Henrietta Lacks's Early Life and Upbringing in Rural Virginia

Key Economic Insight

Born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia, Henrietta's mother died in 1924, prompting her father to relocate his ten children back to Clover, Virginia. At age four, Henrietta moved in with her grandfather, Tommy Lacks, at the 'home-house,' a four-room log cabin that once served as slave quarters. This dwelling featured plank floors and gas lanterns, with water manually hauled from a creek, and was also home to her cousin, David Lacks (Day), who had been controversially pronounced 'stillborn' by a white doctor but was revived by a midwife. Henrietta and Day, who shared a bedroom from a young age, would eventually marry.

Life in Clover revolved around intensive farm labor, with Henrietta and Day waking at 400 AM to tend livestock and their garden before working in tobacco fields. They planted, harvested, and cured tobacco, their fingers often 'raw and sticky with nicotine resin.' Henrietta attended a 'colored' school for two miles until the sixth grade, enduring taunts from children at the nearby white school, while Day stopped in fourth grade to work. Recreational activities included swimming in a creek, playing games like tag and hopscotch, and telling stories late into the night while sleeping crowded in a crawl space, awakened by the smell of biscuits.

Monthly during harvest season, Henrietta and other children accompanied their grandfather on overnight wagon journeys to South Boston, a major tobacco market. They slept on tobacco leaves in the wagon and later in the warehouse's 'dark underbelly' on a dirt floor alongside animals, unlike white farmers who slept upstairs. The warehouse environment was characterized by 'booze, gambling, prostitution, and occasional murders.' Henrietta, considered the 'prettiest girl in Lacks Town,' attracted intense affection from her cousin Crazy Joe Grinnan, who attempted suicide multiple times (jumping into a frozen pond, stabbing himself) over her. Despite her sister Gladys's opposition, Henrietta married Day on April 10, 1941, at ages twenty and twenty-five respectively, without a honeymoon due to work and financial constraints. They had two children, Lawrence and Lucile Elsie Pleasant, with Elsie described as 'simple' or 'touched,' possibly due to a head injury at birth.