A few days later, ten months after our first conversation, Deborah called me. When I answered the phone, she yelled, “Fine, I’ll talk to you!” She didn’t say who she was and didn’t need to. “If I’m gonna do this, you got to promise me some things,” she said. “First, if my mother is so famous in science history, you got to tell everybody to get her name right. She ain’t no Helen Lane. And second, everybody always say Henrietta Lacks had four children. That ain’t right, she had five children. My sister died and there’s no leavin her out of the book. I know you gotta tell all the Lacks story and there’ll be good and bad in that cause of my brothers. You gonna learn all that, I don’t care. The thing I care about is, you gotta find out what happened to my mother and my sister, cause I need to know (Skloot 233).

This passage is very important because it is milestone. From this point on, Deborah helps Skloot with her research about Henrietta. She starts to have detailed information and unprecedented access to Henrietta’s medical records. She also has access to Elsie’s records. Furthermore, Deborah starts to introduce Skloot to other family members. This is also a milestone because it reveals the motives why Deborah wants to help Skloot. I especially like the fact that Deborah helped Skloot not because of money, but because she wanted to make sure that the world got the story right. She was especially concerned about the world knowing that her mother’s name was Henrietta Lacks and the she had five children instead of four as many believed. The sense of pride I get out of Deborah is inspirational.