The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Sparknotes

022300
Courtney Davis
Mrs. Allinder
IB Literature
10 October 2016
Emotional Ties Created In The Reader
Thesis: In the creative non-fiction book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot, creates emotional ties to the reader through the character, Deborah.

Topic Sentence: Deborah was spoken about by Skloot before Deborah appeared as a live character with dialogue to form a founding idea about Deborah in the reader.

Evidence: When Skloot had finally received Deborah’s number from Pattillo, Pattillo gave Skloot a list of what to do and what not to do when “dealing with” Deborah. He told her not to be aggressive or “clinical”, not to force Deborah to do anything, and definitely “don’t talk down” to her because “she hates that”.

After her mother died, Day had given her and her brothers up to Ethel and her husband Galen because Ethel supposedly wanted to help the family by taking care of them. Instead, “Henrietta’s children had grown up hungry” because Ethel fed them a cold biscuit in the morning that had to hold them up until dinner. Ethel would wake the children at dawn and make them “clean the house, cook, shop, and do the laundry” but in the summers she would send them to Clover to “pick worms off tobacco leaves by hand”. When Deborah was ten, her and her brothers moved out of Ethel’s house and in with their oldest brother, Lawrence, and his wife, Bobbette. The abuse had stopped for her brothers but Deborah had to endure molestation from Galen. No matter where she was, Galen would find her and “touched her in ways she didn’t think he was supposed to”. Deborah tried to tell her father, Day, but he never believed her. Galen would touch her while they were in the backseat “forcing his hands under her shirt, in her pants, between her legs” but Day and Ethel were in the front of the car doing nothing about it. The end of the molestation came when Deborah went home with a bruised face from when Galen “threw her in the car”, which was holding her father, and “punched her hard in the face”. Bobbette forced Deborah to tell her what happened and Bobbette put a stop to Galen molesting