To know Ohavia Phillips-Reed, one of Charlotte’s most recognizable media personalities, you have to understand her history. Specifically, you have to understand the history of ackee and saltfish.
The national dish of Jamaica, ackee and saltfish is an identity dish similar to the bacon, egg and cheese for New Yorkers, or pork barbecue for North Carolinians, or Neese’s sausage and biscuits for native Charlotteans. I might be wrong about the Charlottean dish, but let’s debate that later.
To Ohavia, the ancestral meal isn’t just a recipe tucked in a grease-stained composition notebook; it’s a statement on the art of the pivot. Her path to becoming the light for so many others and her true self — the real her, not the sanitized version sold on LinkedIn — was to realize her history isn’t a cage. It’s just the seasoning.
Ackee and saltfish is a global collision born out of necessity. You have cod from the North Atlantic, cured in salt to survive the boat ride, and ackee that made the trek from West Africa. Neither originated in the Caribbean, yet they teamed up to create something iconic. Being who you are requires a similar mix. It’s about taking the salty, jagged bits of your past and the vibrant gifts of your heritage — for Ohavia, the Jamaican side, her mother in particular — and mashing them together.
Before Ohavia became a staple of the Charlotte scene, she was a kid in East New York. The Brooklyn upbringing provided her with grit, but the real “salt” was added when her family moved to Charlotte when she was 13 — or as she says it, “13 going on 30.” Ohavia’s journey then became a battle for upward mobility in a city where, once you were down, the system often expected you to stay there. Ohavia navigated the weight of familial trauma and the instability of housing, at one point finding herself in a position where finding a stable roof over her head felt impossible. Even when the home environment felt most challenging, she felt the responsibility of being the oldest sibling, and used that as motivation.
Instead of letting the darkness of those plights dim her output, she turned to radical creativity as a survival mechanism — a way to “tun yuh han’ an’ make fashion” before she even knew the phrase. For non-patois speakers, “tun yuh han’ an’ make fashion” essentially means to be radically resourceful. It’s the art of taking very little and transforming it into something of high value or style. It’s the Jamaican version of making “lemonade out of lemons,” but with a specific focus on creativity and craftsmanship.
Over nearly 10 years of hard work, since leaving Spectrum News where she was a reporter and producer, she has distilled that raw instability and the friction of being a “loud” New York transplant into a high-octane professional win. She’s the electric in-arena host for the Charlotte Hornets, and an entrepreneur who’s emceed everything from last year’s NAACP National Convention to the Jumpman Invitational.
She’s a light in the world because she chose to keep her dreams clear even when the struggles were trying to poison the fruit. She’s a light in the world because the world is finally seeing the authentic self she has been sharing for years. You want to know how she went from Crown Heights to the C-suite? You have to go back to the plate.
The ackee fruit is a heavy metaphor for knowing when to show up. If you try to force an ackee pod open before it’s ready, it is literally toxic. It has to wait until it naturally yawns open under the sun — a process that reminds us that real purpose “soon come” and cannot be rushed.
Being the light requires Ohavia to have patience with her own growth; she knows you can’t hustle your purpose into existence before it’s time. When you open up naturally, you’re offering people something they can use rather than something that will make them sick. Ohavia calls being the light a force that illuminates even when you don’t want to, a property that warms people even if they aren’t looking for it. Like fruit ripening in the sun, her current era is a natural, spiritual ripening. She doesn’t have to finesse her way into rooms because her energy has already kicked the door down.
Let’s be real: saltfish, straight out of the box, is inedible. It’s too much. It needs the soak, the boil, and the rinse to be purified of the excess. We’re all carrying salt — hardships, bitterness, or the defensive walls we built to ‘gwan’ through the rough times. Being the light means doing the work to rinse away that old bitterness so only the substance remains. You aren’t throwing away the fish; you’re just making it fit for the masterpiece.
When you sauté them together with scotch bonnet and thyme, the ackee picks up savory depth and the fish softens. They complement each other to raise the whole vibe. Ohavia is that transplanted strength — a product of Brooklyn’s vibrant energy, Jamaican seasoning, now poured into North Carolina soil. She’s a wife and entrepreneur who sees her success as a reflection for the next kid coming up. Whether it’s a Carolina kid attending a Hornets event or a teen attending one of her workshops at the Harvey B. Gantt Center, she’s proof that those who saw the worst of the worst usually end up with the most fuel.
As she moves forward, her advice is simple: create your own motion and don’t wait on nobody. Whether she’s squaring up against a swarm of bullies in a summer camp (another story for another day) or building an empire, she’s still that light in the darkness. Stop rushing the clock. Stop being afraid of the salt in your past. Wait for your sun, find your flavor, and be the ackee you’ve always wanted to be.
The author of this piece, Ricky Singh, is the executive director of My Brother’s Keeper Charlotte, whose mission is to improve outcomes for boys and young men of color and ultimately #CharlotteYouth as a whole. He’s a founding leadership member of Charlotte Lab School, and an artist who specializes in graffiti-based murals. Find him on Instagram and subscribe to MBKCLTMECK’s newsletter.