Character Analysis
Don't Judge
David lacks is the Henrietta's first cousin and the father of her children. They shared a bedroom when they were young kids and had their first child when she was 14. He married Henrietta when she was 20. By the time Skloot meets him, he's 84 and in bad health, with a lifetime of suspicion and resentment about Henrietta's cells behind him. He's suspicious of doctors and believes that the docs at Hopkins killed Henrietta. But like most African American men of his generation, he knows he couldn't really challenge them.
Day has a kind of miraculous beginning. He's pronounced stillborn by the doctor who came by after his birth, but the midwife manages to revive him. Like Henrietta, Day's raised by his grandparents; his mother left him behind right after he was born. Like Henrietta, he spends most of his childhood in extreme poverty working on his grandparents' farm; he leaves school after the fourth grade. He was nine when he met Henrietta.
Our relationship with Day Lacks throughout the book is pretty rocky. For a lot of reasons, it's not easy to sympathize with him. He isn't faithful to Henrietta and probably gave her the disease that gave her cervical cancer. We're left with questions about whether he forced her into sex in that shared childhood bedroom.
Day decides to move north to Turner Station to make a better living for his family. He's a hard worker, but he's not a particularly protective father. Zakariyya certainly has a bone to pick with him on that score, as did Deborah. Day's willful blindness in Galen's sexual abuse of his young daughter is actually criminal:
As Day drove with his arm around Ethel in the front, Galen would grab Deborah in the backseat, forcing his hands under her shirt, in her pants, between her legs. (113)
But Skloot's very careful about passing judgment on the patriarch of the Lacks family. While she lays out the difficult and unpleasant facts about his life with Henrietta, she steers clear of explicitly condemning him.
She also never draws direct lines between Day's behavior and the difficult life of the Lacks children after the death of their mother. Is this restraint part of Skloot's training as an investigative reporter? Probably. But she's also likely counting on her readers to make judgments for themselves.
A Mystery
Since Skloot herself doesn't get much from Day in her interviews with the family, we find it hard to know what makes David Lacks tick. He's not really interested in talking to any more reporters about his wife and he's completely had it with the scientific community.
Day clenched his remaining three teeth. "I didn't sign no papers," he said. "I just told them they could do a topsy. Nothing else, Them doctors never said nuthin about keeping her alive in no tubes or growin no cells. All they told me was they wanted to do a topsy to see if they could help my children." (164)
He tells Skloot a few times that he agreed to the autopsy on the grounds that it might eventually help his children and grandchildren; this seems to contradict the way he treated his kids when they actually grew up. He ignores their abuse and never visits Elsie after Henrietta dies. We guess parenting's always easier in theory than in practice.
Day Lacks' Timeline