In FERN’s latest story, produced in partnership with Switchyard magazine as part of a special food issue, Jori Lewis explores the complicated racial history of the watermelon in America, using her own life as the critical lens.
“The watermelon is a generous fruit: the flesh of one can feed a dozen people and can parent hundreds of melons with its seeds,” Lewis writes. “Cultures throughout the ages have, and still do, interpret the watermelon as a symbol of good luck and fertility, a plant whose great fecundity might be shared with you. But in the United States, more than a century of racial denigration has cloaked and clouded this primordial symbol of solidarity, generosity, and abundance, transforming it into something almost unpalatable for many Black people. Of course, the watermelon itself is not to blame, but throughout its botanical, cultural, and social history, it has been a vehicle for our ideas about community, survival, and what we owe the future.”