However, Wilkerson never specifies where this “tradition” is from. But Bryon had never shared his parents’ emotional attachment to the recipe. From Byron’s point of view, Wilkerson writes, “Ma’s cake was a work of art the moist, loamy mouthful, the tang of spirits behind the nose. Thus, Eleanor’s black cake recipe-one of the few things from her past that she could pass onto her children-serves as an expected symbol of heritage and how it can be disrupted or transformed by immigration. Benny and Byron begin to empathize with Eleanor outside of their mother–child relationship, realizing that she “had given up parts of herself until most of who she had been was gone.” Wilkerson tenderly depicts both generations reconciling their misunderstandings of each other: “We loved you both so much and held you both in such high regard that it never occurred to us that you might truly doubt it,” Eleanor says in the recording, a bittersweet moment from beyond the grave.

With Eleanor telling her life’s tale in her own words, the author subverts the assumption that the children of immigrants are the best narrators of their family’s stories. Even when these events become far-fetched, Wilkerson’s dynamic writing and choppy chapters will keep more cynical readers turning the pages to find out what happens next.

Eleanor’s life story emerges as the most compelling, an illustrious saga that features gamblers, Olympian swimmers, a murder mystery, betrayal, heartbreak, and love. “We had to be perfect to make up for the fact that our family is built on a colossal lie,” Benny laments.īlack Cake is told from multiple perspectives, darting between Eleanor’s younger years in the sixties, Byron and Benny’s upbringing, and the siblings’ lives in the present day. The siblings have not spoken in eight years, and the recording that their mother leaves them challenges everything that they knew about Eleanor and how she raised them. Charmaine Wilkerson conjures similar scenes in her debut novel Black Cake, in which a deceased Caribbean woman named Eleanor Bennett leaves a black cake and a lengthy audio recording filled with secrets for her adult children, Byron and Benny.īyron is a successful oceanologist in California who wants to be the perfect immigrant son, a “shining example of the American dream.” His younger sister, Benny, is a wayward queer artist living in New York City who feels estranged from her family. This was serious business, an operation that covered my grandma’s living room and kitchen with vat-sized mixing bowls and various ingredients in order to make cakes for family and church members.

Last Christmas, I helped my grandmother make black cake for the first time.

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson