That made intuitive sense to me since some watermelon cultivars, like the one in northern Senegal, or wild species, like the ones in the Kalahari, seem to thrive in arid regions, storing water away for times of need. But Zhangjun Fei, a researcher at the Boyce Thompson Institute in Ithaca, New York, later told me that the varieties of watermelon we grow today, after millennia of breeding to focus on bigger sizes or sweeter fruits, have lost some of their ability to fight diseases and to withstand the harsh conditions of the deserts of their forebears, which are much more extreme than the Illinois River basin.
“A crop that is taken care of by humans, they are kind of spoiled,” he said. “They say, ‘even if I don’t have this ability to fight off disease, I still can survive because people are treating me well.’”
Fei said that as the climate changes and diseases evolve, farmers will need more ways to raise healthy watermelon crops—and not just growers in the United States like Hendricker and Powell, but also farmers in China, which produces more watermelons on an order of magnitude than any other country in the world, more than 60 million tons in 2020 compared to the next highest country, Turkey, with just 3.49 million tons, or to the United States, with its modest production of just 1.7 million tons. Fei said that researchers all over the world are finding solutions for the watermelon’s future by investigating its past.
• • • •
I was a self-conscious teen. I couldn’t help it. I had landed on the bright side of the tracking machine but there were only ever a couple of other Black kids in the honors and AP classes that formed the rhythm of my life. I often felt on display, singular, strange. I remember once having a conversation with my father about something I was self-conscious about as the only Black person around, although I can’t remember what. Was it someone who wanted me to play basketball? Or to dance? Or to speak like the sassy Black women they saw on TV? Was it a request to do something or wear something or, even, eat something? I think it must have been about food, because my father told me that he used to avoid eating watermelon in front of white people when he was younger. I knew then without knowing firsthand that watermelon was wielded by racists as a cudgel but I never imagined that he might have deprived himself of the juicy melon, not the least because it was ever-present in our house during the summer.
“For more than a century and a half, the watermelon has been a staple in America’s racist diet,” writes sociologist David Pilgrim in his 2017 book, Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors. “The depiction of black people eating watermelon has been a shorthand way of saying that black people are unclean (the fruit is messy to eat), lazy (it is easy to grow), childish (watermelons are sweet and colorful), overly indulgent (especially with their sexual appetites), and lacking ambition (the watermelon presented as satiating all needs).” Pilgrim is the founder and curator of the Jim Crow Museum at Michigan’s Ferris State University, and he says the museum has hundreds of racist images and objects encapsulating this stereotype, including “banks, plates, wall hangings, aprons, towels, ashtrays, toys, firecrackers, cookie jars, match holders, dolls, souvenirs, doorstops, lawn jockeys.”
Historian William Black traced the origins of the racist association of Black people with the watermelon to the period after Emancipation. Many formerly enslaved people farmed and sold watermelons, a crop that they had often grown in their kitchen gardens in the beforetimes. The watermelon was, for them, an instrument of self-sufficiency, a way to survive and even thrive. But that soon changed. “White southerners,” he writes, “waged a campaign within popular culture to transform the watermelon into a symbol of black people’s unfitness for freedom—an utter negation of the meaning black people had given the fruit.” Black reports that during Reconstruction, as early as 1866, southern newspapers often reported on supposed watermelon thefts by Black people, a kind of fixation that he says stood in for white anxiety about what they perceived as the violation of their property rights and political authority. In 1870, Tennessee legislators even proposed the so-called “watermelon bill,” that would have made trespassing a felony and stripped those convicted of their voting rights. It did not pass but eventually other types of legislation across the south would have the same effect: widespread disenfranchisement of Black voters that endured for nearly a century, and in some ways still endures today. In the meantime, Reconstruction-era white supremacists used popular culture to vilify Black labor and initiative when it came to cropping and selling watermelons, and, of course, the Black consumers eating them.
In addition, traveling minstrel troupes literally spread the “watermelon man” archetype in live form—a blackface actor with big red lips, toting his watermelon, scheming to get more watermelon, giving up everything for a slice. That archetype moved across the United States and beyond it to Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, one hateful performance at a time. Historian Chinua Thelwell told me that while researching his book, Exporting Jim Crow, he came across a reference to an American group that performed its racist repertoire in Durban, South Africa, in 1881, including a song called, “Oh That Watermelon.” The stereotype did not take root on the African continent as well as it had in the United States—Thelwell found only a handful of references to the watermelon being used in this way—but in the United States, such blackface songs, musicals, and theatricals carried over onto the silver screen. The 1915 Ku Klux Klan classic Birth of a Nation included a scene of Black people (many of whom were white actors in blackface) having a watermelon-filled celebration.
My father, who was born in segregated Arkansas in the 1940s, would have grown up inundated by advertisements, postcards, films, and TV shows that depicted Black people as watermelon-eating buffoons of either the happy-go-lucky-and-ignorant or the thieving-and-conniving types. My mother, born in segregated Chicago during the same period, said she remembers being stung by a watermelon joke on a nightly TV variety show, maybe The Johnny Carson Show of the 1950s. Martin Luther King, Jr., remembered refusing to eat watermelon in mixed company when he was at seminary in Pennsylvania: “I didn’t want to be seen eating it because of the association in many people’s minds between Negroes and watermelon,” he told a journalist from Redbook in 1956. “It was silly, I know, but it shows how white prejudices can affect a Negro.”
And Dr. King was not alone. It was enough to make whole generations of Black people self-conscious about eating watermelon. Psyche Williams-Forson, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland and the author of Eating While Black, said it is still common for people of a certain age to have reservations about eating watermelon—or, rather, to be seen eating watermelon. “I cite Black people who are absolutely, in some instances, adamant that they would not eat watermelon in public, unless it’s cut up in cubes or unless it’s served a very particular way,” she told me.
