Black Cake: A Novel by Charmaine Wilkerson
In Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut effort, Black Cake: A Novel, Benny and Byron Bennett are estranged siblings reunited by their mother Eleanor’s recent death. Eleanor Bennett speaks to her children through a recording made during her last days, Benny and Byron quickly discover that they didn’t know much about their mother and father at all. Through Eleanor’s revelation of her past, Wilkerson weaves a tale of migration, identity, trauma, and perseverance that eventually connects the siblings with each other and with their parents’ turbulent past. The story resembles a saga, with its heroes facing unthinkable tragedy yet somehow persevering. It begins on a Caribbean island, a setting to which it frequently returns, but nearly all of the characters in Black Cake are flung far from their places of origin. As the Bennet children learn their parents’ story, characters migrate - often under dire conditions - from China to the Caribbean, from London to Rome, from California to New York. Wilkerson’s point is that the colonial history of the Caribbean and their uneasy connection to Britain is not just happening parallel to the stories of Eleanor and her husband Bert. Rather, the Bennetts’ story is colonial history, touching everything from their education and aspirations to the rum-soaked black cake handed down through generations. “Everything is connected to everything else,” says Elly, a pivotal character, “if you only go far enough back in time.”
The prose is uneven, with flashes of beautiful writing shining through clunkier expository passages. A vignette of a young Elly happily digging in the orphanage backyard is a particularly fine piece of writing, while some variation of “it was impossible…or was it?” appears more than once in the book. But Wilkerson’s quick pacing means that the book never feels the heft of its 457 pages. Her storytelling is clever, weaving food history and fictional narrative to create a compelling tale of migration, loss, trauma, and personal reinvention.