“Don’t eat no Watermelon without Seeds”
“You can’t find no watermelons in Brooklyn.”
I grinned expectantly from ear to ear, amused. A good rant is to be expected when he starts with an exclamation you both know can’t be true.
“What?” I said skeptically, as I secured my earpods ensuring I wouldn’t miss a beat.
“Well, I was out with Pat this weekend and we had the most delicious watermelon. Today I felt for some, so I went down to the grocery to get it, and none of the watermelons had seeds. None! Who would eat watermelon without seeds? What kind of thing is that? I really don’t know what these people have going on, but I can’t eat no fruit without seeds. First they tried it with grapes, now they going bigger, getting bolder… they say the seeds are an inconvenience. ‘Chupz.’ These people good yes, but hear what, I’m not eating it. Akasha, don’t eat no watermelon without seeds.”
My dad proclaimed his watermelon manifesto in response to my “hey Dad, what’s up?” as I called him on my walk to New Seasons grocery store—2,500 miles from his watermelon desert. The sun was shining brightly, and my hand, raised to block it from blinding my eyes, lowered as I approached the market entrance revealing them. Piled high were dark green rotund melons, protruding from an oversize crate. My mouth-watered, but I chastened it quickly, my dad’s words fresh in my mind. The placard advertising the price and origin of the melons didn’t say seedless, but I couldn’t be sure, so I went inside to find the precut ones.
Lo and behold they lacked the shiny black ovals from which more watermelons could sprout. I trusted my dad, so of course I couldn’t buy those. I asked a store clerk if the ones outside were seedless or not, he was unsure. What was the chance they had both natural and seedless melons? The clerk was curious as well, he hadn’t noticed that the melons were seedless, and was intrigued that I was on a quest to find the missing seeds exactly where they should be. He offered to cut it open to find out for me.
Emerging from behind the swinging door his face turned down and sideways, he sighed.
“Seedless.”
“Thank you, but I can’t buy that,” I said apologetically.
I walked home with grocery bags brimming with summer fruit, not a watermelon in sight.
Craving the fruit made me recall my childhood in New York City; the way we made a habit of creating a world all our own, a private sphere in a public space where we unabashedly were the lead and entourage characters. On a stoop in Brooklyn, in a park in Manhattan, or at a church picnic upstate, our joy projected and permeated our surroundings. We remained purposefully aloof to any passersby who happened to witness our sacred communion; protective of our language, of our bodies, of our rituals. Pale red water running down our hands, seeds all over the ground, the blood and the body consumed insatiably, reveling in the fact that eating watermelon like this was somehow irreverent, devious, and rebellious. Something sweeter than the fruit itself masticated with every bite. Bellies tumid and prideful we couldn’t articulate what we knew to be true; we were more powerful having participated in this liturgy, we were reaping the harvest that was promised us, reclaiming a part of us we didn’t even know had been stolen.
That summer I ate a lot of watermelon; I can’t remember if any of them had seeds.
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‘Black people don’t eat watermelon in public.’
I can’t remember where I first heard it, but I knew the saying well, a trope masquerading as a joke, one in which I could never decipher our role: the comedy or the comedian. Despite its prevalence, I had seen all the Black people I knew eat watermelon and thoroughly enjoy eating it in public. Something made watermelon consumption in the public realm feel so good, even though it was clear to us we were meant to feel the opposite. We may not have known where it came from but the trope was meant to act as an inhibitor, a mythology of shame passed from generation to generation without a cogent narrative to inform us of its origins. A narrative “so obscure, that many people think the stereotype simply appeared out of thin air.” But we know better, most of what we take for granted, from our nursery rhymes, the inflections in our speech to our social, economic and political order, have a history, a source, a story, an origin, and ‘Black people don’t eat watermelon in public’ is no outlier.
