It took me a while to finish reading “Black Cake”, not because it wasn’t good, but because my life feels — as always — like it’s in flux. I feel like I’m always playing catch-up, always trying to check the to-do boxes on my list, always trying to wait until I’m calm enough to sit down with a book. Here’s a (not well-kept) secret: I’m not sure I know what calm means. My mind is always running. But Black Cake is extremely readable. The chapters are short and I found it difficult to stop turning the pages once I was able to still my mind long enough to savor the story.
This was a book about hidden pasts, family secrets, and letting too much time go by without speaking your truth. Eleanor Bennett has just died, and in her will reading to her children — Byron and Benny — she decides that it is now time for them to know about her past. She reveals, chapter by chapter via a tape recording, her childhood on a Caribbean island and the tumultuous family life she inherited. Her father is a Chinese man who has lived all his life there, and her mother had ran away when she was a child, probably because her dad was an unrepentant gambler. His gambling habit turns out to be the catalyst for Eleanor’s life changes — he has to marry her off to a wealthy loan shark in order to absolve himself of his debts.
But she manages to escape this (short-lived) marriage, remake her life over and over again until she is in America as the mother of two children. Byron, the elder son, is an accomplished oceanologist. He perhaps falls into the category of Black people that white corporates consider socially acceptable because he’s “eloquent” and the embodiment of Black excellence, but they will likely never promote him to a top role because “you’re just not the right fit.” His younger sister Benny is an artist, a baker, the holder of the family’s recipes passed on from her many hours spent in the kitchen with Eleanor. She is also a college dropout and bisexual, a detail that puts a dent in her relationship with her parents one Thanksgiving when she revealed to them that she was with a woman.
Byron and Benny have been estranged for years, and Eleanor’s death is the pull that brings them back together into the same room. She has stories for them, secrets to spill, but mostly she’s also left them with some homework. There is a black cake — a syrupy sweet rum cake that is usually made for special occasions — in her fridge and she said they are to eat it together, “You’ll know when.”
I always say, “Life is long. I mean, yea life is short, but life is also, honestly, like really long.” This is usually pulled out when friends are wrestling with major life changes — big moves, career switches — and they wonder if they are running out of time or if they can do it. My belief is that we need to, as much as possible, stay true to ourselves because life is short, but also because if we do something we hate, life can feel painfully long. We can fit several careers into a 20-year period — so life is long. But we have so much we want to do and feel, so why wait to find the right time for it — life is short. It’s a good maxim because it tricks my friends into thinking I’m wise while also allows them to sink their head into a decision that they’ve already made but aren’t being honest with themselves about. Thinking about our lives in this way gives us the permission to do whatever that we might be afraid to do or admit to ourselves.
And I felt that when I was reading Black Cake. Eleanor has lived so many lives, rebuilt from scratch, yet in the end she still didn’t have enough time to right certain wrongs she believes she’s done. Byron is perceived as the long-term planner — I kept picturing him as a young Obama, that was the type of drive he seemed to possess — but his actions and stubbornness also showed a rash side. He is the type to let pride get in the way of his happiness. And Benny is young. She is in the mindset of not having done enough to impress her family or impress herself. Yet her trauma — and the refusal to come to terms with it — means living in her head must be a lonely world.
What worked: I really liked knowing about the Chinese immigrants in the Caribbean, the historical aspects of women moving to England to work as nurses, and about the communities they build. I liked Eleanor’s history, and I could see her clearly even if I didn’t always agree with her.
What worked less well for me were the children and how they seem to act like 50-year-olds, in their mindsets — whether if it’s in their self-judgment or judgments of others. Their motivations made little sense to me, as someone who’s probably in the same age range, and their emotional acuity is alarmingly underdeveloped considering they are people with full lives. I also wish author Charmaine Wilkerson had just said which Carribean country Eleanor grew up in, instead of keeping it nameless.
Wilkerson is a confident writer — it takes a bold mind to decide to structure her novel in the way that she did, flinging each character wildly around short chapters and hoping the reader just gets how they’re gonna fall. Sometimes the execution is messy to watch, sometimes it lands in a crumpled heap, but her certainty on driving the narrative forward is clear, and I do admire the effort.
