear the story, which is essentially, "Oh my God, I had no idea." He said, "I've been using these cells in my lab my entire career. I did my dissertation on these cells and I had no idea they didn't give permission." So he wanted to reach out to the family and do something. Christophe walked toward us through the lobby of his building, smiling, hand outstretched.

He was in his mid-thirties with perfectly worn denim jeans, a blue plaid shirt, and shaggy light brown hair. He shook my hand and Deborah's reached for Zakaria's, but Zakaria didn't move. "Okay," Christophe said, looking at Deborah, "It must be pretty hard for you to come into a lab at Hopkins after what you've been through. I'm really glad to see you here." Christophe threw open the door to his lab with a sweeping tada motion and wave waved us inside. "This is where we keep all the cells," he yelled over a deafening mechanical hum that made Deborah's and Zakaria's hearing aids squeal. Zakaria's hands shot up and tore his from his ear. Debra adjusted the volume on hers, then walked past Christophe into a room filled wall to wall with white freezers, stacked one on top of the other, rumbling like a sea of washing machines in an industrial laundromat. She shot me a wide-eyed, terrified look. Christophe pulled the handle of a white floor-to-ceiling freezer, and it opened with a hiss, releasing a cloud of steam into the room. Deborah screamed and jumped behind Zakaria, who stood expressionless hands in his pockets.

"Don't worry," Christophe yelled. "It's not dangerous, it's just cold. They're not minus 20 like your freezers at home. They're minus 80. That's why when I opened them, smoke comes out." He motioned for Deborah to come closer. "It's all full of her cells," he said. Deborah loosened her grip on Zakaria and inched forward until the icy breeze hit her face, and she stood staring at thousands of inch tall plastic vials filled with red liquid. "Oh God," she gasped. "I can't believe all that's my mother." Christophe reached into the freezer, took out a vial, and pointed to the letters H-E-L-A, written on its side. "There are millions and millions of her cells in there," he said, "Maybe billions. You can keep them here forever, 50 years, 100 years, even more. Then you just thaw them out and they grow." He rocked the vial of hela cells back and forth in his hand as he started talking about how careful you have to be when you handle them. "We have an extra room just for the cells." He said, "That's important because you don't want hela cells to contaminate other cultures in a lab."

He explained how the hela contamination problem happened, then said, "Her cells caused millions of dollars in damage. Seems like a bit of poetic justice, doesn't it?" "Oh, my mother was just getting back at scientists for keeping all them secrets from the family," Deborah said. "You don't mess with Henrietta. She'll sick hela on your ass." Christophe reached into the freezer behind him, grabbed another vial of hela cells and held it out to Deborah, his eyes soft. She stood stunned for a moment, staring into his outstretched hand, then grabbed the vial and began rubbing it fast between her palms like she was warming herself in winter. "She's cold," Deborah said, cupping her hands and blowing onto the vial. Christophe motioned for us to follow him to the incubator where he warmed the cells, but Deborah didn't move. As Zakaria and Christophe walked away, she raised the vial and touched it to her lips, "You're famous," she whispered, "Just nobody knows it." I'm going to stop there. Thank you.

Donna Seaman:

Thank you so much, Rebecca. That's so moving, even though I've probably read it three times. It still gets me every time. So authenticity and truth are important in both fiction and nonfiction, art and science. So Jaimy, I'm wondering how you ensure that you get things right in fiction, that the authenticity in your story is grounded in something.

Jaimy Gordon:

There wasn't a great problem with getting the [inaudible 00:42:46] right in Lord of the Misrule because I'd worked on the track from 1967 to 1970 in that stage of one's life, of a young writer's life, where you take all kinds of horrible jobs just for a knowing that you'll use them one way or another. But working on the racetrack was different. First of all, it was a bad boyfriend episode. Second of all, I hadn't even been to graduate school yet. So although I knew that I wanted to be a rider, I didn't have any paths very clearly laid out for me. So it was a total life. I mean, when you work on the racetrack, you keep different hours from anybody else. It's a completely different world. All you know of the news, it was the middle of the Vietnam War, which isn't mentioned once in the book. All you know of the news is a couple lines that are sneaked into the racing form between one race and another. So that was a three-year immersion experience.

