The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Henrietta Lacks was born with the name “Loretta Pleasant” in August 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia; no one knows when she became Henrietta. A midwife called Fannie delivered her in the tiny family house. Her mother, Eliza Lacks Pleasant, died in childbirth four years later. Afterwards her father, Johnny Pleasant, took his children back to the family home of Clover, Virginia. The relatives divided the children up, and Henrietta was given to Tommy Lacks, her grandfather.

Tommy Lacks’house was a four-room log cabin which had once served as a slave quarters. He was already raising another older grandchild named David Lacks, whom everyone called “Day.” Originally pronounced dead by a white doctor because he wasn’t breathing, David eventually revived.

Henrietta and Day would get up at 4 AM every morning to tend to the farm before going out to the tobacco fields with many other family members, including their cousins Cliff, Fred, Sadie, and Margaret. In the summer, the cousins played in a swimming hole behind their house, and at night they built bonfires and played games. In the morning, their grandmother made fresh biscuits, while once a month during harvest, Grandpa Tommy Lacks would take a wagon up to South Boston to sell his tobacco, taking the cousins with him. At night, they would sleep in a basement of a warehouse along with the rest of the black farmers, along with “horses, mules, and dogs.”

Clover has a Main Street where, on nice days, the white members of the town would loiter and gossip. Henrietta and her cousins would hire themselves out there, harvesting tobacco in order to get money for the movies, where they would sit in the “colored” section.

Henrietta and Day grow older, racing horses along the dirt road that runs through the former Lacks tobacco plantation (now called Lacks Town). They have a cousin named Crazy Joe Grinnan who is desperately in love with Henrietta—“the prettiest girl in Lacks Town”—and is called “Crazy” because he’ll do anything for her. Crazy Joe, however, didn’t stand a chance, as Henrietta and Day had been sharing a bedroom since she was four, and she has their first child—Lawrence—when she’s fourteen. Four years later, she gives birth to Lucile Elsie Pleasant, called Elsie.

We learn about Elsie, who has epilepsy and an intellectual disability, most likely brought on by syphilis contracted and passed on by Day. The family at Lacks Town, however, originally just calls her “simple” or “touched.”

When he finds out that Henrietta is going to marry Day, Crazy Joe Grinnan stabs himself. Eventually his father ties him up and takes him to the doctor. Henrietta’s sister Gladys also tries to stop the marriage. Some believe that Gladys is jealous of Henrietta’s good looks, while Gladys herself asserts that Day isn’t good enough.

Henrietta and Day get married on April 10, 1941. Soon after, the U.S. enters WWII, and the tobacco farm suffers. The author now introduces Fred and Cliff Garret, cousins to the Lackses. Fred lives near Baltimore and works at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point steel mill. He lives in a black settlement called Turner Station. After Pearl Harbor, demand for steel soars and Sparrows Point becomes the largest steel plant in the world. Black men take on hard and dangerous jobs, inhaling toxic coal dust and asbestos and making far less than their white counterparts.

Fred has returned to Clover to try to convince Henrietta and Day to come back to Turner Station with him. The men decide that Henrietta should stay behind and take care of the children and the farm until Day has made enough money for a house. A few months afterwards, Fred gets drafted, and he gives Day the money he’s saved so that Henrietta and her children can come to Turner Station. And so at age twenty-one, Henrietta leaves Clover and her family home.