Jacqueline Woodson, the National Book Award winner for the young adult memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, addressed in a recent op-ed the racist watermelon joke made by her author friend Daniel Handler, two weeks ago. Woodson, who is black, recalls in the New York Times piece how she grew up eating watermelon during summers in her southern childhood, and writes about her subsequent revulsion to the fruit—perhaps because of the watermelon’s loaded and race-ridden history. …I had seen the racist representations associated with African-Americans and watermelons, heard the terrifying stories of black men being lynched with watermelons hanging around them, watched black migrants from the South try to eke out a living in the big city by driving through neighborhoods like my own — Bushwick, in Brooklyn — with trucks loaded down with the fruit. In a book I found at the library, a camp song about a watermelon vine was illustrated with caricatures of sleepy-looking black people sitting by trees, grinning and eating watermelon.