When I went to graduate school, it was very consciously an escaping from the racetrack to some extent. So just getting the [inaudible 00:44:05] right, that was not hard. Getting the voice to write took more conscious research as I had to go back and talk again to a couple of survivors. I still have the book's dedicated to Bubbles Riley, somebody from Pamlico, but also West Virginia tracks in his day who would just talk to me endlessly. I was listening not so much to the content as the way that he shaped his sentences. That was very important to getting the book.

Donna Seaman:

You had worked on a short story in the nineties. It was published in Best American Fiction, even had a couple of characters.

Jaimy Gordon:

Right. That was very conscious... At that time, it had already been 25 years since I'd been on the track. I just wanted to see if I could get it back, get the voices, the [inaudible 00:45:03] atmosphere. The tracks that I worked on were very crummy racetracks, which I loved about them, but I just wasn't sure I could find that particular aura. But it did come right back, at least for 30 pages. When it had to be 300 pages, then I needed some more. But I knew from how well that story did that I could get a novel out of it. It landed in Best American Short Stories. It might've been because Jane Smiley was editing that.

Donna Seaman:

A horse lover?

Jaimy Gordon:

Almost any racetrack story would do. You have at least one in there, right?

Donna Seaman:

So Rebecca, you're the flip side. You have a plethora of facts, enormous amount of information to cover. Much science writing covers it more like textbooks or popularized teaching, whereas you turned yours into a real narrative. So I'm wondering if you looked to fictional techniques and also when you decided that you had to be part of the story.

Rebecca Skloot:

Yes. No, I definitely looked to fictional techniques. My goal with the book was to write my definition of creative nonfiction is it reads like fiction, it reads like a story, but it's completely verifiably true. Every fact, every statement, whether it's the weather or the dialogue or whatever is verifiable with multiple sources, but reads like fiction. So I read only fiction as models. I didn't want to read nonfiction because I didn't want my book to seem like nonfiction. I knew that going in, and the book has essentially three separate narratives that each take place in a very different time period and they're braided together.

I knew early on that I needed to tell all the stories at the [inaudible 00:47:00] because when you learn the story of these cells and Henrietta and the world that she came from and what happened with the science, when you learn those at the same time that you're learning the story of her family and the impact those cells had on them, even though it was several decades later, the cells take on a very different weight and so does the family story when you learn about the amazing things the cells did and how you personally benefited from all of it. So I wanted the book to go back and forth between these narratives. My goal was I imagined readers reading along and they'd read the science parts and go like, "Yay, science. Science is awesome," and then they read the family part and go, "Oh, boo science. Science is bad." Because it's a story where you just can't, there's no clear cut good guy, bad guy, because all of it, it's a much more complicated story than that.

I felt that telling all the stories at the same time was necessary, which is, of course very hard to do and like a crazy person, I actually tried to write it that way. I just thought, "Well, I'll just know when to switch back and forth between the narratives," which is a good way to lose your mind, trying to write multiple stories at once. At a certain point, I realized I had to unbraid it and write each of the stories separately and then weave them. Part of what I did during that process was I went to a local bookstore. This was in West Virginia, actually. A friend of mine had a house there that I would go hide in to write. There was this little tiny bookstore there. I went in and I just explained to her what I wanted to do. I said, "Find me any book you can find that has multiple characters, multiple time periods, and a braided narrative," and she did. So she would just feed me these novels and I would read them and just steal little things here and there for the structure ideas.

The first one that was just this big light bulb for me was Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, because it tells in some ways a similar story, a present day woman talking to another woman, figuring out an older story. Then you flash back to the older story. Then in the book, they have these news clippings that were interspersed with those stories that were all just facts about what was going on in that time period. I imagined, "Oh, the science narrative could be like the news clippings." Another one was Love Medicine, and that was by Louise Erdrich. She has all these different characters and voices. So I focused a lot on that. Then actually turned to movies at a certain point because I started realizing that movies, most of them are structured that way, we just don't really notice. I was watching Hurricane about Hurricane Carter, the boxer, with my boyfriend. We were just sitting there watching this movie. He's an actor and a director, and I was just being extremely obnoxious.

