On Taylor Street in East Waco, the whole parking-lot side of one building has been painted green and turned into a single long afternoon under the shade trees.
Two tables are set with white fringed cloths. Nobody on this wall is in a hurry. And the story of how the wall survived is as good as the painting.
Dominoes at one table, dinner at the other
At the first table a dominoes game is on: a white-haired man with his hand raised, a woman in red with her back to us, a man in a white cap leaning on one elbow. A young man in a yellow BAYLOR shirt carries over a crate of bottles, and in the back a man works a kettle grill.
At the second table the food is out — a big blue pot, a bowl of greens, polka dots and straw hats all down the table. Past the glass door a pale blue river bends by, people rest on fallen logs, and a woman in white holds out a bunch of flowers.
Creative Waco's Public Art Map lists it simply as Feast. It's signed at the street end, low by the gas meter, just around the corner from the yellow gable: Ira Watkins in sky-blue brush letters, 2005 in black.
The painter who sold watermelons
Ira Watkins was born in Waco in 1941, one of twelve children, and grew up working. He sold watermelons off the back of a wagon for Gus Brinkley, picked cotton, and shined the shoes of Connally Air Force Base servicemen at the Greyhound station downtown. Largely self-taught, he left as a teenager and made his way to San Francisco, where his folk style found buyers and his paintings came to celebrate the Black community that moved to the Bay Area from the South during World War II for the shipyard jobs.
He kept coming home to paint. The same year as Feast, 2005, he painted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the old Interurban bridge pier by the Brazos — and January 17 is officially Ira Watkins Day in Waco in honor of that mural. "I'm a self-taught artist," he told KQED in 2024, "and I just do stuff and hope that it tells a story."
The Waco Tribune, writing about him in 2019, noted that he'd painted "fishing and eating scenes" on the former Easy Fisherman Restaurant on Taylor Street — quite possibly this very building. Around on the opposite wall, faded almost to chalk, a man fishes from a rocky bank and another lounges in a flat-bottomed boat with the line running off his raised bare foot. That wall is unsigned and undated: probably his too, but nothing on it says so. Know who painted it, or when? Tell us.
The mural came with the building
The Charles family found the building on Google Earth. "There were three palm trees and it was up for sale." They bought 937 Taylor Street in 2016 and opened Tru Jamaica Restaurant there in 2019.
Then, on December 8, 2022, a late-night electrical fire devastated the restaurant. While Aniceto Charles Jr., his mother Vivia and his sister Mercedes worked their way back, the painter whose tables wrapped their building made them an offer: Ira Watkins would touch up the outdoor mural in exchange for a plate of oxtail.
Tru Jamaica reopened on October 15, 2025. "I never wavered," Charles told KWTX. "I knew we were going to reopen."
And the young man in the yellow BAYLOR shirt? The wall was signed in 2005. In 2023, after the fire, the family that owns this building was serving its food from a truck on Baylor's campus. Sometimes a mural just knows.
Pull up a chair
Feast is The Long Table on Taylor Street on our Waco's Walls trail, at Taylor and Cherry in East Waco. Ira Watkins is on the trail twice more: his Dr. King on the bridge pier and the 2019 peach on "Everything's Peachy." Go see the tables, then go inside and order. That's what they're set for.
Find the rest on the Waco's Walls trail or The Whole Map — free, all of it.