In his essay How Watermelons Became Black, scholar and historian William R. Black outlines the connection to Black Americans and watermelon, over time moving intentionally from one of proud ownership symbolizing freedom and independence to a scorned and shameful dissociation. Watermelons are a fruit that is easy to grow in the tropical climate of the American south. To yield a bountiful crop, they require 65-90 days where the soil temperature is above 70 degrees fahrenheit. Comprised of 92% water, its vines can stretch ten to twelve feet long producing roots that seek out whatever moisture lay beneath the ground. During the brutal system of racial slavery in America, 1619 to 1865, “many [enslavers] allocated land for [enslaved people] to cultivate during what little free time they had…”Due to the ease with which watermelon grew in their environment and the limited time enslaved people had to dedicate to cultivation, they often turned the land they were given into watermelon patches.
The ability to cultivate land for oneself was not a benevolent gift from the enslaver; granting enslaved peoples an opportunity to grow their own food provided a release from the enslavers' burden to feed them. Despite being laden with the responsibility of their own nourishment and having limited resources to yield a sustainable harvest, many enslaved people relished the opportunity to grow their own food. The enslaved were often allowed to sell whatever yields they did not eat, granting them the first opportunity to sell the fruits of their labor and keep what they earned from the sale for themselves. Performing an act for oneself instead of in service to the enslaver was seen as an act of resistance. Some enslaved people may have even used the funds they amassed selling watermelon to purchase their freedom, ensconcing the watermelon as a tool of economic sovereignty and a symbol of Black liberation.
“Former [enslaved peoples] ‘were able to support themselves from the first hour after
their masters ran away,’ namely by selling watermelons, sweet potatoes,
eggs, and other foodstuffs to soldiers at the nearby Union camp” remarked one commentator traveling through the south after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Although labeled by history as the “Great Emancipator”, Lincoln crafted the emancipation proclamation less as an act of moral fortitude—attempting to right the wrongs of American enslavement— and more as an ultimatum to the confederacy; a war tactic meant to bring the rebel army and its economic power to their knees.
Freeing enslaved people who outnumbered whites in many southern enclaves would unleash an army of men loyal to the Union within confederate strongholds. On January 16th, 1865, two weeks after Lincoln delivered the emancipation proclamation, which became the 13th amendment, General William T. Sherman, a union army officer issued Special Order No. 15 “which confiscated as Union property a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles in from the coast. The order redistributed the roughly 400,000 acres of land to newly freed Black families in forty-acre segments.” Sherman also authorized the army to loan mules to the newly settled farmers. This is the origin of the reparative promise to Black Americans of “forty-acres and a mule.”
The order, like the emancipation proclamation was less about justice for the newly freed Black people, and was meant to punish confederate landowners and unload the burden of providing for the tens of thousands of freedpeople who showed up at the union army’s doorstep in search of protection for the freedom they had just gained. Despite its origins, the order was revolutionary. It made formerly enslaved people land owners, it made it illegal for any white people to reside on those lands, and installed union troops to protect the rights of the Black people who benefitted from the order’s mandates. It established a Black owned and led territory, a safe haven where people newly endowed with the rights and liberties of freedom could blossom and flourish.
But, the order was short lived, President Lincoln, who approved Special Order No. 15, was assassinated in April of 1865. His successor Andrew Johnson ascended to the presidency as the war was won, and by the fall of 1865 Special Order No. 15 was revoked and all redistributed land was returned to the traitors who sought to secede from the union. The south was in ruins and the nation was embarking on a period of Reconstruction. Johnson and his cabinet believed it wise to settle unrest and soften the blow of losing the bloody war, by placating white southerners.
Breaking promises to the newly freed Black people was collateral damage. Black people, given no land or assets with which to jumpstart their freedom during Reconstruction, took to renting or purchasing small plots of land, growing watermelons and other produce, and selling them in the town square. This was preferred by some to the alternative of returning to the forced labor camps where they had been tortured and robbed of their humanity to work as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, as many newly freed people with limited economic opportunity did. Regardless of their status as independent agriculturists or sharecroppers, Black southerners sold watermelon with great aplomb. At first white people saw this act as innocuous, Black people had been selling them watermelon during slavery as well. They patroned the Black farmers, purchasing watermelons from them, painting a picture of Black people as harmless yet mildly enterprising, seizing upon a simple yet abundant crop to make a living.
