1951. The first chapter begins on January 29, 1951, as Henrietta visits John Hopkins hospital in East Baltimore. After the birth of her fourth child, Deborah, just over a year earlier, Henrietta told her cousins, Margaret and Sadie, that she was experiencing pain. She kept her pains quiet from her husband and had another child, Joe, in September, 1950. A few months after Joe’s birth, Henrietta experiences severe bleeding and, knowing for certain that she has a “knot” on her womb, she visits the doctor who refers her to John Hopkins, the only major hospital in the area that treats black patients. The gynecologist, Howard Jones, confirms Henrietta’s suspicions: she has a large, purple growth on her cervix.

Chapter 2 goes back further in time to Henrietta’s childhood. She was born Loretta Pleasant in 1920 in a shack in Roanoke, Virginia—it is not known when or why she became Henrietta. When her mother died four years later, her father took his 10 children to Clover, Virginia, where his extended family worked as tobacco farmers. Henrietta spent the rest of her childhood with her grandfather, Tommy Lacks, who was also raising another grandchild—Henrietta’s cousin, David Lacks (known as Day), who one day would become her husband.