And They Took My Milk!

Abstract

"After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That's what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em.... Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made me open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still." "They used cowhide on you?" "And they took my milk." "They beat you and you was pregnant?" "And they took my milk!" -Toni Morrison, Beloved

Before reading Andrea Freeman's insightful book, Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice, I had never heard of the Fultz quadruplets. But I grew up in South Carolina, one state over from the Fultz sisters, in a household where there were always cans of Pet Evaporated Milk in the cabinets. We used evaporated milk for all sorts of things, from creaming and sweetening coffee to making strawberry shortcake for Sunday dinner. Although I am a generation younger than the Fultz quadruplets, I also grew up in a place where, to my knowledge, no one breastfed. Certainly not my mother, my aunts, or any of the other middle-class Black women in our circle. Breastfeeding was primitive and indecent, as primitive as the Africans I saw every afternoon after school when Tarzan was on, and as indecent as the naked African women that seemed to be in every issue of National Geographic magazine. In the Southern Black community where I grew up, breastfeeding was like scrubbing clothes with a washing-board when a washing machine was available-it just wasn't done. Or rather, I assume it just wasn't done.

Skimmed's brilliance is that it disabused me of my naivete. Freeman's book showed me the interconnected web that constrains the "decision" not to breastfeed, including laws, history, marketing, and more. As Freeman notes, "Approximately 83 percent of White mothers and 82.4 percent of Latinx mothers report ever attempting to breastfeed, while 66.4 percent of Black mothers report ever trying" (p. 10). When adding class, the numbers are even more extreme: "Only 37 percent of low-income Black women initiate breastfeeding" (pp. 10-11). The facile assumption might be that Black mothers, particularly poor Black mothers, are more likely to grow up in poorer "communities with minimal to nonexistent breastfeeding resources and support mechanisms[.]" But as Skimmed reveals, "the problem is even deeper" (p. 4). By weaving together the story of the Fultz sisters, Freeman demonstrates the interconnectedness of Pet Milk using the quadruplets as commodities, along with the lasting impact of slavery and the bad mother trope, and the entanglement of the government and corporations in marketing formula, particularly to low-income women.