Henrietta Lacks Part III

Part Three of Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, focuses on Henrietta's cells legacy, and Skloot and Dale finding more information about Henrietta and Elsie. However, I would like to focus on the trust and distrust between Dale and Skloot on their end travels. From the beginning, Dale was cautious of Rebecca from the first phone call. Dale and her family had been bombarded from other white reports about Henrietta, thus the entire family was suspicious of anyone calling about Henrietta. When Dale and Rebecca were staying in the hotel rooms, the first time they were going through the files, Rebecca grabbed Henrietta's file because she thought Dale wanted her to go through it, but was mistaken. Dale got extremely defense, and lost all trust in Rebecca and took the files and ran. The trust that the two had built up was on good standing, but as soon as one minor mistake from Skloot happened, Dale built up her walls. This brings up the obvious topic of race, especially the topic within of black people trusting white doctors, and in this case a white report. Race was a major factor in the trust the two had developed because the Lacks family had been deceived many times from white doctors and white reports. Although, Dale herself said, "We all black and white and everything else--- this isn't a race thing... It's not about punish the doctors or slander the hospital. I don't want that." (Skloot, 250). From an outsiders perspective, the ordeal of HeLa cells was about race and class. But to Dale, it was just about giving her mother recognition.