Black Cake

Black Cake (2022) is a family saga that chronicles more than half a century of one family’s journey, including its thwarted dreams, star-crossed loves, and dark secrets. Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel, it centers on the story of Eleanor Bennett, a 70-something first-generation Caribbean immigrant living in Southern California. Her death opens the historical fiction novel. Her two grown children, Benny and Byron, are to listen to a recording she made shortly before her death that reveals how little the two know about their mother.

The novel uses as its organizing motif the black cake, a traditional Caribbean dessert, with its wide variety of sweet ingredients, all of which blend to make a sublime confection. In Eleanor Bennett’s tumultuous life, the novel explores the nature of identity itself, the way in which cultures combine within families, and how generation to generation a family shapes its own history. In the grand tradition of storytelling that recalls the landmark works of realism of the 19th century, the novel is structured, nevertheless, in the distinctly postmodern tradition of nonlinear narratives with chapters that jump across time and move between multiple points of view. Even before it was published to critical praise, Black Cake was optioned by Oprah Winfrey’s production company to be developed into a limited series on Hulu.

This study guide uses the first-edition hardcover version, published by Ballentine Books in 2022.

Plot Summary

Covey Lyncook, a teenager growing up on a remote Caribbean island in the early 1960s, delights in swimming long distances in the beautiful waters around her island. Her best friend, Bunny, loves to swim with her, the two pushing each other to new distances. Bunny struggles with romantic feelings for Covey, which she never shares. Covey is in love with a surfer, Gilbert Gibbs, who dreams of going to London to study law. She is being raised by her father, an Asian immigrant who runs a small convenience store. When her father’s gambling addiction gets out of hand, he promises his daughter in marriage to a local underworld crime figure. At the wedding reception, however, the man drops dead, and in the confusion Covey slips away. Everyone assumes Covey, who, like her mother, is a master baker, known particularly for her black cake, an island delicacy, poisoned the wedding cake.

Now on her own, Covey heads to London. Too terrified of the long reach of the island’s crime syndicate, Covey makes no contact either with her friends back on the island or with Gibbs. Rather, she enrolls in a nursing program, where she meets Eleanor Bennett, another island girl. The two decide given the limited options they have in London they will head up to Scotland and start new lives. The train carrying them to Edinburgh crashes, and rescue workers mistake Covey for Eleanor, who died in the crash. Now with a new identity, Eleanor (formerly Covey) takes the secretarial job that Eleanor was to take. Everything seems to be fine—until Eleanor is raped by her office manager. She summarily quits the job only to find out weeks later she is pregnant. Desperate, she returns to London and, without any choice, signs her baby daughter over for adoption. When she is in London, she encounters Gibbs. The two decide to pursue the promise of America, each now gifted with an entirely new identity. They become Bert and Eleanor Bennett. They settle in Southern California, he becomes a lawyer, and they have two children, Benedetta (Benny) and Byron.

The two children grow up very differently. Benny is a misfit, a rebel, and drifts through school and from job to job with a dream of someday either being an artist or owning a hip coffee shop in Manhattan. Byron is a diligent student and becomes a world-renowned oceanographer. When Benny comes home for Thanksgiving shortly after dropping out of her second college, she tells her parents she is struggling with her bisexuality. In the ensuing kerfuffle, Benny leaves, and for eight years, even through the death of her father, she maintains her split with her family. It is only when her mother dies from a blood clot after grueling chemotherapy that Benny and Byron, now in their forties, at last have an awkward reunion.

The two know only what their mother told them about herself: that she was orphan raised by nuns. When the family estate attorney brings the two kids to his office, he relays their mother’s final instructions: to play a recording she has made and then, when the time feels right, go to her home and share a black cake she left in the freezer, the last one she made. The instructions are eccentric, but Benny and Byron agree. The recording reveals the truth about Eleanor—that is, the backstory about Covey and her real identity—as well as the shattering truth that somewhere they have a half-sister they never knew about.

As it turns out, that sister is now an international food guru known for her riveting presentations on the history of cultural cuisines—videos and articles that have made her a significant presence on social media. Just months before her death, Eleanor happened to see the woman on the Internet. Eleanor knew instantly this was her long-lost daughter. Through the agency of the family lawyer, the three siblings are brought together in the months after Eleanor’s death. The reunion is difficult, but the three come together and share their mother’s black cake in a gesture of community and family. It is revealed that it was Bunny, who has since become a champion long-distance swimmer and something of an inspirational motivational speaker, who long ago administered the poison to the crime boss Covey was marrying in an effort to free the woman she loved from bondage in an unloving marriage. A year after Eleanor/Covey’s death, the three new siblings take the ashes of both of their parents and scatter them in the ocean along with the last crumbs from Eleanor’s final black cake.