The origin of America's first surviving set of identical quadruplets.
ANDREA FREEMAN
Pet Milk ad featuring the Fultz quadruplets. Their doctor sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company.
“Four Little Babies.” Pet Milk, “Four Little Babies Become Four Little Ladies,” advertisement, Pittsburgh Courier, October 22, 1949, 5. Public Domain.
We're pleased to present an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice » by Andrea Freeman.
Annie Mae Fultz could not afford to let anything go wrong with her pregnancy. Her doctor, Fred Klenner, had detected three tiny heartbeats inside her. It was 1946. Annie Mae was a tall, strong, thirty-seven-year-old half-Black, half-Cherokee woman from Tennessee.1 Dr. Klenner, although originally from Pennsylvania, happily adhered to southern racial norms.2 He had separate waiting rooms for Blacks and Whites in his downtown Reidsville, North Carolina, office. The old-fashioned decor of his practice matched his dated views. His segregated waiting rooms gave way to treatment rooms full of ancient furniture and unusual medical instruments.3 His walls displayed White supremacist literature and, later, a “Vote for George Wallace” poster.4 He vigorously defended Hitler as misunderstood to anyone who would listen.5 The local hospital where he delivered babies, Annie Penn Memorial, relegated Black mothers to the basement.6 Despite his unapologetic racism, Annie Mae had faith in Dr. Klenner’s medical abilities.
The neglected ward housed Annie Penn’s least valued patients and its oldest, shabbiest equipment. Annie Mae’s meager bedside boasted only bare-bones paraphernalia: a single-unit hot plate and a ten-quart kettle.
Annie Mae had plenty of challenges to overcome in the face of the growing lives inside her. A childhood battle with spinal meningitis had robbed her of the ability to hear or speak, rendering the possibility of a medical emergency, when urgent communication would be essential, even more frightening.7 On the tobacco farm where Annie Mae’s husband, James, a fifty-nine-year-old Black man known to all as Pete,8 toiled as a tenant farmer, there was no electricity.9 The family had no car, and the road leading out to the farm was rutted, long, and lonely. On Dr. Klenner’s advice, Annie Mae left her six children in their father’s care and moved into Annie Penn’s basement to wait out her delivery.10 To pass the long hours that followed on her hospital cot, Annie Mae conversed with her nurse, Margaret Ware, through gestures and lip-reading.11
The odds that all three of Annie Mae’s triplets would survive were slim. Although any mother expecting triplets must come to terms with multiples’ low survival rate, Annie Mae confronted more obstacles than most. Advances in modern medicine that could have eased the birth process had yet to reach the basement. The neglected ward housed Annie Penn’s least valued patients and its oldest, shabbiest equipment. Annie Mae’s meager bedside boasted only bare-bones paraphernalia: a single-unit hot plate and a ten-quart kettle.12