Simultaneously, “Black activists and a small group of Radical Republicans who truly believed in Black equality—viewed Reconstruction as a ‘once- in-a-lifetime’ opportunity to purge the republic of the legacy of slavery. Thanks to their efforts, the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human civil rights ever witnessed in this nation.” The Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted citizenship to all persons born in the United States of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude. It also extended the rights to make and enforce contracts; be party to legal proceedings; and buy, own, and inherit property, to Black people. This act became the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution and was ratified by the states in 1868. Less than 10 months after the 14th Amendment’s ratification, the 15th Amendment was passed by Congress. The 15th Amendment gave all [male] citizens the immutable right to vote regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude, and gave Congress the ability to enforce this right.
These laws began to animate life during Reconstruction- throngs of Black Americans began to take part in civic life. They voted, ran for office, and held seats in Congress and state legislatures that their former enslavers used to hold. They created laws that built and mandated public education for all, built social infrastructure including universities, owned land, and set a course for Black peoples’ full participation in the promises of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The work they did uplifted everyone, especially working class white tenant farmers and sharecropping families, people who did not have access to education or full access to the American promises guaranteed to wealthy landowners.
The more Black people participated in public life, the more they seemed to gain and set this new nation on a path to true democracy and equality for all, the higher tensions rose in the south. White people began to view Black progress as a threat to the racial caste system they built their identities on. Before this period of Reconstruction, African Americans had to find ways to stay alive in a structure that required total submission. They occupied a position of inferiority and servility, and most importantly to white people at this time, no matter the white person's age, gender, or station, Black people had to bend to their every will and whim. The curtailing of the dominance of the white will over the Black body produced violence and a rallying cry to put Black people back in their rightful place, and watermelon became a vehicle to do so.
Watermelon had taken on a more expansive public life, it became a domestic cash crop and a well known cultural symbol of Black economic independence, resilience and growth. Not only were Black people selling and profiting off of watermelon, they were giving them away as gifts, a way to create solidarity between the cause of the formerly enslaved and their allies. Watermelon's symbolism permeated dominant culture, and quickly became reviled by most whites on both sides of the Mason Dixon, but particularly by poor southern whites. In their eyes, if Black people became more free, then whites would become less free. This belief was reinforced when in 1868 in Macon County, GA a freedman refused to surrender his watermelon to a white passerby. The passerby could not accept that his whiteness did not override a Black man’s ownership rights, so he bludgeoned the Black man in the head repeatedly with the butt of his pistol, killing him in cold blood. This was the south that white people, unable to cope with the vestiges of Reconstruction, wanted. They saw Black people, despite their accomplishments, as infantile, unworthy to participate in full American citizenship. Instead of viewing Black enterprise through watermelon positively, seeing it as Black people’s acquiescence to the capitalist system despite all it had done to denigrate and maim them, white people actively transformed the narrative into one that painted Black people as thieves, stealing what was rightfully endowed to white people by virtue of their whiteness: freedom of personhood, economic sovereignty, and participation in American democracy.
