In today’s NY Times – Jacqueline Woodson, “The Pain of the Watermelon Joke.” Woodson is the 2014 National Book Award winning author of “Brown Girl Dreaming” in the Young People’s Literature category. If you’ve got time to read only one thing today, please make it be this essay. “As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children — sitting on my grandparents’ back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly. It was the late ’60s and early ’70s, and even though Jim Crow was supposed to be far behind us, we spent our days in the all-black community called Nicholtown in a still segregated South.”
Posted on: Sat, 29 Nov 2014 12:38:00 +0000
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