by Mary Jessica Hammes
December 03, 2009

In a recent family photo, Teresa Brown Jesus, her two sisters, and their 11 children, ranging in age from 20 months to 19 years, appear happy and glowing in crisp white shirts. The adult sisters are nestled on a sofa; cousins hold cousins. One of Teresa’s then-infant twins rests in her cradled arms, his small head turned to her subtly lifted shirt.

In a time when zero support groups existed in her area, when a nurse advised one of the sisters not to breastfeed her twins, the family’s story is downright amazing. Against all the odds, every child in the family portrait was breastfed. Get to know the family, and it’s no surprise the youngest is breastfeeding in the photo.

Teresa’s older sister, Kim Thomas, breastfed all of her children. When Teresa’s youngest sister, Christy Holley, became a mother at 16, she breastfed her daughter for a year and a half. She nursed her baby while on one of the two buses she took to high school.

Teresa knows her extended breastfeeding mystifies some people. Her 3-year-old son nursed for 18 months and she’s still nursing her toddler twins.

“People think I’m crazy for pumping for 20-month-olds, but I nurse on the weekends and I want to keep my supply up,” says Teresa, a policy analyst for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Teresa and her family are unusual in another way: African American infants are significantly less likely to be breastfed.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, only 19 percent of black women breastfeed their children for more than six months, less time than their white and Latina counterparts. As baby gooroo reported, the infant mortality rate among black women (13.6 deaths per 1,000 live births) is more than twice that for white women (5.66 deaths). The states with the highest infant mortality rates also have the lowest rates of breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding is natural, breastfeeding is normal
In the African American community, breastfeeding isn’t generally viewed as “normal,” isn’t always supported by family and friends, and suffers from a noticeable lack of culturally sensitive literature, according to An Easy Guide to Breastfeeding for African American Women.

“I don’t think people think it’s normal,” says Teresa. “People who know me think I’m just sort of different anyway.”

Teresa grew up in Delray Beach, Florida, and attended Duke University and then the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, obtaining two master’s degrees—one in social work and one in public health (maternal and child health). After graduating, she worked in the D.C. area where she met her husband, Emilio de Jesus. Living in Bishop, Georgia, she commutes to Atlanta, where she is also a certified lactation counselor.

She can thank her sisters for blazing the breastfeeding trail—in Teresa’s memory, they were the first in the family to breastfeed for any significant amount of time.

Kim first nursed her daughter for 5 months, and then twin boys for a year.

“I’d always read how breastfeeding was the best milk for the child,” Kim says. A web developer in Hampton, Virginia, she was lactose intolerant as a child and didn’t want her own children to experience the pain she did after drinking dairy products. And besides that, “Honestly, I didn’t want to sterilize bottles and mix milk,” she says, laughing.

When her 19-year-old daughter was born, the staff at the naval hospital matter-of-factly showed her how to breastfeed and left her to it. There were no support groups. And when she nursed her baby around her family, “I could tell they were shocked,” she says. “Not as if I shouldn’t do it, but because it was something different.”

And there was that nurse. After her twins, now 17, were born via c-section, the discouraging nurse told her, “Why are you trying to breastfeed them? That’s just too much to do. You really should try giving them bottles.” Kim was heartbroken, but luckily her doctor noticed. Teresa remembers what the doctor told her sister: “Of course you’re doing the best thing, breastfeeding those boys. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t do it.”

“He was the one who made me feel I was doing the best thing in the world,” Kim says. She ended up being grateful that she stuck with it. Nursing twins in the middle of the night was much easier than trying to keep up with bottles.

“It was strictly my doing,” she says of the lack of breastfeeding organizations or pamphlets or education available to her. “No one was telling me to do anything. It was me and my determination to breastfeed.”

“I had never seen anyone else in my family [breastfeed]—not my aunts, younger cousins, never,” Teresa says. “None of my friends or mom’s friends. I had really never seen anyone breastfeed a child before, not even really pictures. It certainly was not something that was normal.”

Support makes all the difference
Kim paved the way for Christy to breastfeed her daughter while still a teenager living in Florida. “At first I had reservations about it,” Christy recalls. “I was thinking, how would this work?” Living in Thomas, GA, she takes online classes working toward a bachelor’s degree in business administration and caring for her 5 children, ages 16, 12, 11, 9, and 5.

Her junior year was spent at an alternative high school that allowed her to take her baby to school. She returned to her regular high school her senior year, where she was able to take breaks to pump and breastfeed once she got home. “I’m pretty sure it was a shock to them, that someone their age was doing this,” she says of her school friends. “But it didn’t bother me at all. Me breastfeeding in front of other people was not an issue.” Christy’s popularity and self-confidence helped a lot, she says, as well as the overwhelming support of her family, school, and church.

“I didn’t have that crutch where the grandmother takes over and raises the baby,” she says. “My mother said, ‘This is your baby, you have to deal with it.’ She made me finish school.” At her alternative school, she says people treated her like, “I’m still a person, I just have another little person with me. I didn’t feel like my world was coming to an end.”

And Christy saw how healthy her first-born was. “She was never sick,” she says. “She didn’t have any infections. It was more healthy for her and it proved to me it was the best thing for her…I truly believe breastfeeding is the best thing to do.”

Teresa felt the same way. She focused on her education and waited until she was almost 35 to become pregnant. She made up her mind that she too would breastfeed. Her husband and his family were all extremely supportive of that decision.

“If my mother-in-law or husband weren’t supportive, I can’t imagine,” Teresa says. “That must be really, really hard for women.”

As for her own family, they had grown accustomed to the sight of a breastfeeding woman—especially because Teresa nursed her children anytime, anywhere, in front of anyone. Her mother has “never said anything that was not supportive,” Teresa says. “My mom sort of sees me as a person who does whatever she wants to do.” After all, Teresa was the first in her family to go to college, let alone get two advanced degrees. But her grandmother occasionally asked if the twins are still nursing, suggesting at various times that at that age, “they can just eat a lot of food.”

Even though her family has been supportive, Teresa feels like too many people think breastfeeding is for poor people, maybe even her grandmother. “They think, ‘Why would I do that when I can buy formula,’ she says. “In the black community, and in parts of the developing world, it says something about you if you can afford to get formula for your child.”

Teresa knows firsthand that there’s a lack of support specifically for non-white women. She sought support while breastfeeding her twins and found some help at the hospital where they were born. Given her professional background, she also knew where to look online for information. But every organization she found that targeted black women is now defunct due to lack of funding. She visited a La Leche League meeting but didn’t return. “There were not a lot of women there who were like me,” Teresa says, noting she was the only black woman in attendance. “Some were like me in a lot of ways, but I didn’t make the effort to go back.”

So after her long family history of success with breastfeeding, Teresa is looking at different ways to reach the black community in order to educate and share the benefits of breastfeeding. There could not be a better example for new and expectant mothers. Next on her list: get a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, which now houses the Carolina Breastfeeding Institute.

“I’m going to figure something out,” she says.

Click here to read about another trailblazer, founder of Blacktating.com.

Mary Jessica Hammes is an Athens, Georgia-based writer, trapeze instructor, knitter, gardener, comic book enthusiast, and hula hooper. She is mom to Tommy.