Synopsis:
Byron and Benny haven’t seen each other in years. Now the estranged siblings must set aside their differences to deal with their mother’s hidden past.
When their mother, Eleanor, dies in California, they are left a puzzling inheritance: a traditional Caribbean black cake made from a family recipe with a long history . . . and a voice recording the contents of which will change Byron and Benny’s lives.
In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking tale Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their lineage and themselves.Their journey of discovery takes them from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom . . . and back to California.
Can Byron and Benny reclaim their once-close relationship, piece together Eleanor’s true history, and fulfill her final request to “share the black cake when the time is right”? Will hearing their story resolve their own struggles with identity? Or will they end up feeling more lost than ever?
Black Cake is a story about an extraordinary journey through the life of a family changed forever as a result of the choices made by its matriarch. It’s an examination of how the inheritance of betrayals, secrets, memories, and even names can shape history and relationships.
We can’t choose what we inherit. But can we choose who we become?
Review:
Wilkerson was raised by both a mother and stepmother — two women with contrasting upbringings in Jamaica and New England, both of whom married men from cultures different from their own. One of them gave her the recipe, written in pencil on lined notebook paper, for black cake, as it is called by many Caribbeans. In the United States, a familiar version of it is known simply as fruitcake because the ingredients include fruit marinated in rum. Wilkerson says that a younger relative’s request for the recipe got her started “thinking about inheritance and how we choose to keep some things closer to our hearts than others — especially in a multicultural family like mine.” Wilkerson “never intended to write a story with a cake in it. It just sort of walked into the story.” And inspired the novel’s title.
Food plays an integral role in social functions and family gatherings, and evokes memories of those times. Wilkerson astutely observes that “sharing a family recipe can carry the same weight as sharing a piece of heirloom jewelry or an ancestral home. Especially if a recipe, a language all its own, is all a person has left to give.” Black cake is traditionally served at celebrations and in Wilkerson’s story it “symbolizes family bonds and memories in the face of significant loss, but also a multicultural history. . . . It is a source of joy. But also, it is the offshoot of a less-than-sanguine past.”
Black cake figures into the story from the outset. The prologue takes readers to the shore of an island where a bride’s abandoned wedding dress is smeared with black cake and lilac icing. Wilkerson depicts a father’s anguish and regret, and at least two mysteries. Why would a bride leap up from a wedding feast and disappear into the bay? And could she still be alive, even though her father seems resigned to wait for her body to wash ashore?
Wilkerson immediately whisks readers to Los Angeles in 2018 where Byron, “the African American social media darling of ocean sciences,” is about to be reunited with his younger sister, Benny. They were extremely close growing up, but eight years have passed since they last saw each other. Benny didn’t even attend their father’s funeral, after storming out of the house on a fateful Thanksgiving Day . . . and never returning. Their mother, Eleanor Bennett, texted Benny from time to time over the years, most recently to say, “Benedetta, please come home.” Benny didn’t return in time. Now Eleanor is dead, and “B and B,” as their mother called them, are about to learn about their family history. Their mother recorded the eight-hour story over the course of four days. Her lawyer, Charles Mitch, informs them Eleanor expressly requested that they listen to the recording together — in its entirety — in his presence. He warns them to “be prepared” for what they are about to hear.
Eleanor also left a short hand-written note. “B and B, there’s a small black case in the freezer for you. Don’t throw it out. I want you to sit down together and share the cake when the time is right. You’ll know when. Love, Ma.” Byron thought his mother never made another black cake after Benny stormed out on that Thanksgiving, and he is shocked when he realizes that she made at least one more. As the recording begins, Byron and Benny are both stunned to hear Eleanor reference a sister they never knew existed. What were the circumstances of her birth? Who is she? Where has she been living all of their lives?
In short chapters, Wilkerson explores the lives of Byron and Benny from their perspectives — key events during their childhoods, their dreams and regrets, and the bases for the decisions they have made up to the point in their lives at which they have come together to mourn their mother. Benny has just lost her job, while Byron has enjoyed great success in his career as an oceanographer, despite being passed over for the job of director of the institute with which he is affiliated. Neither has found a lasting personal relationship. Lynette, Byron’s girlfriend, left him and they haven’t spoken in three months. Benny has had a series of relationships and Wilkerson reveals that her sexual orientation was the cause of the rift with her father that was never resolved. Eleanor deferred to him in all things, for reasons Byron and Benny have never fully appreciated. Eleanor ponders, “What happens when love and loyalty are in conflict with one another? . . . Your father was the bedrock of our family. I needed to be there for your dad, just as he had always been there for me. For us.” As the recording proceeds, Byron and Benny come to understand Eleanor’s meaning.
