How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #1
Bobbette excused herself and ran home, bursting through the screen door into the kitchen, yelling for Lawrence, "Part of your mother, it's alive!" Lawrence called his father to tell him what Bobbette had heard, and Day didn't know what to think. "Henrietta's alive?!" he thought. It didn't make any sense. (181)
Info about HeLa was characterized by miscommunication and wild ideas from the very start, including wild media speculations that HeLa-monsters would soon be populating the earth. Most members of the Lacks family didn't know much about science, so it's easy to see how explanations of Henrietta's cellular "immortality" turns into "Henrietta's ALIVE?!" Skloot wants us to understand that Henrietta's daughter-in-law, son and husband are not stupid: they just don't have the context to make sense of these claims.
Quote #2
When Hsu got home from the conference, she called Day to ask if she could draw blood from his family. "They said they got my wife and she part alive," he told me years later. "They said they been doin experiments on her and they wanted to come test my children see if they got that cancer killed their mother." (182)
There's a lot getting lost in the translation here, so to speak. Hsu, Victor McKusick's assistant, speaks heavily accented English, and Day really has no idea what she's saying. He attempts to piece her conversation together with his understanding of Henrietta's death, and a result is a classic failure to communicate. Neither side realizes there's a problem until the whole Lacks family is in an uproar about the blood draws.
Quote #3
Hsu's accent was strong, and so was Day's—he spoke with a Southern country drawl so thick his own children often had a hard time understanding him. But language wasn't their only barrier. Day wouldn't have understood the concept of immortal cells or HLA markers coming from anyone, accent or not—he'd only gone to school for four years of his life, and he never studied science. The only kind of cell he'd heard of was the kind Zakariyya was living in out at Hagerstown. (183)
Skloot reminds us time and again that a lot of the Lacks family's heartache and anxiety could have been alleviated if only one person in the scientific community had taken an hour to explain the situation to them in ways they could understand. When Hsu shows up to draw blood from the Lackses, she just makes the situation a whole lot worse.