Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

 

Source of book: Purchased for our book club

 

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. This book was one I had no idea existed, until it was nominated. 

I did not know until our club met to discuss it, that the author has a local connection. Wilkerson apparently was a news anchor in Bakersfield in the 1980s, which was before I moved to the area. As other members of our club noted, her writing feels a bit like reporting some of the time, which would make sense given her journalism career. 

 

Black Cake turned out to be an enjoyable story, with a series of gradual revelations of family secrets. The secrets aren’t particularly surprising - you can figure out a lot about where the story will go - but that is probably true to life. Most of our secrets are pretty predictable, actually. (See my family immigrant story for our big skeleton…) 

 

The story jumps back and forth between the present and the past. Benny (Benadetta) and Byron are siblings. Their father died several years ago, and their mother recently passed. Bennie was estranged from the family (as a result of coming out as bisexual, combined with her father’s lack of acceptance) but returns to take care of the final arrangements. As it turns out, their mother, Eleanor, has recorded her life’s story, including the past she never disclosed to her children. 

 

Eleanor Bennett is really Coventina (“Covey”) Lincook, born to a Caribbean mother who deserted the family and a Chinese immigrant father in Jamaica. Due to her father’s gambling and debts, he falls under the thumb of the local crime lord, who demands Covey’s hand in marriage. The day of the wedding, the crime lord suddenly falls dead of poison, and Covey (a competitive swimmer) flees and swims out into the ocean in the teeth of a coming storm. She is presumed dead, but her best friend Bunny knows where she is hiding, and assists her (with help from the family’s long-time servant Pearl) in escaping to England. More adventures ensue, and Covey ends up semi-accidentally assuming the name of a friend who is killed in a rail accident, and moves the United States with her longtime flame, who she has reunited with in England. 

 

That’s kind of the basic idea of the book, but there are plenty more parts to the modern story as well. I found the book unique in the fact that it actually carefully ties up the loose ends. No part of the story ends up being just “there,” without relating to the rest in some way. (Although there were a few incidents that seemed inserted to make a point, they were pretty normal experiences for Caribbean-Americans in England and in the United States.) 

 

The book is primarily a well-told story, but it also looks at family dynamics. Covey and Gibbs and their lifetime secret keeping. The pressure put on their kids to succeed, given the sacrifice of everything including identity to give them a good life. Public versus private personas. (Wilkerson has an interesting perspective into the difference between being in front of a camera and one’s private life.) Sibling relationships and the effect of parental favoritism. (Man, I know this one first hand.) 

 

The one complaint a number of people in our club had was that, other than Covey, it felt a bit hard to see the interior lives of the characters. The rest are a bit opaque. I wonder if some of that was because of the lack of reality, the lack of truth, the lack of connection that generally plagues the characters in a system of silence and secrets. 

 

I wanted to mention a couple of lines. First is this one that really stood out to me as understanding the pressure of living up to parental expectations. 

 

When she was little, Ma and Dad used to tell her [Benny] that she could be anything she wanted to be. But as she grew into a young woman, they began to say things like We made sacrifices so that you could have the best. Meaning, the best was what they envisioned for Benny, not what she wanted for herself. Meaning, the best was something that, apparently, Benny was not. 

 

I’m afraid this is how I feel these days. “The best” to my parents definitely did not include a wife who worked outside the home, let alone one whose career is very important to her. (And who also out-earns me.) “The best” did not include my rejection of the Republican party and the policies of Ronald Reagan. “The best” did not include my standing against racism even when my own family said those appalling things. “The best” appears to have meant performance of a specific set of gender roles, cultural whiteness, and fundamentalist religion. Which, nope, can’t in good conscience do that. 

 

The second line is regarding the child that Covey had before reuniting with Gibbs. Her boss at the job she was working at raped her, she got pregnant, and was essentially forced into giving the child up for adoption. She tells nobody this until that recorded deathbed confession. Her husband never learns. And here is why:

 

Eleanor had lied to her husband for all those years because she understood that if you wanted someone to keep loving you, you couldn’t ask them to bear all of your burdens, couldn’t risk letting them see all of who you were. No one really wanted to know another person that well.

 

The truth of this is, shall we say, debatable. Except in one sense. You cannot ask a partner - or anyone else - to bear all your burdens. I remember from back in my Dr. Laura days (before she went bizarrely racist and lost her show) when she would advise spouses who had had affairs in the past to consider whether they wanted to confess because it would actually help anything, or because they wanted to transfer the burden of the secret onto an innocent party. And it usually was the latter. (I am reminded too of a person from my fundie past who would “confess” his use of pornography to his wife and others, which struck me as a means of humiliating her for her perceived inadequacies, rather than anything helpful to their marriage. They eventually split up, to nobody’s surprise.) So, I agree in principle that one shouldn’t burden a partner or friend with everything. But on the other hand, it seems to me that this shouldn’t have been kept a secret. In my own case, at least, I have never been hung up on “virginity,” and would have married my spouse whether she had had a child previously or not. I also would have been fine with knowing her past trauma - such a revelation would not have been a weapon against me like the “confession” of an affair. 

 

That got a bit off subject, but I think it does matter in the book. The Bennett family is pretty admirable in most ways, but their blind spot is in this fear of being real with each other. Everyone has an image to maintain, even Benny, who is unable to maintain the image her parents want her to have. 

 

One last bit: the “Black Cake” of the title is a traditional Jamaican dessert, related to the English fruitcake. As one character (who ends up writing about colonialist and indigenous foods) notes, Black Cake isn’t purely Jamaican. The sugar came to the Caribbean through slavery, and before that, it went from China to Africa, and now has become a worldwide part of the diet. So, Black Cake is….culturally complicated, as are a great many foods. Culture, including food, is in many ways global and in most ways the result of cross-pollination and combination. I think it is a beautiful thing. We didn’t have a black cake for our meeting, because it requires soaking fruits in booze for several weeks, and my wife (badass cake chef) has been working long hours at her new management job. She did make chocolate cupcakes, though, so…

 

Anyway, an interesting book, a fast read, and one that sparked an interesting discussion on a variety of topics.