One of the earliest and most compelling pieces in the Africa in America series is A Thin Line or The Hanging Tree. Situated atop a single chunk of painted wood, the scene is divided into three parts: a lynching, a nanny nursing a white baby, and a silver patch of ground punctuated by cowrie-shell eyes. Harvey provided detailed insight into each part and how it relates to the whole:

I heard the older people talk about in the slave times, see, I wasn't there then, but I heard them talk about how that the white woman's milk wasn't strong and sometime they babies died...and the nanny, she had babies so often her milk never dried up, she always had milk, so she nursed the white baby to health. And in the meantime, they was hanging her grandson, because he looked at a white girl in admiration...and they hanged him for it. So that caused a thin line, there's a thin line between these two, which has four eyes, and the eyes was the eyes of God to me...And today is the better day...they won't hang her (grand)son now if he looks at somebody, and the white woman's milk is pure and good now, for her baby to grow on. But see, God is the one done this. Integration didn't do any of it. That's what that piece was all about.

When they see this they think it's teaching hate, but it's an opportunity for the children to see what went on in the early times, but to see where they come from because of a bond between a white woman and a black woman, see. The white woman couldn't say you can't hang Sally's son, because she wasn't allowed to talk, she wasn't allowed to speak. Silence was her thing. But she and Sally through the days when the men was all gone doing their thing, they prayed together, they cried together, they loved one another. And the eye watched it. And Eve got to Adam like Delilah got to Sampson, she got to her man. And she told him, 'if it wasn't she nursed our baby it would die, and you hang her son for reckless looking, just lookin' and admiring something beautiful, it wasn't right.' But see, it was the spirit speaking through her to him, and the eye tricked his heart. So [his] heart heard her voice and he felt ashamed of what he had done. So he goes to the other guys and talked to them about what they were doing. So the hanging tree got chopped down... and that eye is still watching.