The cultural war was waged, watermelon was painted as the fruit of the infantile thief who lacked temperance, seeking only to satisfy his most primitive instinct for a gluttonous sweet treat. “They began equating Black people’s growing of watermelons with outright ‘neglect,’ and praised ‘the more provident and intelligent’ Black folks who focused on growing cotton,” a crop whose yield didn’t stop at point of sale, but also served the southern landowner, the northern textile owner, and the global cotton market that made America a wealthy nation. When a white farmer grew watermelons, it was a sign of industriousness; when a Black farmer grew watermelons, it was a sign of short-sightedness. Black people simply eating watermelon became proof that they were unfit stewards of American citizenship. “To invest, farm, or vote responsibly—to be a true citizen of the republic—one had to think in the long term and sacrifice for future gains. The former slave, however, as the New-York Tribune wrote, ‘lives in the present, thinking little of the past or the future; a bottle of whisky or a watermelon today is more prized by him than a farm or a fortune twenty years hence.’ ” You can almost swap watermelon out for sneakers or any other product Black people have shown a cultural interest in over the past two hundred years and see the same talking points, the same tropes used to shame, disparage, and demean, making the case time and time again in dominant culture that Black people are unworthy of American citizenship.
Reconstruction ended in 1877 and so too did the gains made for Black people through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a win in a contested presidential election, made a deal with white Southern Democrats to pull the remaining federal troops out of the south. Once again the political ambitions of one man and his party's desire to appease white southerners made Black people collateral damage. The promise of citizenship, which in America is supposed to be endowed with justice, liberty, and equal protection under the law, was curtailed for political expediency and served to abruptly end Reconstruction. White backlash in the form of Jim Crow laws, instituted a second slavery that repealed Black citizenship, created an apartheid regime and instituted a new reign of state sanctioned violence and terror. Years later, Jim Crow laws were used as a blueprint for creating the exclusionary laws that cleared the way for the holocaust, but even some of their statues were so severe that even the Nazi’s deemed them too extreme for their cause.
Over the next eighty-eight years, Black Americans were disenfranchised, stripped of their rights, beaten, maimed, lynched, and made second class citizens through case law, state law, and the cultural tropes that for white people, affirmed Black inferiority and heralded white supremacy as the foundational edict of this land. During those eight plus decades the symbols of white supremacist capitalist democracy, characterized by extractive and exploitative white majority rule was enshrined in song, dance, story, minstrel shows, movies, postcards, caricatures, salt and pepper shakers, tchotchkes, illustrations, and jokes. The watermelon, accompanied by dark skin, big lipped, and wide grinning darkies remained a centerpiece.
Today white backlash is symptomatic once again of perceived Black progress and the need to reaffirm for us all Black peoples place in America. Eight years of America’s first Black president, Barack Obama, were punctuated by a Trump presidency, and the flaunting of the machine of white supremacy that refuses to afford Black people equal protection under the law. Make America Great Again and all of its iterations whether carried out in congress’s inability to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act or in the courts as they struck down affirmative action, is a rallying cry to restore what is being seen as the upheaval of the racial caste system. A reclamation of a time in America’s history where Black people “knew their place.” A time when white people were not asked to check their bias and do the work of interrogating their 400 years of privilege. This country continues to peddle white supremacy, attempting to convince Black people of their unworthiness all while profiting from the goods of Black labor and cultural production.
We study history so that we can see the present clearly, we know that everything that is old will become new again, that rights hard fought and struggled for can be repealed, reinterpreted and gutted. In her March 2024 article for the New York Times Magazine Whitewash: The 50 year Campaign to undo the Progress of the Civil Rights Movement in the Name of Colorblindness, Nikole Hannah Jones outlines the strategy of white conservatives to use civil rights legislation to “dismantle the constitutional tools for undoing racial caste in the United States.” Our nation's willingness on both sides of the aisle to shroud racial redress in colorblindness and equality, instead of racial equity and economic redress is costing Black people our livelihoods and quite literally our lives. A lack of a concerted strategy to push back against this seizure of the rights of Black people and what we have been told is our persistent march toward progress is really the shelling of the fruit of our ancestors’ labor, an attempt to render us seedless.
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Fruits, fleshy or dry when ripened, are supposed to bear their own seeds, that is their primary purpose. The watermelon fruit is the ultimate protector of its seeds, hard shell exterior, camouflage green, able to withstand small breaches and blend in with the natural environment all the while containing an immense field of red flesh host to over one thousand seeds scattered in between. Fruit bearing watermelon seeds provide their plants with the opportunity to create progeny, to carry on their species, to be generative and outlast their inevitable mortality.
