Hawking Melons in Bed-Stuy With the Summertime Salesman ‘Everybody Knows’

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From the bed of a blue pickup truck parked at a corner in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, James Jackson sells hundreds of watermelons each week of the summer.

“I buy top grade watermelon,” he said. “I don’t buy no number two, number four.”

The white-bearded retiree has been in the seasonal melon-selling game for about four decades, becoming a summer fixture in his spot on the intersection of brownstone-lined Throop Avenue and Macon Street.

Jackson, 77, started selling watermelon by driving around the streets of Brooklyn, hawking them from a truck and sing-screaming, “Watermelon!” to drum up attention.

When he worked as a nursing assistant at a hospital in his younger years, he saw many patients come in dangerously parched, and he keeps that in mind as he peddles his melons.

“When you get hot, they want something to cool off [so] the body don’t dehydrate,” said Jackson, who is originally from Virginia but has lived in the neighborhood since he moved in his twenties.

Jackson’s friend and fellow Bed-Stuy resident Richard Edmonds has been assisting him on a part-time basis for the past 15 years or so. Edmonds’ volunteering became an everyday thing only in the past four or five years. The men used to begin the watermelon enterprise starting in June, but this year, they started in April.

“It’s a sign of summer,” Edmonds said. “We are here, the people like us, we try to give them the best of everything.”

Edmonds, 68, helps the older man set up each morning, sometimes as early as 7 a.m., even though he still works nights as a staffing coordinator at Brooklyn Hospital where they met. It can make for long, tiring days for Edmonds, but he believes in his friend’s vision.

“I think he is my best friend, but he may have a different opinion,” Edmonds said. “I make sure nobody takes advantage of him.”

On a recent warm Monday afternoon, business flowed steadily from customers of all kinds. A delivery worker on an e-bike stopped by to grab a cup of cut melon, as did a young dad with his 10-day-old baby in a stroller. A driver pulled over, and Edmonds handed two melon cups to her and a friend through the passenger’s side window. Kids visited with their caregivers when school got out. One woman came by twice to ask whether there was any yellow watermelon available.

“Most of the time, we sell out,” said Trisha Forbes, a Bed-Stuy resident who’s one of the locals who Jackson hires to help run the stand for the season.

She chopped up juicy hunks of melon and packed them into cups, and rested beneath the shade of an umbrella during the rare lulls between customers. Jackson supervises, sitting in the shade in the company of friends that visit. If Forbes’ watermelon supply is running low, Jackson will carry more over to her from a separate truck where he stores them when he’s not on the corner.

Most of the customers are locals who begin arriving just as soon as the men set up. They’ve got regulars, and they’ve watched some of them grow up from toddlers to 20-somethings.

“I love to meet people,” he said. “Everybody knows me.”

Edmonds and Jackson used to pick up watermelon — and sometimes cantaloupe — from the Brooklyn Terminal Market in Canarsie, but several years ago switched to a supplier based in New Jersey, who each week arrives at the corner to drop off around 200 melons grown in Georgia, Florida and other farms along the Gulf Coast.

The price Jackson pays for the melons fluctuates, usually between $13 and $15 per fruit. He determines what to sell the melon for by scoping out prices at local supermarkets and going a bit lower. He makes enough profit to cover his bills and rent, he said.

How many actually get sold each week? “I don’t count them,” Jackson said.

Market Changes

Jackson has shifted his offerings over the years. He used to always slice the melon and sell it by the pound, but his supplier advised him to instead sell cut-up melons in plastic cups, which go for $5 each. But some customers still ask for quarters or halves of watermelon, and the men oblige.

“For the young generation, they have no time to be cutting up melon. They just want a cup of melon going to work or coming home or going wherever they’re going and they could eat,” Edmonds explained.

Another way Jackson caters to young people is by giving customers a way to pay electronically. Edmonds figured out how to use Zelle after his 19-year-old daughter put it on his phone, he said. His number is scrawled on a cardboard sign attached to the truck, and he hears the sound of payments hitting his phone throughout the day.

Jackson tells Edmonds he should take over when he retires from selling fruit. But Edmonds says he just wants to travel; he never imagined he’d be spending so much of his time on this corner, hauling melons, making sure the staff have enough small bills to make change.

For now, Jackson plans to keep at it — no matter how hot it gets.

“I’m blessed to help people,” he said.

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