Sunday, September 28, 2014

How does Skloot proceed with her research when it becomes clear that Sonny is not going to meet with her?

Rebecca Skloot begins the process of speaking with Henrietta Lacks’s surviving relatives with Lacks’s husband, Day. Their son, David Lacks, Jr., called “Sonny,” agrees on the telephone to meet her in Baltimore. After she arrives and checks into a hotel, her series of pager messages to David goes unanswered. While hoping and waiting he will call, Skloot does two things: she starts looking in the telephone book for people with the Lacks surname, and she rereads a 1976 article about the Lackses. Having only one land line, she hesitates to start randomly calling Lacks people in case Sonny is trying to reach her on that line. As she reads Michael Rogers’s article, she is stunned to realize that when he was in Baltimore, he had proceeded in the same way. His conclusion that “just about everyone knew Henrietta” encourages her to start dialing. In addition, she reads another article, which mentions Henrietta’s address and the neighborhood where she lived, Turner Station. This prompts Skloot to head for Turner Station.
https://books.google.com/books?id=GFevO-QxQDgC&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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