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A review by spenkevich
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
4.0
I recommended this to my mom when it came out and now I hear her recommending it to people all the time--BIG WIN for former me always asked why the things I liked were "so weird and caustic."
‘I owe it to you to let you know about my past because this is your story, too.’
Identity is a complex amalgamation, a mixture and intersection of family lineage, culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and more. A mixture not unlike a recipe for food, a metaphor that deliciously entwines the story and characters in Black Cake, the debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson. An estranged brother and sister arrive for their mother’s funeral, only to discover she has left them a lengthy recording that upends everything they know about their family. Wilkerson’s many layered and endlessly twisting novel directly confronts ideas of identity as these siblings have their foundation pulled out from under them and must reassess everything they know about the Bennet family and, in turn, themselves. This book is packed with ideas, and while it occasionally feels a bit overstuffed the fast moving pace keeps you page turning as lives twist and history unravels itself into the present. Moving across multiple decades and continents, Wilkerson’s stunning debut is a smart and heartfelt investigation of family, culture, generational divides and the ways our identities coalesce ‘through a mixing of traditions, a mixing of fates, a mixing of stories.’
‘They’ve lost their mother and they can’t seem to find their way back to each other.’
Byron and Benny Bennet—yes, there are a lot of B names in this—haven’t spoken since Benny fled a family gathering years previous and never showed at their father’s funeral. Their mother, Eleanor, had always wanted to tell them the truth about her life, but with the family fractured she never found the time until it was too late, leaving instead a long recording that begins with telling her children they have a sister they’ve never met and a story of a girl named Covey living in the Caribbean in the 1960s. This book is a wild ride, with potential murder, lives forever altered multiple times, aliases, secrets, and much, much more. Yet at the center of it all is black cake, a recipe central to the Bennet family from their mother’s childhood on the island and a symbol of blending culture, stories and lives. And a final request that her children eat a black cake she left them when the time is right. But as they are shaken from each revelation that also reopens old wounds, will that time ever come? And who was Eleanor really?
‘More people’s lives have been shaped by violence than we like to think. And more people’s lives have been shaped by silence than we think.’
Wilkerson impressively juggles a lot here, rotating between the past and present in brief chapters that, while written entirely in third person, spirals through the characters to reframe on their specific lives, emotions and thoughts. The style gives each character their individualism while also weaving them together to view each individual as connected through the community of their shared lives. ‘Like many people, he isn’t any one thing,’ Wilkerson writes of Byron, but this sentiment is universal for each character and as the story progresses we see just how true this is.
As we watch Covey run from her past and reconfigure her life and identity&mash;shaped in the forges of violence, chance and a society that creates barriers for women of color—we also see how many people become connected to her story and can be affected by it. While this initially includes those who helped her escape and could come under the literal gun of the crime family surrounding the death of her forced marriage it becomes more solidified when she has children and extends her lineage. But what is key is the notion we are all connected, and each individual life reverberates against all the rest in the great orchestra of humanity where one wrong turn or sudden tragedy can sound the discordant note that derails the whole.
Wilkerson attempts a further examination of connectivity by demonstrating lineage and heritage not only of familiar links, but as occupants of the earth and members of the long history of humanity. ‘Everything is connected to everything else, if you only go far enough back in time,’ she writes, in an omniscient narration that sometimes dips too close to being its own personality without grounding into the narrative itself. It works in theory but the practice of it in the text is a bit rushed and feels like a tacked on aftereffect used too sporadically. A chapter will open with telling of how things were, say, hundreds of years ago and then connect it to the actions of a character, told without familiarity before returning to the normal narration style. I like the point being made, though it is a bit jarring and seems more like a transition crutch than a natural part of the narrative but overall it serves the theme of connectivity and heritage well. Particularly in the sense of generational trauma, as metaphored (spell check tells me this is not a real word but I’m coining it now so feel free to normalize it) in a scene with the character Elly cutting her foot on an ancient gate buried in the sand, which fills into a larger theme of how best intentions can come across as hurt later on.
