NC’s Watermelon Lady finds viral fame, selling fruit so good it literally stops traffic

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For 18 years, anybody who hankered for the sweetest fruit in Raleigh could find The Watermelon Lady parked on the shoulder off New Bern Avenue, selling 20-pound beauties from her flatbed trailer.

She tossed them straight off the truck: black-seeded, sugar babies, orange and even yellow melons — all of them vine-ripe, never refrigerated and juicy enough to drip down your chin.

Then TikTok found her secret stand, and the viral raves poured in:

“Everybody jaws is jumpin!” raved a recent post . “Teeth or no teeth!”

And another:

“I’m from Raleigh and AIN’T NOBODY TELL ME NOTHING !! I need black seed!”

And now, The Watermelon Lady enjoys popularity so intense that 50 people stand in line all day, every day, toting her fruit home in rolling carts and cardboard boxes.

Caution, Watermelon Traffic Ahead

Every day but Monday, the jumble of cars park headlamp-to-brake light along New Bern Avenue near WakeMed, crammed into the side streets in both directions — enough that the median strip opposite The Watermelon Lady’s flatbed is dotted with orange cones and No Parking signs.

Her Facebook page offers minute-by-minute updates: sold out of orange watemelons, sold out of yellow watermelons, black-seeded watermelons arriving from Georgia tomorrow.

In a day, her Raleigh flatbed unloads 500 at $12 apiece — Venmo, Zelle and Apple Pay welcome.

“A lot of the people, if they have grandparents that grew up on farms, they know,” said Sanjuana Sanchez, aka The Watermelon Lady. “Any time you see somebody selling like this, on the side of the road, then you know you’re alright. It’s straight off the farm.”

Six days a week

With her son JJ, she holds down three locations in Raleigh, Fayetteville and Four Oaks while her husband hauls melons from farms stretching from Florida to Delaware, depending on what’s ripe.

And at 47, she keeps up a six-day workweek on the back of a flatbed in 100-degree heat, managing three transactions at once, some in English, some in Spanish, while juggling fruit the size and weight of a bowling ball.

“I tell them I just need one day to wash clothes,” she joked.

From her perch on the flatbed, she dispenses free watermelon wisdom while the line snakes around the block:

▪ The original watermelons, she explains, were yellow, while the red ones were cross-bred.

▪ Her melons come with a “tail” snipped off the vine, unlike the grocery store specimens that got cut prematurely.

▪ The best judge of ripeness is a good, hard thump.

“Find one with a nice yellow belly,” she says, “and sounds nice and hollow.”

Off the chain

More than a five-star Yelp review, The Watermelon Lady brings the endorsement of the TikTok community. Some sample reviews:

▪ “Her sh--- off the chain!”

▪ “This mess is insane!”

▪ “She’s poppin’. I ain’t gonna lie.”

Longtime customers queue up at her flatbed and whistle at the growing empire of fans snaking off down New Bern.

“I ain’t never seen anything like this,” says one. “I used to come and it’d be one or two people.”

“It’s been that way since last Saturday!” says another.

“Two Saturdays ago!” says a third.

A minivan pulls up alongside her truck and stops dead on the road, blocking a lane of traffic.

“Keep going, please!” shouts The Watermelon Lady! “Off the road!”

And with that, she grabs another melon for the masses, ripe for the cutting, juicy to the end.