Interspersed are chapters in which the story of a girl named Covey emerges. She is being raised by her father, Johnny “Lin” Lyncock, on a Caribbean island. Lin owns shops, but drinks and bets on cockfights, finding himself in debt to Little Man, an island gang leader. Covey’s mother, Matilda, and her best friend, Pearl, made black cakes with icing flowers that were “second to none” and sold them to residents for special occasions. But many of the island’s “upper crust” believed Mathilda “had shown poor judgment” by having a child with Covey’s Chinese-born father. One day Covey’s mother disappeared with the assistance of a customer, and although Covey believed she would return or at least send for Covey, she never did and the years passed as Covey grew into a young woman. “She could see now why her mother had left her father. She just couldn’t see how her mummy could have left her, too.”
Wilkerson details how “in the spring of 1965, Covey’s life veered onto the path that would eventually connect her to Eleanor Bennett.” It’s a mesmerizing and emotionally resonant tale about Covey, and her life with her father, best friend Bunny, and the boy she falls in love with, Gibbs Grant. Covey’s story is punctuated by dreams of her future, devastating heartbreak and loss, abuse, and choices no young woman should ever be forced to make. Not to mention an unsolved murder that overshadows every aspect of Covey’s life for decades. It is also a commentary about the time period in which Covey grew up, and an illustration of how unbreakable and affirming friendships can be. Ultimately, it is a story of survival, resilience, and second chances.
Wilkerson deftly moves the story between the past and present, introducing intriguing new characters as she returns again and again to Eleanor’s narrative, unraveling mysteries involving those characters at expertly-timed junctures. Each of Wilkerson’s characters is developed fully and multi-dimensional. Aside from Little Man and his gang, there are no villains in her tale of a woman who did not share her truth with her children while she still had time and the myriad ways in which hearing the truth only after her death — as well as the death of their father six years earlier — impacts the children she loved boundlessly.
The pace of Black Cake never slackens as Wilkerson transports readers from modern-day Los Angeles, to the Caribbean more than fifty years ago, as well as London, Scotland, and Rome. She immerses readers in each location, conjuring each distinct locale’s sights, sounds, smells, and culture, always bringing attention back to the three central players in the story. Benny is a thirty-six-year-old woman who has never learned to be comfortable in her own skin, always feeling that she is not living the life she was meant to create for herself but unsure about how to manifest her desires. As her mother’s life story is revealed to her, Benny questions why Eleanor didn’t understand what Benny was going through and never offered her advice. “Why didn’t Ma do more to hold on to her? And what is Benny supposed to do with these feelings, now that Ma is no longer around?” Benny recalls backing black cake with her mother, who once told her, “This is the only thing that I had left when I lost my family.” But at that time, Benny could not truly understand Eleanor’s meaning, of course.
Byron, even though a highly recognizable African American man, has been subjected to social injustice but never been empowered to stand up for his rights. Being estranged from Benny, their father’s death, and a disturbing incident with Eleanor shortly before her death shook the foundations upon which Bryon built his life and beliefs. His mother once asked him, “What are you willing to do? . . . Are you going to let someone else’s view of who you should be, and what you should do, hold you back?” At last Bryon finds the answers to her questions.
And their sister, in whose life food has played an integral part, as well, must come to terms with a truth that she suspected all along. Mr. Mitch endures his own rediscovery of intimacy, as well as heart-wrenching loss.
Wilklerson notes that “many families have stories like these, and when they finally emerge, they often do so in the kitchen, at the table, over a meal, or with a glass in hand.” Or via the submission of DNA samples to companies like Ancestry and 23andMe. Black Cake is a scintillating and moving examination of learning to adapt when one’s perceptions and beliefs about family members’ decisions and choices are upended by revelations of long-held secrets. It’s about being willing to cast away old ideas in favor of new understandings about the people one loves — what they have endured, what motivated the direction their life took, what inspired them to endure adversity. Wilkerson believes that learning our family history can inspire us to accept “seeming contradictions or conflicts in people and cultures without imposing the need to tie things up neatly.”
