82The Long Table on Taylor Street
Outdoor mural of two long tables set for a meal under the trees, listed as “Feast” on Creative Waco's Public Art Map · by Ira Watkins, signed and dated 2005 at the street end of the wall · the long parking-lot side of Tru Jamaica Restaurant, 937 Taylor Street at Cherry Street, East Waco · the Waco Tribune (May 25, 2019) recorded that Watkins painted “fishing and eating scenes” on the former Easy Fisherman Restaurant on Taylor Street — quite possibly this building · the faded fishing scene on the opposite wall is unsigned — probably his too, year unknown; know more? Tell us · we haven't found who commissioned it — know? Tell usMURAL
Two long tables under the shade trees — dominoes down, the grill going, a BAYLOR shirt hauling the drinks — signed by Waco-born Ira Watkins, 2005.
The whole parking-lot side of the building is painted green and turned into one long afternoon under the shade trees. Two tables are set with white fringed cloths. At the first, 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 — while a young man in a yellow BAYLOR shirt carries over a crate of bottles and a man at a kettle grill works in the back. At the second, 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. Nobody on this wall is in a hurry.
It is 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. Creative Waco's Public Art Map lists it as Feast. The Waco Tribune, writing about him on May 25, 2019, noted that he painted “fishing and eating scenes on the exterior of the former Easy Fisherman Restaurant on Taylor Street” — quite possibly this 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 a 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.
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 shipyard jobs. In 2005 he also painted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the old Interurban bridge pier by the Brazos, earlier on this walk; 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 mural came with the building. The Charles family found it on Google Earth — “There were three palm trees and it was up for sale” — bought 937 Taylor in 2016 and opened Tru Jamaica in 2019. A late-night electrical fire devastated the restaurant on December 8, 2022. While Aniceto Charles Jr., his mother Vivia and his sister Mercedes worked their way back, Watkins offered to touch up the outdoor mural in exchange for a plate of oxtail. Tru Jamaica reopened here on October 15, 2025. “I never wavered,” Charles told KWTX. “I knew we were going to reopen.”
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