Our history in this country as Black people is wrought with this nation attempting to breach our fruit and render us seedless. The tropes they created to undermine our participation in American democracy endowed with the full rights of American citizenship, have worked to disenfranchise, denigrate, and shell us economically, socially, and politically. We have been painted as America’s problem, yet the idea of America, sold across the globe as the greatest country in the world, a place where all dreams can come true and all seeds can bear fruit, simultaneously attempts to render Black Americans seedless. There is no question that slave labor made America wealthy, and that Black cultural production sold as uniquely American provides this nation with global dominance and power. Yet Black people remain in an underclass, characterized as unworthy benefactors of American liberty, despite being the only people whose full participation and access to those rights would make America’s covenant reign true.
The watermelon and the shelling of its cultural significance as a symbol for Black independence and self-sufficiency is akin to the shelling of every Black justice movement in America. The playbook started during Reconstruction is still actively fueling the backlash we see today. It gets stronger every time it's invoked but so do we. We learn, we evolve, we propagate and sprout and grow bigger and more resilient. We create movement after movement, the Civil Rights movements of the 1860’s and 1960’s, Pan-African movement of the 1950’s, the Black Panther movement of the late 1960’s, the Black Power movement of the 1980’s, and the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010’s. We create art and literature to tell our story, create the scaffolding for the world we want to live in, and give color to this American journey toward a just and equitable democracy. We in our brilliance, in our excellence, in our dignity, in our existence, in our rest, will never allow ourselves to be eaten into obscurity. Despite their best efforts our fruit will continue to produce millions of seeds
NOTES
Black, William R. “How watermelons became black: Emancipation and the origins of a racist trope.” The Journal of the Civil War Era, vol. 8, no. 1, 2018, pp. 64–86, https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2018.0003.
Rhoades, Heather. “How to Water Watermelon Plants and When to Water Watermelons.” Gardeningknowhow, Gardening Know How, 16 July 2009, www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/fruits/watermelon/watering-watermelon.htm#:~:text=Watermelon%20roots%20go%20deep%20searching,rate%20of%20your%20watering%20system.
Black, William R. “How watermelons became black: Emancipation and the origins of a racist trope.” The Journal of the Civil War Era, vol. 8, no. 1, 2018, pp. 64–86, https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2018.0003.
“Emancipation Proclamation (1863).” National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives and Records Administration, www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/emancipation-proclamation. Accessed 31 May 2024.
BlackPast. “(1865) General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 •.” (1865) General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 •, 19 Jan. 2022, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/special-field-orders-no-15/.
Sherman’s Field Order No. 15 - New Georgia Encyclopedia, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/shermans-field-order-no-15/. Accessed 31 May 2024.
“American Civil War.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 28 May 2024, www.britannica.com/event/American-Civil-War.
“Constitution.” The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/amendments/14/citizenship-privileges-and-immunities-due-process-equal-protection-apportionment-disqualification-for-rebellion-debts-incurred-during-rebellion. Accessed 31 May 2024.
“13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865).” National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives and Records Administration, www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment. Accessed 31 May 2024.
“14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights (1868).” National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives and Records Administration, www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment. Accessed 31 May 2024.
“15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting Rights (1870).” National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives and Records Administration, www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/15th-amendment. Accessed 31 May 2024.
“American Civil War.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 28 May 2024, www.britannica.com/event/American-Civil-War.
“Blacks and Watermelons - May 2008.” Jim Crow Museum, jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2008/may.htm. Accessed 31 May 2024.
Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House, 2023.
Pilgrim, David, and Debby Irving. Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors: Stories from the Jim Crow Museum. PM Press, 2018.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole,, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story First edition., One World, 2021.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “The ‘colorblindness’ Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 13 Mar. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/magazine/civil-rights-affirmative-action-colorblind.html.