Black Cake is a stunningly-crafted debut work of fiction. Wilkerson’s complex and absorbing family drama is imbued with longing, insight, compassion, humor, and, finally, peace for her intriguing and memorable characters.
Excerpt from Black Case
Prologue
Then
1965
He should have known it would come to this. He should have known the day that hak gwai wife of his ran away from home. Should have known the day he saw his daughter swimming in the bay as a storm bore down on her. Should have known when his parents dragged him to this island and changed their names. He stood at the water’s edge, now, watching the waves crash white against the rocks, waiting for his daughter’s body to wash ashore.
A policeman beckoned to him. The policeman was a girl. He’d never seen one of those before. She was holding a fluff of white fabric, his daughter’s wedding dress, smeared with black cake and lilac icing. She must have dropped the cake on herself as she jumped up from the table. He remembered a clattering of plates, the splintering of glass on the tile floor, someone crying out. When he looked toward his daughter, she was gone and her satin-covered shoes lay strewn on the lawn outside like tiny capsized boats.
Part One
Now
2018
She’s here.
Byron hears the elevator doors peel open. His first instinct is to rush toward his sister and embrace her. But when Benny leans in to hug him, Byron pushes her away, then turns to knock on the door to the attorney’s office. He feels Benny put a hand on his arm. He shakes it free. Benny stands there, her mouth open, but says nothing. And what right does she have to say anything? Byron hasn’t seen Benny in eight years. And now, their ma is gone for good.
What does Benny expect? She took a family argument and turned it into a cold war. Never mind all that talk about societal rejection and discrimination and whatnot. It seems to Byron that whatever kind of problem you have in this world, you can find someone to show you understanding. And times are changing. There’s even been a study in the news recently about people like Benny.
People like Benny.
The study says it can be a lonely road for people like her. But she won’t be getting any sympathy from Byron, no. Benedetta Bennett gave up that luxury years ago when she turned her back on her family, even though she claims it was the other way around. At least she showed up this time. Six years ago, Byron and his mother sat in the church across from his father’s coffin up in L.A. County, waiting for Benny to arrive, but no Benny. Later, Byron thought he saw his sister skirting the burial grounds in the back of a car. She’d be there any minute, he thought. But, still, no Benny. Only a text from her later, saying I’m sorry. Then silence. For months at a time. Then years.
As each year went by, he was less certain that Benny had been there that day or that he’d ever had a sister to begin with.
Dig deeper into the moment.
That he’d ever had a chubby, squiggle-headed baby girl following him around the house.
That she’d ever cheered him on at the national meets.
That he’d ever heard her voice sailing across the auditorium as he closed his hand around his doctoral diploma.
That he’d ever not felt the way he does right now. Orphaned and pissed as hell.
Benny
Her mother’s attorney opens the door and Benny looks past him, half expecting to see her ma sitting in the room. But it’s only Benny and Byron now, and Byron won’t even look at her.
The lawyer is saying something about a message from their mother but Benny can’t concentrate, she’s still looking at Byron, at the bits of gray in his hair that didn’t use to be there. What’s with the pushing, anyway? The man is forty-five years old, not ten. In all these years, her big brother has never shoved her, never hit her, not even when she was little and tended to pounce and bite like a puppy.
Benny’s first memory of Byron: They are sitting on the couch, she is settled under her brother’s arm, and Byron is reciting adventure stories to her from a book. His feet can already touch the floor. Byron stops to fluff Benny’s hair with his fingers, to pull on her earlobes, to pinch her nostrils shut, to tickle her until she is breathless with laughter, until she is dying of happiness.
The Message
Their mother has left them a message, the lawyer says. The lawyer’s name is Mr. Mitch. He’s talking to Byron and Benny as though he’s known them all their lives, though Byron can only recall meeting him one other time, when his ma needed help getting around town after her accident last winter, the one his friend Cable insisted wasn’t an accident. Byron walked his mother up to Mr. Mitch’s office, then went back outside to wait for her in the car. He was sitting there watching some kids skateboard down the broad, buff-toned sidewalks between one high-end chain store and the next, when a police officer rapped on his side window.
This kind of thing had happened to Byron so often over the course of his adult life that sometimes he forgot to be nervous. But most times, whenever he was approached or pulled over by an officer, he slid down into that space between one heartbeat and the next where he could hear his blood crashing through his body, a waterfall carrying centuries of history with it, threatening to wipe out the ground on which he stood. His research, his books and social media following, the speaking engagements, the scholarship he wanted to fund, all of it, could be gone in a split second of misunderstanding.