Which is an aspect of the novel I really appreciate, as it juxtaposes generational perspectives and how the disconnect chafes on either party. The siblings begin the novel processing their mother’s story as one of betrayal for keeping secrets, while we recognize that her and her husband view secret keeping as an act of mercy and to protect those closest to them. And this older generation that sees value in secrets is shown as being appalled by the younger generation that puts their entire lives in the public eye through social media, fearful that so much openness leaves them vulnerable to harm. To them, their actions are one of protection but are seen by the younger generation as rejection. Benny’s narrative positions her sense of identity into the crosshairs of this clash, with her dad mistaking her bisexuality as mere confusion instead of accepting it as an aspect of her selfhood. I particularly enjoyed this aspect of the novel, having been a similar recipient of the criticism and frustrated by the avoidance that insisting someone’s identity is mere confusion makes you internalize shame and have a hard time trusting yourself.
‘She had been part of the world forever and always would be.’
There is a rich irony here, because so much of each character’s journey is making peace with being a complex self, and while so much of life is affected by ‘the way people saw them and how it determined the roles that they were expected to play in life,’ they find their sense of self doesn’t fit into tidy, socially-prescribed boxes. Each character discovers they are ‘a dual entity, a sort of hybrid’, being too much the same aspects that they are not enough of and feeling alienated because of it.
Covey is a black woman with a Chinese father, for example, living in a culture that has absorbed aspects of colonization into itself. ‘they belonged, first, to the hills and caverns and shores of the island where they had grown up,’ Wilkerson writes about Covey and her friend in London, Elly, ‘but they also felt that they were part of the culture that had influenced so many aspects of their daily lives.’
‘We cannot always saw at which point one culture ends and another begins, especially in the kitchen.’
The way colonialism intersects with traditional culture becomes a major theme in Black Cake, best demonstrated in the titular food itself. As noted early on, black cake has roots outside the island, but has transformed into a specific cultural artifact of the island. There are some really great foodie aspects to this book, especially when Wilkerson addresses food ethics and culture through the character of tv food expert, Marble. ‘if you talk about the way in which food moves around the world,’ she say when facing criticism for addressing these issues, ‘ you can’t help but mention the social, economic, and political facts behind it. It doesn’t mean I’m engaging in political commentary.’ Her aim isn’t to judge but to examine the ways food has a complex heritage, which is mirrored in the realizations of lineage in the primary characters who can trace their roots across social, racial, and political “borders”. ‘The diaspora of food, just like the diaspora of people, has helped to shape many cultural traditions,’ Marble says, drawing the direct line between the two. Over time things change, adapt, become part of something else while still retaining what they once were and always will be. This, too, is mirrored in the many transformations seen in the book and the many characters who have a different name in different stages of their life, such as the childhood Bunny later being swimming icon Etta Pringles.
Black Cake branches into many applications of this idea to examine it from a multitude of angles. It also makes sure to call-out social issues that would inform up the character’s lives. The book does seem to overextend itself in acknowledging all these topics, but one might wish it would pause in order to better explore them. There is something to be said about honing in to make sure to say one or two things really well rather than saying a lot at a surface level (a few do feel a bit shoe-horned in). However, Wilkerson somehow manages to make her maximization of social critique quite enjoyable as they are folded into the larger narrative in a way that makes us realize they are important to recognize but, as Byron says, ‘I’m not going to get into all of that here, that’s a whole other story. ’The most successful address very in-the-moment issues in context of the themes and with the shadow of the past cast across them. ‘Trying to undo worry is like trying to undo his blackness,’ Wilkerson writes about Byron, and his racial identity is an active role on his path through society, particularly in the face of authority such as the workplace or law enforcement.
'This is who they have always been, an African American family of Caribbean origin, a clan of untold stories and half-charted cultures.'
This is a soaringly good debut that should very well be a big book of the year. As a debut this has some mechanical hiccups and a few stylistic choices that didn’t always work, as well as seeming a bit overly long as the latter portion of the novel was overly concerned with putting a tidy, satisfying bow on every loose end. That said, honestly, I love it all. This was such an engaging book with a fast pace that made it nearly impossible to. A few nitpicks aside, Wilkerson takes a purpose in her sights and hits the target dead on which makes the occasionally rough flight path all good by achieving its goal so well. Black Cake is a really heartfelt book that tackles some difficult subjects and does so by successfully orchestrating the reader’s emotions along with the story. This is a beautiful tale about family and one that will certainly find it’s way into your heart.
4/5
‘The people you loved were part of your identity, too. Perhaps the biggest part.’
‘I owe it to you to let you know about my past because this is your story, too.’
