Joe (Zakariyya) Lacks

Zakariyya's rage stems from compounding traumas: he lost his mother as an infant, was sexually abused by cousin Galen in a household Day failed to protect, killed a man in a fight and served time for manslaughter, and watched HeLa cells generate billions for corporations while his family lived in poverty without health insurance. Skloot frames his fury not as pathology but as a coherent, if destructive, political and personal indictment of systemic exploitation.

When Skloot first meets him, Zakariyya slams a knife onto the table during their conversation, signaling deep hostility toward outside researchers he associates with a history of exploitation. Skloot presents this not as random menace but as the act of a man with no remaining reason to trust a white researcher asking questions about his mother and her stolen cells.

Joe changed his name after converting to Islam, an act Skloot frames as an attempt to forge an identity independent of the Lacks family's painful history. Because his family's name—and his mother's cells—had been claimed and circulated by others without consent, the renaming represents a rare act of self-determination in a life where personhood was repeatedly denied or ignored.

The most emotional moment occurs when Johns Hopkins researcher Christoph Lengauer invites the Lacks family to view HeLa cells under a microscope. Seeing his mother's cells still alive and dividing decades after her death, Zakariyya is visibly overwhelmed and comes close to tears. It is the only encounter he ever has with any aspect of Henrietta, and it reveals the profound grief beneath his rage without erasing his legitimate anger at the injustice she suffered.

Deborah is the sibling Zakariyya is closest to in the narrative. They share the same fundamental anger over their mother's exploitation, but Deborah channels hers into obsessive research and emotional advocacy, while Zakariyya's tends toward explosive volatility. During tense encounters with Skloot, Deborah frequently acts as a mediator—validating Zakariyya's grievances while trying to prevent confrontations from escalating.

Zakariyya killed a man during a fight and was convicted of manslaughter, spending years in prison as a result. Skloot traces this violence back to the trauma of his childhood—particularly the sexual abuse by cousin Galen that went unchecked in Day's household—situating his imprisonment within a broader pattern of abandonment and systemic failure rather than presenting it as simple criminality.

Lengauer, a Johns Hopkins researcher, plays a structurally pivotal role by inviting the Lacks family to view HeLa cells under a microscope—treating them as stakeholders rather than curiosities. This gesture of genuine respect is what the medical establishment had consistently failed to offer the family. Zakariyya's tearful response to seeing his mother's living cells illustrates how deeply that prior exclusion had wounded him and marks the most significant emotional shift in his story.

Both Zakariyya and Elsie represent Lacks children failed by overlapping systems simultaneously. Elsie was institutionalized and largely erased from family memory by the medical establishment, while Zakariyya was left unprotected in a harmful household and later imprisoned. Together they illustrate Skloot's argument that the same structures—medical, social, and familial—that exploited Henrietta also discarded her most vulnerable children.