A NOTE ON SOURCES

I first learned of Henrietta Lacks, the Prologue and presiding deity of this play, from my colleague Steve Tomasula’s VAS: A Novel in Flatland. My knowledge of Lacks was made more acute by Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I am indebted to Skloot’s description of Lacks’s iconic photograph—“She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red”—for the opening image of my play, and also for the image of pearls which arises on page 11. Skloot describes Lacks’s autopsy thus: “And her organs were so covered with white tumors it was as if someone had filled her with pearls.” In the opening and closing lines of this play, the phrase in quotation marks paraphrases a remark by Lacks’s cousin, Sadie Sturdivant, as quoted in Skloot’s book. Sturdivant describes Lacks as wearing her hair “just like it was dancin toward her face.”