Principal characters
Eleanor Bennett, a.k.a. Covey Lyncook, a young woman from a Caribbean island who later immigrates to the United States
Benny Bennett, her daughter, a struggling artist
Byron Bennett, her son, an oceanologist
Mr. Mitch, the Bennett family attorney
Johnny “Lin” Lyncook, her Chinese father, a gambler
Mathilda Lyncook, her mother
Pearl, her friend and helper
Bert Bennett, a.k.a. Gibbs Grant, her boyfriend and later husband
Clarence “Little Man” Henry, her fiancé, a loan shark
Black Cake (2022) is the debut novel of American writer Charmaine Wilkerson, who began her career in news media and communications before shifting to writing fiction. The novel’s brief prologue takes place in 1965 on an unnamed Caribbean island similar to Jamaica. A police officer and the father of a missing bride stand on a rocky seashore surveying the tattered, stained remains of a wedding dress in the aftermath of disastrous events. In fewer than ten sentences and in an emotionless, matter-of-fact tone, this opening hints unmistakably that something has gone very wrong at a wedding.
From that point forward, the story of this missing bride’s family moves in a carefully constructed pattern that zigzags back and forth across generations and far-flung locations including London, California, and her mother’s home island in the Caribbean. There is a large cast of characters, and Eleanor Bennett, the story’s central figure, an immigrant to the United States from the prologue’s unspecified Caribbean island, has assumed multiple identities in her life and was originally named Covey Lyncook. Eleanor’s revelations of her past and these revelations’ impact on her children form the core of Black Cake’s narrative. Other important characters, including Eleanor’s husband, originally named Gibbs Grant and later named Bert Bennett, are also known by multiple names depending on the time period. Tracking the novel’s numerous characters back and forth across time and location may try the patience of those readers who prefer simpler, more straightforward storytelling.
The main narrative truly begins when Eleanor, keeper of a long-held family secret, dies of cancer in Los Angeles in 2018. She leaves her son and daughter an audiotaped monologue in which she reveals the truth of her life. Eleanor’s children, Byron and Benny, are both adults and have been out of touch since Benny estranged herself from the family eight years earlier. However, when the siblings receive word from Eleanor’s attorney, Mr. Mitch, that they must come together to his office to listen to a recording of their mother’s confessions, Byron and Benny reconnect. In this way the siblings begin a journey of discovery they could not have imagined and eventually learn that everything they had been told about their family history was a lie. Eleanor begins the recording of her life story with an appeal to her children foreshadowing the gravity of what she is about to tell them, and asks the children to forgive her for never telling them the truth before.
The book is divided into “Then” and “Now” segments, which are interspersed among other chapters as the story goes back and forth in time between the 1960s and 2018. Through this structure, Wilkerson reveals that Eleanor was known as Covey in her childhood. The events of Eleanor’s early life in the 1960s, of which her children know nothing, unfold in the “Then” segments of the book, allowing the reader glimpses of her childhood in the Caribbean, the social and cultural context of her upbringing, and the ways Eleanor’s life was impacted by the sudden and permanent disappearance of her mother.
The critical elements of Eleanor’s background, which become secrets she holds onto for decades, are developed in these segments. Her mother leaves the family and is absent from Eleanor’s life. Her father, Johnny “Lin” Lyncook, is a gambler of Chinese descent who raises Eleanor with the help of her mother’s friend and family helper, Pearl. Eleanor’s mother taught her how to swim confidently in the sea; as a result, Eleanor later becomes a powerful swimmer. She grows into adolescence alongside her beloved best friend, Bunny, and falls in love with a young man named Gibbs Grant. However, although Eleanor is in love with Gibbs, her father tries to place her in an arranged marriage to settle a gambling debt. Eleanor’s potential husband, Clarence “Little Man” Henry, is a loan shark and villainous character; when he is poisoned to death at the wedding, Eleanor is suspected of his murder. With storytelling rich in personal and interpersonal drama, the “Then” segments explain what ultimately happens to Eleanor, including her time in London with Gibbs, their immigration to the US, and their new lives there under the assumed names of Bert and Eleanor Bennett.
The “Now” segments, which take place in California in 2018, relate the present-day events occurring after Eleanor’s death and primarily focus on the relationship between her two children, the reasons for the rift that exists between them, and their discomfort at being thrust together by the circumstances surrounding their mother’s death. Byron’s anger about Benny’s estrangement from the family is palpable. Benny is carrying deep hurt and resentment because she felt her family rejected her when she most needed their support. Each sibling responds with disbelief as they listen to their mother’s story.