Only later, after the officer had opened the trunk of his patrol car and come back with a copy of Byron’s latest book (Could he have an autograph?), did it occur to Byron that a grown man of any color, sitting alone in a car watching pre-adolescents skateboard up and down the sidewalk, could elicit a reasonable degree of suspicion. All right, he could see that, it wasn’t always about him being a black man. Though, mostly, it was.
“Let me just warn you,” Mr. Mitch is saying now. “About your mother. You need to be prepared.”
Prepared?
Prepared for what? Their mother is already gone. His ma.
He doesn’t see how anything after that is going to make much of a difference.
B and B
There’s an entire file box labeled ESTATE OF ELEANOR BENNETT. Mr. Mitch pulls out a brown paper envelope with their mother’s handwriting on it and puts it on the desk in front of Byron. Benny shifts her seat closer to Byron’s and leans in to look. Byron removes his hand but leaves the packet where Benny can see it. Their ma has addressed the envelope to B and B, the moniker she liked to use whenever she wrote or spoke to them together.
B-and-B notes were usually pinned to the fridge door with a magnet. B and B, there’s some rice and peas on the stove. B and B, I hope you left your sandy shoes at the door. B and B, I love my new earrings, thank you! Ma only called them Byron or Benny when she was speaking with one sibling or the other, and she only called Benny Benedetta when she was upset.
Benedetta, what about this report card? Benedetta, don’t talk to your father that way. Benedetta, I need to talk to you.
Benedetta, please come home.
Their mother left a letter, Mr. Mitch says, but most of their mother’s last message is contained in an audio file that took her more than eight hours, over four days, to record.
“Go ahead,” Mr. Mitch says, nodding at the packet.
Byron cuts open the envelope and shakes out its contents, a USB drive and a handwritten note. He reads the note out loud. It’s so typically Ma.
B and B, there’s a small black cake in the freezer for you. Don’t throw it out.
Black cake. Byron catches himself smiling. Ma and Dad used to share a slice of cake every year to mark their anniversary. It wasn’t the original wedding cake, they said, not anymore. Ma would make a new one every five years or so, one layer only, and put it in the freezer. Still, she insisted that any black cake, steeped as it was in rum and port, could have lasted the full length of their marriage.
I want you to sit down together and share the cake when the time is right.
You’ll know when.
Benny covers her mouth with one hand.
Love, Ma.
Benny starts to cry.
Benny
Benny hasn’t cried in years. At least, she hadn’t, until last week, after being fired from her afternoon gig back in New York. At first, she thought her boss was being crabby because he’d seen Benny thumbing her smartphone while taking customer calls. There was a rule against that sort of thing, but there was a message from her mother. Four words that she just couldn’t shake out of her head.
Actually, the message had been in her voicemail for a month already, but just then, Benny had been looking at her cellphone, wondering what to do. She hadn’t really spoken to her mother in years. Not talking to your own ma for that long took a certain kind of gall, Benny knew. But so did not standing by your own daughter when she’d needed you most.
For years, it had been easier for Benny simply to stay away, to not respond to the rare message from back home, to steel herself against every birthday and holiday away from her family, to tell herself that this was a form of self-care. In her weaker moments, she’d plug in the old digital photo frame that she kept under some sketchbooks in a desk drawer and watch as a series of smiling faces that she’d thought would always be part of her life popped onto the screen, one after the other, then off again.
One of Benny’s favorite pics showed her with Byron and Dad, arms linked and dressed in black tie for some event, the kind of fundraiser or tribute or gathering of lawyers at which her father had often taken the lectern. The resemblance between the three of them was striking, even to Benny, who had grown up with this fact. And from the identical light in their eyes, you could tell who had been taking the photograph. Her ma.
Benny’s boss was raising his voice at her now. “You weren’t doing your job,” he said.
Benny slipped her phone into the pocket of her cardigan.
“Your job is to read from the goddamned script. Your job is not to volunteer social commentary on the durability of consumer electronics!”
Oh, that. Not the phone.
By the time Benny figured out what her supervisor was talking about, she was out of a job.