The movie came on and about three scenes into it, I was like, "This is my book. Oh my God, this is the same structure as my book." He eventually was like, "Just stop. Watch the movie and then storyboard it." He's like, "Go back tomorrow and storyboard the movie. Figure it out, but just shut up right now." So I did that, and I spent three days just pushing play and pause and play and pause and play and pause. I storyboarded the entire movie on index cards. It had three narratives. So I did different colored index cards for each narrative, which I'd already done with my own book. Then I laid it out on this giant, this bed, and literally just put my book on top of it to see what would happen. I took each of my color coded cards and just was like, "Pink, pink, green, green, pink, pink."

The thing that I got most from that was realizing that movies jump around in time so fast and that if you're going to have a book that jumps around like that, you have to do it really quickly, or you start to lose one of the other narratives. So it was actually, I think, the pacing was something I got more from movies than anything else. So yes, I did think about that. I'm not sure that entirely answers the question, but yeah, that was how I got my idea.

Donna Seaman:

Very interesting. Jaimy, I think you've described yourself as being besotted in language and that you initially started writing fiction in that enchantment of rhetoric and words. I wonder how you moved from that stage in your writing to this more realistic, more earthy.

Jaimy Gordon:

You don't think this book is besotted with language?

Donna Seaman:

Oh, I do think it is. I do think it is. But the story's different than [inaudible 00:51:16].

Jaimy Gordon:

The reason I was such a sucker for that racetrack life, apart from the fact that the guy was really charming in his way, menacing way, was that like Maggie in the book, I was lured away from a small town newspaper writing job. I was sitting at the edge of the shed row writing headlines for food copy, and he was having a conversation with a blacksmith. I didn't understand a single word they were saying. I mean, it was a completely new language to me, very spicy. I mean, really interesting. I love to be around animals, large animals, small animals. I find animals very interesting. But more than anything, I just wanted to penetrate that language. In this book, as some critics have complained and others have said with grudging admiration, there's no mercy for the reader.

You have to get with it. I just plunged right into that racetrack, [inaudible 00:52:23] and a chapter or so. People, if they stay with it that long, they get used to it. Then they were really in a different world. But that was the whole lure. Of course, each of the characters represents a different ethnic component of the racetrack. So they all talk somewhat differently, but it's all racetrack one way or another. It was very important to me also to get that down, because that too is, I mean, we might not have racetracks, certainly not cheap racetracks the way that we did, for better or worse in the fifties, sixties, seventies.

Donna Seaman:

So interesting.

Jaimy Gordon:

[inaudible 00:53:12] few more years.

Donna Seaman:

Oh, sorry. Several things come up in common here. Preserving lost worlds or in periled worlds, and also this responsibility to people that appear to be very different than yourselves. I mean, you both ventured into other cultures and other worlds, and I wonder if you, Rebecca, could talk a little bit about how you navigated that and the foundation, this foundation that kind of came out of that feeling of indebtedness, I would guess.

Rebecca Skloot:

I mean, I think for me, when I first contacted the family and I had this phone call to Deborah where I said I wanted to write this book, and it was clear that she wanted to talk to me. She was really curious. She wanted to know more about her mother and thought that doing a book would both get her mother's story out there, which she felt very strongly about, but also would teach her about her own mother. But then she kept saying things like, "But I don't know who to trust, and maybe you're going to try to steal my cells." I just had no idea where that was coming from. I really had to just completely dive into their world and they weren't coming with me. So the first thing that I did was I went and found Henrietta's living, her generation of her siblings, her cousins, and they were all living in this little tiny town in Southern Virginia. Some of them didn't have indoor plumbing or electricity. Some of them had just gotten it recently. They lived in an old plantation, a lot of them still in these old slave shacks.

