When I first saw the modern painting of a little black boy with a watermelon, I was torn.
I have seen so many derogatory images of black-boy-with-watermelon that I shun them. Going to auctions, it’s not hard to find postcards or figurines from another era with a little black boy grinning as he eats a watermelon. It was an innocent experience made derogatory by a depraved mind and undignified hand bent on dehumanizing him and all black people. Some of those images are just too horrible to look at.
At another auction recently, I was reminded of those images in a 1908 advertisement painting for Cream of Wheat. It featured a black boy sitting on a crate as he ate the cereal, with a watermelon just behind him. The watermelon had nothing whatsoever to do with the picture. It was there to uphold the stereotype – that Cream of Wheat was so good that even a little black boy would choose it over watermelon.
So, when I saw the painting presumably by an African American artist named Sam Benson on the auction-house website, I was surprised that it moved rather than repulsed me. I went back several times to look it over, and it eventually grew on me.
This was a little boy whose eyes sparkled in glee as he focused on the slice of watermelon, which was so large that it took up half of the canvas and covered what I’m sure was a big smile. The artist drew him as a cutie, not as a caricature, and the watermelon was food, not an extension of who he was.
In Benson’s 2000 painting, this was just a kid who couldn’t wait to devour this slice of watermelon. I understood the sentiment. I love watermelon; maybe it’s from my southern roots. I grew up on my grandfather’s farm in Georgia (one of the top watermelon-growing states), and he always had a watermelon patch. I’m sure he had been growing them since he began farming decades before.
Every summer now, I buy a watermelon or two, split it open lengthwise at home and place both halves in my refrigerator covered in plastic wrap. When I want a hunk of watermelon, I just take a fork and grab it. I have a friend who cuts up hers and places it in a container in her refrigerator – not me.
Society has long used watermelons to insult black folks, and the message it carries has been ingrained into our being. I recall an article written years ago by an African American writer at my former newspaper about her public experience with watermelon. She and her family were at a private pool where they were the only or one of the only black families. Watermelon was being served and she wanted some, but was embarrassed to choose it in front of the white folks. She was afraid that she would be perpetuating the stereotype.
As I recall, she got past her reticence, took the watermelon and enjoyed it. That’s the way to do it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with eating watermelon. What’s wrong is how our society has taken an innocent and tasty fruit and made it ugly. Black folks, in fact, don’t consume as much watermelon as some think. But we all know that has nothing to do with the stereotype.
So where did this deprecating connection between black folks and watermelons come from? Here’s a bit of history:
“The stereotype that African Americans are excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came into full force when slaves won their emancipation during the Civil War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence.”
Here’s the ramification:
“Since the earliest days of plantation slavery, the caricature of the dark-skinned black child, his too-red lips stretched to grotesque extremes as they opened to chomp down on watermelon, was a staple of racism’s diet. Over time, the watermelon became a symbol of the broader denigration of black people. It became part of the image perpetuated by a white culture bent upon bolstering the myth of superiority. … Like all racial and ethnic stereotypes, this one’s destructive properties have, through the decades, stretched far beyond mere insult. It has helped poison self-esteem, pushing some people to avoid doing anything that seemed too ‘black.'”
Watermelons appeared to have been first a food of Italian or Arab peasants, who also were denigrated for eating it. By the time the fruit arrived in America, its undesirable traits were not only assigned to enslaved Africans, but also to some poor whites.
Black folks and watermelons were produced on sheet music (as characters and music titles), films, minstrel shows, postcards, games, figurines, ashtrays, souvenirs and many other items. At the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the organizers set aside a “Colored American Day” that included free watermelons.
It’s a stereotype that won’t die in a land that remains divided by race. Even America’s first black president isn’t immune: A cartoon in the Boston Herald newspaper in 2014 showed a bather who had broken into the White House asking President Obama if he’d ever tried watermelon-flavored toothpaste. The cartoonist said he failed to recognize the implications of his choice of toothpaste.
As for artist Sam Benson, I wondered what he was thinking in creating the painting. I could find little about him, except that he was from Chester, PA.
When the painting came up for sale in the online auction, I decided to bid on it. I figured that I’d get it for the starting price of 50 bucks – who else would want a painting of a black boy with a watermelon? – but someone else wanted it, too. By the time the auction ended, it sold for $175 but not to me. I finally gave up on the bidding. It was a sweet painting but I wanted to pay considerably less for it.
