A Yellow Watermelon was published by Junebug Books -- the children's division of New South Books, a publisher that specializes in contemporary Southern authors. It tells the story of one memorable summer in the life of 11 year old Ted Dillon. Ted is the youngest of 3 boys in a family that is just barely scraping by in small town Alabama. His dad works in the local sawmill which, like just about everything else in the vicinity, is owned by Mr. Cliff Creel. Ted makes pocket money by selling the weekly newspaper Grit.One evening Ted sneaks into the sawmill after hours to explore, where he meets Jake -- a black man who has been hired to watch the mill. Through Jake he learns of the Robinsons, a dirt-poor black family who are in danger of losing their farm through the dirty dealings of Old Man Creel. Mr. Creel, in collusion with the local preacher, is also stirring up prejudice against the Robinsons. Ted befriends Poublum Robinson, a boy his own age, and is determined to help them out.
A Yellow Watermelon tells an interesting story and has a whole lot of heart, and I really, really wanted to like it, but in the end I found it disappointing. I thought that it oversimplified the whole idea of racial prejudice in the Jim Crow South, to the point of making it seem insignificant. The onus for the hateful behavior was put on mean Old Man Creel and the weak-willed drunkard preacher with everyone else being bystanders who didn't say much but acted sympathetic to the Robinsons because no one liked Mr. Creel very much. In no way was the hateful institution of Jim Crow laws ever even addressed! In fact, while it was believable that Ted might have befriended both Jake and Poublum, I found it utterly unbelievable that everybody accepted the friendships with almost nary a word, even while they all referred to their black neighbors as "niggers" and "darkies."
This may be a trifling point, but the dialogue when the black characters spoke was cartoon Southern black dialect, peppered with "sho 'nuffs" and "dis" and "dats". It reminded me of reading a vintage version of The Bobbsey Twins in the Land of Cotton and really bugged me.
There were also references that were way too modern, and seemed designed to teach young readers a lesson about prejudice rather than to make a good story; for example, when Ted crosses the invisible line in his uncle's cotton field to pick cotton with Poublum he says, "In the summer of 1948, I reverse integrated the cotton field."
One review on the back of the book compared A Yellow Watermelon to the classics To Kill A Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn. I beg to differ. This isn't an awful book, but if you're interested in something to show kids what racial prejudice in the South was like, they'd be better off reading Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry or Christopher Paul Curtis' The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963.