Benny was still dry-eyed when she walked out of the call center with the only personal items she’d kept in her shared cubicle: a coffee mug with stained, fractured insides and a fringy-looking plant. What kind of plant it was, Benny could not recall, but it had never let her down. Nothing seemed to deter it, not a lack of water, not fluorescent lighting, not the plastic-smelling office air, not her supervisor’s noxious language. Every once in a while, she would lift the plant’s tiny stems with her fingertips and wipe the dust from its fronds with a damp cloth, just so.
It was fifteen minutes before Benny realized that she had taken the wrong bus. She got off at the next stop and found herself standing in front of an old coffee shop with fake-pine garlands and fake-velvet bows on its doors. She hadn’t realized this kind of place still existed in the city. At the sight of the spray-on-imitation-frost lettering spelling out Happy Holidays across the plate-glass window, at the thought of yet another year without having a coffee shop of her own to run (though with less kitsch), at the sight of a young father inside the café kneeling down to button his child into a puffy, lilac-colored jacket and tucking her dark hair into the lilac fur-lined hood, Benny burst into tears. Benny had never liked lilac.
The Recording
Mr. Mitch takes the memory stick with Eleanor Bennett’s recording and inserts it into his desktop computer. Eleanor’s children lean forward in their seats when they hear her voice. Mr. Mitch wills himself to keep a placid face, breathes deep and slow. This is not personal, this is professional. Families need their attorneys to stay unruffled.
B and B, Mr. Mitch is recording this for me. My hand is not so steady anymore and I have a lot to say. I wanted to talk to you both in person but, at this point, I’m not sure I’ll get to see you two together again.
Benny and Byron both shift in their seats.
You are stubborn children, but you are good children.
Mr. Mitch keeps his eyes focused on the notepad on his desk, but he can still feel the air shifting in the room. A stiffening of backs, a squaring of shoulders.
B and B, promise me you’ll try to get along. You can’t afford to lose each other.
Benny stands up. Here we go. Mr. Mitch pauses the recording. “I don’t need to hear this,” Benny says.
Mr. Mitch nods. Waits a moment. “It’s what your mother wanted,” he says.
“Can’t you make me a copy of the file?” Benny says. “Make me a copy. I’ll take it back to New York.”
“Your mother expressly requested that you listen to this together, all the way through, in my presence. But you know, we don’t have to stay in the office. If you prefer, we could stop now and I could bring the recording to your mother’s house at a later time. Would you like that?” “No,” Byron says. “I want to hear this now.” Benny scowls at
Byron, but he doesn’t look at her.
“Your mother was very specific,” Mr. Mitch says. “We need to listen to this together, so I’m happy to continue this when both of you can make yourselves available.” He opens an agenda on his desk. “I could come by the house late this afternoon or tomorrow morning.”
“I don’t see how it’s going to make a difference to Ma now, anyway,” Benny says. Still standing, she looks down at Mr. Mitch with steady eyes but her voice wobbles on the word Ma.
“I think it will make a difference to you and your brother,” Mr. Mitch says. “There are things your mother wanted you to hear right away, things you need to know.”
Benny lowers her head, stays there for a minute, huffs out a breath. “Better this afternoon,” she says. “I’ll be leaving town right after the funeral.” Benny looks at Byron one more time but he keeps his eyes fixed on the desk. She walks out of the room without saying goodbye, her blondish Afro puff quivering as she stomps across the waiting room, pulls the door open, and steps into the darkened hallway.
Mr. Mitch hears the faint chime of the elevator down the hall and Byron stands up.
“Well, I guess I’ll see you later,” Byron says. “Thank you.”
Mr. Mitch gets up to shake his hand. Byron’s phone buzzes and by the time he reaches the door, his cellphone is already clapped to his ear. There must have been a time, Mr. Mitch thinks, when Byron was just a kid, trawling the beach, more interested in putting a conch shell to his ear than anything like a phone.
“My son listens to the sea for a living, can you imagine?” Eleanor said to Mr. Mitch one day, back in the days when her husband Bert was still alive and they were at some lawyers’ event together.
“It’s actually a job!” Bert quipped. They had a good chuckle together over that one. Eleanor and Bert had a way of doing that, being funny together.
Maybe, when all this was over, Mr. Mitch could ask Byron about his latest project, about how the institute he works for is helping to map the seafloor. The oceans are a challenge, Mr. Mitch thinks. And what about a person’s life? How do you make a map of that? The borders people draw between themselves. The scars left along the ground of one’s heart. What will Byron have to say about that, once he and his sister have heard their mother’s message?
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