Identity is a complex amalgamation, a mixture and intersection of family lineage, culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and more. A mixture not unlike a recipe for food, a metaphor that deliciously entwines the story and characters in Black Cake, the debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson. An estranged brother and sister arrive for their mother’s funeral, only to discover she has left them a lengthy recording that upends everything they know about their family. Wilkerson’s many layered and endlessly twisting novel directly confronts ideas of identity as these siblings have their foundation pulled out from under them and must reassess everything they know about the Bennet family and, in turn, themselves. This book is packed with ideas, and while it occasionally feels a bit overstuffed the fast moving pace keeps you page turning as lives twist and history unravels itself into the present. Moving across multiple decades and continents, Wilkerson’s stunning debut is a smart and heartfelt investigation of family, culture, generational divides and the ways our identities coalesce ‘through a mixing of traditions, a mixing of fates, a mixing of stories.’
‘They’ve lost their mother and they can’t seem to find their way back to each other.’
Byron and Benny Bennet—yes, there are a lot of B names in this—haven’t spoken since Benny fled a family gathering years previous and never showed at their father’s funeral. Their mother, Eleanor, had always wanted to tell them the truth about her life, but with the family fractured she never found the time until it was too late, leaving instead a long recording that begins with telling her children they have a sister they’ve never met and a story of a girl named Covey living in the Caribbean in the 1960s. This book is a wild ride, with potential murder, lives forever altered multiple times, aliases, secrets, and much, much more. Yet at the center of it all is black cake, a recipe central to the Bennet family from their mother’s childhood on the island and a symbol of blending culture, stories and lives. And a final request that her children eat a black cake she left them when the time is right. But as they are shaken from each revelation that also reopens old wounds, will that time ever come? And who was Eleanor really?
‘More people’s lives have been shaped by violence than we like to think. And more people’s lives have been shaped by silence than we think.’
Wilkerson impressively juggles a lot here, rotating between the past and present in brief chapters that, while written entirely in third person, spirals through the characters to reframe on their specific lives, emotions and thoughts. The style gives each character their individualism while also weaving them together to view each individual as connected through the community of their shared lives. ‘Like many people, he isn’t any one thing,’ Wilkerson writes of Byron, but this sentiment is universal for each character and as the story progresses we see just how true this is.
‘But the fact was, when you lived a life, under any name, that life became entwined with others’. You left a trail of potential consequences. You were never just you, and you owed it to the people you cared about to remember that.’
As we watch Covey run from her past and reconfigure her life and identity&mash;shaped in the forges of violence, chance and a society that creates barriers for women of color—we also see how many people become connected to her story and can be affected by it. While this initially includes those who helped her escape and could come under the literal gun of the crime family surrounding the death of her forced marriage it becomes more solidified when she has children and extends her lineage. But what is key is the notion we are all connected, and each individual life reverberates against all the rest in the great orchestra of humanity where one wrong turn or sudden tragedy can sound the discordant note that derails the whole.
Wilkerson attempts a further examination of connectivity by demonstrating lineage and heritage not only of familiar links, but as occupants of the earth and members of the long history of humanity. ‘Everything is connected to everything else, if you only go far enough back in time,’ she writes, in an omniscient narration that sometimes dips too close to being its own personality without grounding into the narrative itself. It works in theory but the practice of it in the text is a bit rushed and feels like a tacked on aftereffect used too sporadically. A chapter will open with telling of how things were, say, hundreds of years ago and then connect it to the actions of a character, told without familiarity before returning to the normal narration style. I like the point being made, though it is a bit jarring and seems more like a transition crutch than a natural part of the narrative but overall it serves the theme of connectivity and heritage well. Particularly in the sense of generational trauma, as metaphored (spell check tells me this is not a real word but I’m coining it now so feel free to normalize it) in a scene with the character Elly cutting her foot on an ancient gate buried in the sand, which fills into a larger theme of how best intentions can come across as hurt later on.
