Jacqueline Woodson Responds to Daniel Handler's Racist Watermelon Joke

Posted on November 29, 2014

Jacqueline Woodson has responded to Daniel Handler's racist watermelon joke made after she accepted her National Book Awards. In an op-ed in The New York Times, the author adresses the issue head on.

Ms. Woodson writes about her childhood in the late 1960s in South Carolina where she and her siblings would spend summers at her grandparents' house eating watermelon. Jim Crow was supposedly over, but their family lived in an all-black community in the segregated South. As she grew up she began to read books that showed caricatures of blacks eating watermelon. She also started hearing the jokes in which blacks "were shuffling, googly-eyed and lesser than." By the time she was 11 she would become violently ill whenever she ate the fruit.

The author talks about her single mother's strength and determination to get their family out of the South and how she learned how important it was to tell her people's stories. She became a writer, grew up and began to win some very prestigious awards. But when she won the National Book Award and got a standing ovation, she got a real shock. Her friend made a watermelon joke.

Ms. Woodson writes, "In a few short words, the audience and I were asked to take a step back from everything I've ever written, a step back from the power and meaning of the National Book Award, lest we forget, lest I forget, where I came from. By making light of that deep and troubled history, he showed that he believed we were at a point where we could laugh about it all. His historical context, unlike my own, came from a place of ignorance."

She notes that she has been friends with Handler for years and was eating dinner at his house on Cape Cod on summer when he served watermelon soup. She told him then she was allergic to the fruit. But it's clear he did not understand the real significance of that fact, because his experience growing up was so far removed from her own.

Woodson then pivots in the essay to talk about her NBA winning book, Brown Girl Dreaming which focuses on growing up in the segregated South. She says that this is a time when diversity in literature is just really beginning to happen. She talks about her mission as she sees it as a writer: "To give young people — and all people — a sense of this country's brilliant and brutal history, so that no one ever thinks they can walk onto a stage one evening and laugh at another’s too often painful past."

In the essay, Ms. Woodson never condemns Handler nor does she say she has forgiven him. She does not mention his apologies or his donation of $110,000 to support diversity in writing, because it's not about him. She explains in an interview with Parade magazine in which she is asked about the incident for the umpteenth time.

She acknowledges that something good came out of the incident -- the attention for the diversity campaign -- but is clearly getting frustrated that the focus in on Handler. She says, "... I don’t want to talk about him -- I want to talk about me. This is a big moment for me. Hand-in-hand with winning the award, I've been asked the question so many times. And it’s like, 'Really, is this what you want to talk about?” I’m glad something good came out of it, but come on.'"