The significance of the black cake of the book’s title reverberates through the stories of Eleanor’s life and events of the present day. When Eleanor is a child on the island, her mother, Mathilda, owns a cake shop famous for its traditional black cake, which Mathilda and Pearl produce together for Christmas and other special occasions. Eleanor learns how to make this cake by watching her mother. When she grows up and became a wife and mother herself, Eleanor continues the tradition of baking black cake; she always works with her daughter Benny at her side. Even after moving away as a young adult, Benny makes the annual trip back home to join her mother in creating the Christmas cake. This lifelong, creative, and intimate experience of making the cake with her mother inspires Benny to develop her own expertise in making this dessert and to dream of attending culinary school. As part of her final gift to her children, Eleanor leaves one more black cake to them when she dies, urging them to “sit down together and share the cake when the time is right.”
Knowing the origins of black cake allows the reader to explore the pivotal role of the traditional dessert in this family story. While his mother and sister consider black cake as a marker of their island heritage, Byron sees it only as a remnant of colonization, remarking, “Black cake was essentially a plum pudding handed down to the Caribbeans by colonizers from a cold country.” This implies that the family’s homeland in the Caribbean was once a British colony, adding to the sense that the novel’s unnamed setting is based on Jamaica, which was also once under British colonial domination. British plum pudding, a traditional dessert in that country, made its way into the local cuisines of many countries under British domination; the dessert later evolved in the cooking of colonized peoples and their descendants to become something uniquely Caribbean. While it retained some basic character of its origins, it evolved into something new through cultural fusion. As different Caribbean peoples created their very own black cake, the dessert’s origins as plum pudding began to fade, even as its status as a byproduct of colonialism remained true. In this sense, the dessert has parallels with Eleanor’s own multicultural family. The troublesome parts of their past, namely the impact of colonialism, lie undiscussed but nonetheless exert some effect on the ways life in the present is lived, celebrated, and lamented.
The “Then” and “Now” sections are interwoven with each other and further divided into many brief chapters, some consisting of only a few paragraphs, a structure which quickly shifts the reader’s attention from one character, time period, or location to the next. The characters of Byron and Benny are fully developed, as is the emotional baggage that each sibling carries and the pressures that push in on them. Byron is a successful and well-known oceanologist who has been passed over multiple times for the promotion he wants and is despondent over his failed relationship with his girlfriend. Benny dropped out of college after enduring a humiliation on campus, is struggling in her career as an artist, has recently been fired from a job, and is in an abusive relationship that she feels powerless to leave. Wilkerson deftly immerses the reader in the tension created by the combination of each sibling’s own soul-sapping personal issues with their forced reunion, the death of their mother, and the profoundly disturbing new information that leads them to question their very identities.
Aside from being an engaging read for its intrigue, family intimacy, and intercultural richness, Black Cake is important for its willingness to raise questions about identity, heritage, and connection in a post-colonial society. With intricate care, Wilkerson has placed Caribbean black cake, a significant and complicated cultural marker, at the center of the story; she demonstrates its power to connect people across different generations and countries. With that kind of agency to pull a family and its story together, the cake itself becomes something of a character in the novel.
The novel received fairly positive reviews upon its publication in 2022. While some critics were enthusiastic in their reception of Black Cake, others, like Liberty Martin for Harvard Review Online, gave the novel lukewarm reviews. Martin found some of Wilkerson’s decisions problematic; in particular, she criticized Wilkerson for not identifying the Caribbean island and for only weakly acknowledging the politics of race as it related to the Bennett family’s story. Martin felt that Wilkerson’s racial commentary was “rehashed rather than insightful,” and that the author “miss[ed] the ripe opportunity” to provide meaningful insights on race as it related to the experiences of the novel’s characters.
Similarly, a reviewer for Kirkus appreciated the careful unfolding of the story across disparate time periods and places through the numerous short chapters but felt that the characters’ interior over-processing of events and problems slowed down the plot. This reviewer also unfavorably compared the “deliciously larger-than-life” characters from the “Then” section of the novel with the contemporary characters in the “Now” section, which the reviewer described as “consciously assembled to touch bases of gender and racial identity.” Still, the reviewer felt the novel had “plenty to savor.”
Other reviewers gave the novel unqualified praise. For example, Keishel Williams, who reviewed Black Cake for the Washington Post, described the novel as “delectable,” highlighting the brief, fast-paced chapters and the power of the story to inspire readers to consider the ways historical events can influence a family’s trajectory. Williams highlighted how Wilkerson used the legacy and history of black cake as a way to “[question] the very essence of tradition that is known to many people of Caribbean heritage,” and felt that the novel’s sweeping narrative provided powerful commentary on the multigenerational effects of trauma, migration, and other issues.
Elisabeth Egan, reviewing the novel for the New York Times, also commented on the novel’s frenetic organization and pacing. She compared Wilkerson’s construction of the novel to the work of a “mad chef” mixing multiple ingredients into a “roiling soup of family secrets, big lies, great loves, bright colors and strong smells.”