The Reconciliation / Economic Heritage, 2024

50 × 34 ″ Framed: 60 × 43 × 2.5 ″ Embroidery and acrylic paint on archival pigment print

For Sale

One of the moments that truly pushed me to continue seriously working on this series happened in a grocery store. I was with my youngest daughter, who was about eleven at the time, and I picked up a watermelon. As I held it, she said, “Mommy, that’s racist!” It caught me completely off guard. I immediately became hyper-aware of my surroundings, looking around to see if anyone was watching me.

Somehow, even at her age, she had already absorbed the idea that there was something shameful about being Black and simply holding a watermelon. That moment stayed with me. I realized that even I didn’t fully understand where this harmful stereotype came from. So, I started digging.

Economic Heritage (2024), depicts my oldest daughter holding a large watermelon. At first, I was hesitant to make it, because in the wrong hands, an image like this felt unsafe, no matter how lovingly it was made. I felt protective of the subject, of the history, of how it might be misused. But I knew this work needed to exist. Not as a stereotype, but as a reclamation.

As part of my research, I spent time reading and learning from several sources. Among them were David Pilgrim’s Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors (2017), Psyche Williams-Forson’s Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America (2022), William R. Black’s scholarship, Jessica B. Harris’s High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (2011), Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project (2019), articles from the Jim Crow Museum, the Works Progress Administration’s ex-slave narratives, and so many other sources.

What I found was that after emancipation, many formerly enslaved Black people began growing and selling watermelons as a way to build economic independence. At one point, watermelon symbolized freedom, resourcefulness, and Black self-sufficiency. But that success was met with resistance. Racist propaganda and violence quickly followed. In a 1941 interview from the Federal Writers’ Project, a previously enslaved gentleman named Easter Willis recalled that some Black farmers “made good money and had a good farm”—but the Ku Klux Klan would come and murder them for it.

This wasn’t just about controlling land or labor, it was about dismantling the possibility of Black prosperity. And so, watermelon, once a symbol of survival and economic strength of the Black community, was twisted into a tool of ridicule. That’s the weight my daughter was carrying that day in the grocery store, without even knowing the full story.