Character Clues

Character Analysis

Speech and Dialogue

Skloot said she's often asked about her decision to represent the speech of Henrietta's family in their southern dialect, rather than cleaning it up for publication. On her website http://rebeccaskloot.com/faq/#questions-writingimmortal, she's very clear about her motivations:

The idea of taking and rewriting someone's language was just so wrong to me, and inaccurate—rewritten quotes aren't what they said. And the family's language is so much a part of who they are. They have beautiful ways of talking about things.
We think it's a very good choice, especially in a story about a family whose voice has been silenced. Skloot's choice to include dialogue in family's dialect also helps us to sympathize with them more readily. Once we hear what the family has to say, it's easier to see what they're thinking, to understand their point of view.

Skloot herself has an Aha! moment when Cootie schools her on how the Lacks family understands Henrietta's sickness:

"You know, a lot of things, they man-made," he told me, dropping his voice to a whisper. "You know what I mean by man-made, don't you?"

I shook my head no.

"Voodoo," he whispered. "Some peoples is sayin Henrietta's sickness and them cells was man- or woman-made, others say it was doctor-made." (81-82)

It's easy to spot the bad-guy physicians and researchers in the book; they're the ones that speak in a clinical and complicated way. They're communicating with each other in professional journals or at meetings.

"There is the possible danger, "Southam wrote, "of initiating neoplastic disease by accidental inoculation during laboratory investigation, or by injection with such cells or cell products if they should be used for production of virus vaccine." (127)

Good-guy docs and researchers speak more understandably and empathically, like our heroes Christoph Lengauer or Roland Pattillo. You can tell they realize they're talking to lay people who need clearer language. They don't just hand them a textbook, like McKusick did with Deborah.

"At this magnification you can't see much," Christoph said. "The screen is just boring because the cells are so small, even with a microscope you can't see them sometimes."

[…] "All this is one cell," he said. "It kinda looks like a triangle with a circle in the middle, you see that?" (263-264)

Although she's not trying to make herself look good, the reader can see that Skloot, who always explains scientific stuff to the family in a clear way, understands the frustration they've experience by the lack of straight talk over the years.

Physical Appearance

Skloot has a keen eye for observation, especially when it comes to the "characters" in her book. She's especially intrigued the looks and habits of Henrietta Lacks, even though she only gets to know these through two pictures and a few anecdotes. One of the more striking things about Henrietta is her fastidiousness: she loves to dress well and makes sure that her hair is done and her nails carefully polished.

These details help us see Henrietta as a person who cared about her body and about the image she projected when she went out into society. They show us that Henrietta was more than just a collection of cells or a scientific miracle. Skloot provides details like this for other women in the work: Mama Speed (her softness v. strong will) and Deborah (wearing black like Skloot to show that she's professional).

Her attention to the personal characteristics of the Lacks family and associates—and how they convey their personalities—is especially important in a narrative meant to tell their story and grab the reader's sympathy. We can see from the physical appearances of Day and Henrietta's adult children that the years haven't been kind to them and that the lack of access to medical treatment has taken its toll.

Social Status

When you've got a chapter called "The Other Side of the Tracks," you can bet social status is a key theme in the book. Skloot calls attention to the poverty of the Lacks family and how it complicated their interaction with a largely white, prosperous, and educated scientific community. It's clear from the example of John Moore that Skloot believes things would have been mighty different if the Lacks family were not black, poor, and uneducated.

A socio-economic gulf exists between the medical/scientific community and pretty much everybody else. What this led to, Skloot tells us, is that the scientific community often felt that it didn't have to communicate with patients or families in ways that they could understand, or at all. This sense of social privilege causes all kinds of grief for the Lacks family: never learning about Henrietta's "contribution" or what it meant, and never getting any sympathy for how this affected them.

Of course, race complicates the situation further. For the most part, the African Americans in the book are poor and have little power. Only Roland Pattillo, an African American physician, is in a position of authority, and he uses it to protect the Lacks family.