History Lesson 
Queen of Hearts
She’s the girl who wears cowboy boots under her poufy white taffeta dress every weekend as she rides in some other town’s parade.
RaVana Damon
The first, and perhaps trickiest, of the decoys is the mailbox on the corner of Mulberry and U.S. 90, whose nylon cover is green, red and black and arranged in a pattern more familiar to the people of Luling than most of their own children. But this is not the right house, nor is the one a few doors down with a watermelon placard centerpiece humming from the dead center of an untrimmed lawn. Discard it as another piece of subterfuge and keep driving.
The queen lives at the end of Mulberry Street, across from a football field, in a long, squat white house with blue shutters and a roundabout driveway, where her daddy’s truck is parked and more obvious paraphernalia fills out the porch. There is a painted chair and a birdbath wearing the insignia, and the mailbox doesn’t need a nylon cover: The watermelon pattern is painted on. The tip-off, though, is hanging from the porch. Her mother explains that the two watermelons are actually bird feeders, and her little brother, who jumps around in the manner of most six-year-old boys, wears an eye patch and informs us that there’s a nest and three eggs laying claim to the melon on the right.
This is not the home of Miss Texas by any stretch of the imagination, and the girl limping up to the door in one pink sock and one white is not Miss Texas. RaVana Damon has gray eyes, a freshly sunburned face, and ungodly white-blonde hair, the shade that young children have before age assigns them a more reasonable color. She’s of medium-build, maybe on the shorter side for a volleyball player; she’s sore from two-a-days in preparation for the varsity season at Luling High School, where she’s a senior.
The team practices until six or six-thirty every night, except for on Tuesday and Friday nights, when they have games. RaVana gets home late those Friday nights and wakes up early on Saturdays. She takes a shower, and her mother, Tandra, curls her hair as RaVana dozes. Then they load up the truck. RaVana doesn’t put her makeup on until the town before their destination—it could be Lubbock, San Antonio, Corpus, anywhere in the state—and doesn’t change into her dress until the float is set up.
The red and green float, with metallic fringe garland that glitters under the Texas sun, is an idol to the watermelon that would have made Aaron’s golden calf blush. RaVana sits on a throne two green fringed steps up from the base in a strapless white taffeta gown and white gloves that crawl up to her elbows. On some of the hotter days, the sun mistakes her for an egg white, and tries to cook her.
Atop her head sits a rhinestone-studded crown—a lot like the one Tandra keeps in a display cabinet in their home from her own reign in 1988—because the sunburned girl in the mismatched socks is the Watermelon Thump Queen of Luling, one of the hundreds of small-town festival pageant queens in Texas. And under her poufy white dress, she’s rocking cowboy boots.
If you miss the left onto Mulberry Street, you’ll be driving for another fifteen minutes until your next one, so try not to. There are no swimming pools or decks or another row of houses abutting the backyards of the houses on Mulberry; there are watermelon patches for acres, and twenty of those acres belong to the Damons. “My dad’s been growing watermelons ever since I can remember,” says RaVana, who has helped her father, Bubba, in the field since she was eleven. To combat mildew and bugs, they dust the melons with sulfur, leaving a trail of fingerprints on the green rinds as they move through the field. Watermelons like water and a lot of space to grow, and you have to weed them carefully: Watermelons have deep roots.
Tandra’s grandfather raised melons, back when caravans of eighteen-wheelers would run through town, loading up with melons to ship around the country. Farmers used to make their living off of cattle and watermelon, Tandra says, but that all changed with the discovery of oil. Bubba inspects vehicles and rigs for Progress Drilling in town. “This is not something you do for money,” he says, nodding toward the melon patch. They do it for fun, and it’s because that’s what their families did. And every summer in June, Bubba, Tandra, RaVana, and six-year-old James truck through the twenty acres, picking out the biggest watermelon for the auction at the Watermelon Thump Festival.
The four-day outdoor event, held on the last weekend to fully fall in June, is everything a festival should be (think carnival, arts and crafts, kiddy rides, fattening food and, heck, a fire eater). And then there’s the whole watermelon thing: a melon judging and auction, the seed spitting contest, and a melon eating contest. The festival has crowned a queen every year since 1954, and in 1988, that queen was Tandra Lewis, a sunny young blonde who would soon be exchanging vows with Bubba Damon. Tandra’s aunt, Ollie Jo, was crowned in 1968. So it wasn’t all that unusual when RaVana announced to her mother in January that she would run for Watermelon Thump Queen.
“I said, ‘Okay. If you do, it’s one hundred percent all the way once you start. We’ll do it,’” Tandra says. “I told her, ‘You’re going to hate me until June 20, and then you’re going to love me again.’”
In the following six months, many things happened. These are things that did not: plastic surgery, etiquette lessons, signing contracts with bikini companies, rehearsing a speech on world peace. And not once did RaVana walk across a room with a book delicately balanced on the crown of her head. If she wanted to be Miss USA, sure, this might be a sound strategy. But to become the Watermelon Thump Queen, well, that would have been pretty stupid.
RaVana and Tandra began designing posters in January, and RaVana had glamour shots taken in February. Only juniors at Luling High School can run for queen. “And they have to have been enrolled there for a year already,” Tandra says, dropping her voice a little. “We don’t want girls moving their families to Luling just so they can be queen.” To get on the ballot, each girl had to sell two hundred buttons—worth entrance to the Thump—for $5 apiece. From there, it was direct democracy: The girl who received the most votes at the Thump Pavilion on June 20 would be crowned queen at the festival. RaVana’s first poster went up March 18. “From March 18 to June 20, we campaigned, nothing but campaigned,” Tandra says.
There were buttons and fliers, candy buckets and drink koozies, door signs and refrigerator magnets. RaVana went door to door with her aunt Donna and she went with her friend Katelynn, and then they’d come home and make posters, while her father and some friends hammered signs into the ground. “The people in town are like, whoever asks me first, I’m going to vote for them,” RaVana says. It got to the point where she stopped everyone she saw in the supermarket, chatted them up, and asked for their vote. And usually, she got it.
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