Time-stamped by 1996 with its movie rental stores and classic 90s fashion, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman is far from a new tale; yet still, there are those who are just now hearing it for the very first time after the film entered the Criterion Collection last month. In the film, Dunye—who directed, wrote, and starred in the trailblazing feature—takes to the Philly streets on a mission of inquiry for black lesbians everywhere.
In the fictional docu-style film, the story of the “Watermelon Woman” unravels before the viewer just as it does for Cheryl (whose character bears Dunye’s same name) herself. One moment, an old film called Plantation Memories—directed by a white lesbian named Martha Page—is flickering on the TV. In the next, the intrepid filmmaker is launched into an all-consuming quest to find the identity of Fae Richards, the fictionalized film’s central Black star. In the mode of Black Hollywood actresses like Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen, Richards was restricted to the racist stereotype of the “Mammy” in her film roles. On top of that, she was deliberately left unaccredited, known only by the dehumanizing phrase: “The Watermelon Woman.”
Despite the many attempts of Plantation Memories to degrade Richards, Cheryl begins to envision the life of the person buried beneath Hollywood’s unrelenting prejudices and vows to unearth Richards’ true story. The instant that the protagonist picks up the camera and starts to film her own documentary, Dunye replaces Martha Page’s directorial eye with her own. Cheryl uses her own resources to create a legacy for Fae Richards both engaged with and guided by the experiences of Black lesbians.