Which is an aspect of the novel I really appreciate, as it juxtaposes generational perspectives and how the disconnect chafes on either party. The siblings begin the novel processing their mother’s story as one of betrayal for keeping secrets, while we recognize that her and her husband view secret keeping as an act of mercy and to protect those closest to them. And this older generation that sees value in secrets is shown as being appalled by the younger generation that puts their entire lives in the public eye through social media, fearful that so much openness leaves them vulnerable to harm. To them, their actions are one of protection but are seen by the younger generation as rejection. Benny’s narrative positions her sense of identity into the crosshairs of this clash, with her dad mistaking her bisexuality as mere confusion instead of accepting it as an aspect of her selfhood. I particularly enjoyed this aspect of the novel, having been a similar recipient of the criticism and frustrated by the avoidance that insisting someone’s identity is mere confusion makes you internalize shame and have a hard time trusting yourself.
‘She had been part of the world forever and always would be.’
There is a rich irony here, because so much of each character’s journey is making peace with being a complex self, and while so much of life is affected by ‘the way people saw them and how it determined the roles that they were expected to play in life,’ they find their sense of self doesn’t fit into tidy, socially-prescribed boxes. Each character discovers they are ‘a dual entity, a sort of hybrid’, being too much the same aspects that they are not enough of and feeling alienated because of it.
‘But just when she’d thought that her world was expanding beyond the suffocation of adolescence and into a new environment, she found that the boxes into which she was expected to fit—whether for race, sexual orientation, or politics—seemed to be making her world narrower.’
Covey is a black woman with a Chinese father, for example, living in a culture that has absorbed aspects of colonization into itself. ‘they belonged, first, to the hills and caverns and shores of the island where they had grown up,’ Wilkerson writes about Covey and her friend in London, Elly, ‘but they also felt that they were part of the culture that had influenced so many aspects of their daily lives.’
‘We cannot always saw at which point one culture ends and another begins, especially in the kitchen.’
The way colonialism intersects with traditional culture becomes a major theme in Black Cake, best demonstrated in the titular food itself. As noted early on, black cake has roots outside the island, but has transformed into a specific cultural artifact of the island. There are some really great foodie aspects to this book, especially when Wilkerson addresses food ethics and culture through the character of tv food expert, Marble. ‘if you talk about the way in which food moves around the world,’ she say when facing criticism for addressing these issues, ‘ you can’t help but mention the social, economic, and political facts behind it. It doesn’t mean I’m engaging in political commentary.’ Her aim isn’t to judge but to examine the ways food has a complex heritage, which is mirrored in the realizations of lineage in the primary characters who can trace their roots across social, racial, and political “borders”. ‘The diaspora of food, just like the diaspora of people, has helped to shape many cultural traditions,’ Marble says, drawing the direct line between the two. Over time things change, adapt, become part of something else while still retaining what they once were and always will be. This, too, is mirrored in the many transformations seen in the book and the many characters who have a different name in different stages of their life, such as the childhood Bunny later being swimming icon Etta Pringles.
Black Cake branches into many applications of this idea to examine it from a multitude of angles. It also makes sure to call-out social issues that would inform up the character’s lives. The book does seem to overextend itself in acknowledging all these topics, but one might wish it would pause in order to better explore them. There is something to be said about honing in to make sure to say one or two things really well rather than saying a lot at a surface level (a few do feel a bit shoe-horned in). However, Wilkerson somehow manages to make her maximization of social critique quite enjoyable as they are folded into the larger narrative in a way that makes us realize they are important to recognize but, as Byron says, ‘I’m not going to get into all of that here, that’s a whole other story. ’The most successful address very in-the-moment issues in context of the themes and with the shadow of the past cast across them. ‘Trying to undo worry is like trying to undo his blackness,’ Wilkerson writes about Byron, and his racial identity is an active role on his path through society, particularly in the face of authority such as the workplace or law enforcement.
'This is who they have always been, an African American family of Caribbean origin, a clan of untold stories and half-charted cultures.'
This is a soaringly good debut that should very well be a big book of the year. As a debut this has some mechanical hiccups and a few stylistic choices that didn’t always work, as well as seeming a bit overly long as the latter portion of the novel was overly concerned with putting a tidy, satisfying bow on every loose end. That said, honestly, I love it all. This was such an engaging book with a fast pace that made it nearly impossible to. A few nitpicks aside, Wilkerson takes a purpose in her sights and hits the target dead on which makes the occasionally rough flight path all good by achieving its goal so well. Black Cake is a really heartfelt book that tackles some difficult subjects and does so by successfully orchestrating the reader’s emotions along with the story. This is a beautiful tale about family and one that will certainly find it’s way into your heart.
4/5
‘The people you loved were part of your identity, too. Perhaps the biggest part.’