Where is Henrietta?

View Henrietta Lacks in a larger map

One of the things that struck me about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was how often locations came up and how important they ultimately were. Henrietta, whose physical world was really quite small (in the time sense and travel-wise), ended up affecting people all over the world, not to mention her cells have been all over the planet (and beyond). What I wanted to do, then, was track some of these locations to see what they would look like brought together. 

The idea for this came from "Mr. Plimpton's Revenge," a Dinty Moore story written in Google Maps. Seeing where something happens and getting a brief description of the event encourages me to think about movement and place in unusual ways. I'm the kind of reader who hates place descriptions, mostly because I find they almost never match up to my inner map of the story. With map stories, place becomes more specific (you see exactly where the person means), but also more general (you can't see inside any of the locations and every city kind of looks the same after a while). 

Part of what struck me about Skloot's book was how different narrative lines were thread together. For example, while she was dying, Henrietta was already spreading to places beyond her body and those places were where the rest of the story was. There's something beautiful about that. And it makes sense then, that Skloot chose to structure her book in a three-pronged way. Moore's story too is about the ways we intersect even while being seemingly physically far away. 

It might be worth spending a moment here to discuss the process of making a story in Google Maps. (Some basic instructions, if you're interested.) I'm not going to pretend I've created any kind of masterpiece, but it's a kind of different way to think about a story. At each point, you have to give it a title (like chapters?). I chose years mostly because the timeline at the top of Skloot's chapters helps orient the reader through the multiple stories. Plus my goal was to track Henrietta's life and a birth-death approach seems most clear. 

There are other choices to make like what color to assign the markers and what design. There are all kinds of symbol options beyond the little balloon; it seems some people use Google Maps for scavenger hunts and other shared mapping experiences. I chose to use different colors for what I understood to be different story lines--Henrietta gets blue (with a dot for her grave, as a sense of finality), and Gey's story gets yellow. Elsie gets her own green dotted balloon because her story ends at a place too. I suppose playing with them in a more direct way, as in "mixing" the colors when two story lines collide (so yellow and red make an orange balloon, for example) would add another layer. 

You can also connect points with straight lines, actual routes, or choose to leave them disconnected. I picked the route between the hospital and their home in Turners Station to connect because that journey seemed to be the one that would have the most impact on everyone's lives.

When it came to the writing, I added extra information about some of the sites because there are interesting parallels like the disappearing colony in Roanoke (nobody knows what happened to them) and the destruction of the steel industry in Turners Station (thinking about Pittsburgh too and how medicine has taken over steel). It makes the story broader in some ways, but also distracts a bit from Henrietta. 

That was something I admire about Skloot--any time I thought she was diverging from Henrietta's story, for example during the somatic cell hybrid discussion (141), she revealed its relevance by the end of the section or soon thereafter. I learned to trust her that just about everything she teaches us will end up being important later: we need to know about hybrids in order to understand how they were used to create more scientific advances and to understand the Lacks' family's lack of scientific literacy later in the book. Everything pushes us toward other parts of the story. Skloot's a master at keeping the important stuff fresh in the reader's mind too, which is what allows the book to sprawl out beyond Henrietta's personal story. "Ethel was the woman that Sadie and Henrietta once hid from on the dance floor" (111) just to pull out one instance where she references an earlier event and brings us back to it quickly in order to continue.

To wrap up, I would consider my map a kind of remix project because I mostly took information from Skloot's book and remapped (heh) it into a different context. One of the things I love about the internet, and what excites me about the possibilities opening to publishing, is that texts can be much more obviously collaborative and expansive. It's easy to borrow and combine and add between people to produce new, interesting things in unfamiliar contexts. In this case, mapping helped me see Henrietta's story--where she existed, her physical scope--and that adds a new dimension to the story. It might not for anybody who looks my attempt, but you could say this is another way to "read" a book, like outlining helps you understand progression and structure.

I'd love to hear what you all think of the map, and I'd be happy to open it to collaboration if anyone wants to add to it.