I grew up in Portland, Oregon. We're not famous for our diversity over there. This was a world that I had never encountered, both in terms of the level of poverty and just a southern Black culture. This little white girl shows up, driving along. I had this little beat up car and I showed up with this and just my plan was to drive down there and just find mailboxes that said Lacks and start knocking on doors and saying, "Did you know Henrietta Lacks?" I got there and everybody's name was Lacks. I didn't know this, but it was because the plantation owner had been a Lacks. When the slaves were free, they all took his name and they just kept it. There were white Lacks' and Black Lacks' living on opposite sides of the street. There was all this racial tension. There was still a very active KKK community. That was so beyond anything I'd ever experienced. I think obviously, I mean, I talked for days about the ways that this book, the experience of researching and writing this book changed me.

But in terms of experiencing another culture, I mean, I'm not a person who would've... I did not describe myself as a privileged person. I grew up not that much money. I had to work three jobs to go to school, went into a lot of debt. I never thought of that as being a privilege until I went and started spending time with the Lacks family and realized that that was a privilege. Going into debt and going to school, thinking someday you're going to be able to pay that off was a privilege. Having a basic grade school education was a privilege. The race, I learned so much about race in this country through my experiences with the Lacks family. They weren't going to let me in until I got it. Deborah would get slack from people occasionally. "Why are you talking to a white writer? This is a Black story." She was like, [inaudible 00:56:20], "Well, no Black writer has ever asked." But beyond that, she really wanted it. She felt like it was a much bigger story than that. She's like, "It's about race, it's about class, it's about everybody."

She didn't want it to be reduced to just a story about racism, but she needed to know that I understood that part of the story. So eventually, they would call me the honorary Black Lacks, and I'd go and hang out with them, and they tease me relentlessly about my whiteness. It was like, "Oh, she's in the sun. She's going to start [inaudible 00:56:48]. We'd better move her." But to get there, Deborah and I have these arguments sometimes about race. So she would say often to other people who would criticize her for talking to me that she didn't think a Black writer could have written the book. I would say, "That is ridiculous. We are so beyond that." We fought about it and she saw that as me not understanding race in this country. At a certain point, I realized that she had to concede that she was right in one way. It wasn't obviously that a Black writer couldn't have written the book.

Anyone could have, but it would've been a different book because the people I was talking to would not have talked to a Black writer in the same way that they talked to me. I had this moment of realizing this. I was talking to a white scientist who's quite old, and he was a generation of scientists who grew up during segregation. He did not talk to Black people, and he would've been very defensive. He wouldn't have taken me as an equal. I had this moment in an interview of talking to him and realizing it by listening to the way he was talking about the family. I had to go to Deborah and say, "I get it. Part of this privilege that I didn't realize I had was that I'm white," and that really does still exist in this country. So all of that then of course went into the book and my understanding of the family and wanting to capture their culture and write about it in a way that showed other people who perfectly open-minded white people, so give them a different experience than they imagined.

So in terms of foundation, one thing very early on that I realized was that I didn't want to be another person who came along and potentially benefited from the family without doing something in return. So I started this foundation, and so I give some of the proceeds of about going there, and it's been mostly focused on education. We've been able to give out, I think it's like 25 different Lacks' who are grandkids, great grandkids, great great grandkids are going to school, college, some of them private high school now paid for by the foundation. We've been able to help with some medical expenses, but that I wanted to do going in the rest of those big lessons that happened. I already knew that I wanted to do the foundation before that, but that just sort of solidified that desire.

Donna Seaman:

Very interesting. Jaimy, you mentioned animals, which I wanted to ask you about. You both are animal lovers and I was reading, John McPhee recently had the Writing Life essay in The New Yorker, and he was looking back on his writing life and trying to figure out why he wrote about what he wrote about. He made a list of topics and realized that almost all of them were things that he's been interested in since before he went to college. I wondered if in some ways that was the case for you and if loving animals was part of that at all.

Jaimy Gordon:

Well, I've always had a dog and they were all very different personalities. I had a dog from when I was about five years old. I had wandered maybe a half a block from home. That was the farthest I had ever gone. A neighbor who I didn't know said, "Get your dog away from my garbage can." I looked down and there was a little dog there, and I called the dog in some way and that became my dog. I mean, my mother said, "No, you can't keep her unless... We will wait until tomorrow morning. If she's still there, we'll keep her." She was there. So I had that dog for a long time. It's just having complex relationships with animals, it's always been there in my life. I've had birds, I've had cats, dogs, horses, mice, and snakes. I worked on the mall. Really interesting. Curiously, I was never one of those teenage girls who had a thing for horses, particularly because I just didn't like the whole jod for riding boots, riding helmet, crop sort of thing. But the potential was there.

