Notes
“The Pain of the Watermelon Joke”
Author Jacqueline Woodson writes about her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, growing up in South Carolina and Daniel Handler’s watermelon joke directed at her at the National Book Awards. “I would have written Brown Girl Dreaming if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we’ve come through. Their great-great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War. Their great-grandfather, Hope, and great-grandmother, Grace, raised one of the few black families in Nelsonville, Ohio, and saw five children through college. Their grandmother’s school in Greenville, Sterling High, was set on fire and burned to the ground.”
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Categories: Notes
Tagged as: 2010s, activism, African American history, African Americans, anti-racism, awards, biography, Blackness, Brown Girl Dreaming, Civil War, Daniel Handler, history, Jacqueline Woodson, memoir, Midwest, National Book Awards, Ohio, race, racism, resistance, South Carolina, US, We Need Diverse Books, YA
Published by Carol
Carol Borden was editor of and a writer for the Toronto International Film Festival’s official Midnight Madness and Vanguard program blogs. She is currently an editor at and evil overlord for The Cultural Gutter, a website dedicated to thoughtful writing about disreputable art. She has written for Mezzanotte, Teleport City, Die Danger Die Die Kill, Popshifter and she has a bunch of short stories published by Fox Spirit Books including: Godzilla detective fiction, femme fatale mermaids, an adventurous translator/poet, and an x-ray tech having a bad day. Read and listen to her other shenanigans at Monstrous Industry. For her particular take on gutter culture, check out, “In the Sewer with the Alligators.”
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