I spent a lot of time when I lived in California with birds, and I thought the horses and birds were very similar. They have similar flight fight reactions. They're much funnier than they're normally given credit for. They definitely have a sense of humor. They excite, agitate, get calm again, give their trust in similar ways. So it was just strange to go from these little smallest things that hardly anybody gives credit for being very interesting pets to horses. I haven't really had a horse in my life again since 1970, but I hope that I meet a horse next week that could happened. I'd be very interested.

Rebecca Skloot:

I'm glad you brought up that. I heard McPhee talk about that years ago when I was in undergrad. He talked about the fact that he had mapped basically everything he'd written and he could trace it back to something he was interested in and actually obsessed with before college. I think at the time he had said it was before he was 19. I think it's absolutely true. I mean, it's definitely true of me. If you look back at everything I've written, it is either connected to bioethics in some ways or animals and just this place where science and daily life meet. I talk about this at schools a lot with students that I think when students was trying to find things to write about or trying to find their place, I always say, "What are you obsessed with? What have you always been obsessed with?" I learned about hela cells when I was 16 and I wasn't planning to be a writer. I was going to be a veterinarian, but it just stuck with me.

I think my father got sick when I was 16 and he was in a research study as a guinea pig basically. I spent a lot of time in a hospital watching my dad be used in research, which obviously connects to this. So I think everything I've ever done can connect back to something pretty much pre-18. I think as I know there are probably a lot of writing teachers in here, I think these are great exercises for students is to get them to go back to those places as opposed to like, "I'm going to write about my roommate." Students have this tendency to write about what's in front of them, and I think it's really good to push them to go back to those pre 18 obsessions and see what's actually there.

Donna Seaman:

I also am very struck that both of you most likely have had a lifetime habit of attentiveness, of being observant. You both write such richly sensuous descriptions of anything, a room outside. How do you absorb, retain and then articulate that you want to answer?

Rebecca Skloot:

Sure. I mean, for me, it depends on what it is that I'm doing. As a journalist, I am very conscious of gathering those details. It's one of those things when you're out doing interviews and you're out in the field doing research, it's really easy to forget to notice that stuff because you're trying to catch everything everyone's saying and you want to ask questions. So I have this habit of anytime I interview someone, I have throwaway questions that I ask. I don't care what the answer is, or it's just completely uninteresting to me, and I'll just throw them out. Those are my times when I just push pause on everything. Then I look around the room and I go floor to ceiling, wall to wall, and I just document everything, water stains, whatever. You have to be careful. You're listening and glancing at the ceiling. Then I'll do the same thing with the person in front of me because, again, you can talk to someone for hours and leave the room and be like, "Were they wearing glasses?"

You just don't retain that stuff. So I'll do that. I'll document someone head to toe and their mannerisms. So I consciously look for that stuff a lot. I actually think a lot of this came from growing up with, my father was a fiction writer, and I didn't realize this at the time, but when I was a kid, we would play this game where when we would go out to dinner or something as characters in his books, so we would make reservations as the Housers, and we would go and we would have dinner as the Housers in a restaurant.

Then he was writing this novel that was about a hotel owner, and it was, so there were a lot of different characters who would come and go, and we would sit there and look around the restaurant and make up stories for people in the restaurants and build them as characters. I now realize that was my very busy father trying to figure out how to work and have a full-time job and kids and work on his writing. So he was working on his writing at dinner. But I think that taught me to look at people and things in a scenic way, in a character developing way that I wouldn't have probably done otherwise.

Donna Seaman:

Jaimy?

Jaimy Gordon:

Not too long after I met my husband, and we've been together more than 25 years, we were sitting at a cafe in Germany and he dropped into my coffee 20 pieces of sugar without my noticing a single one. I mean, I can be so oblivious, I only pay attention to certain things, but he just wanted to see how many he could put in before I would notice. He put that entire jar into my cup without my noticing because I was looking at him. I wasn't thinking about... I can be... T


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