Book 906: Black Cake – Charmaine Wilkerson

When someone from the publisher reached out to me about Black Cake, it wasn’t an immediate yes or an immediate no.* I honestly had no idea what I was going to do, I thought it was a beautiful cover (even if I didn’t notice the woman on it for ages) and the multi-generational story drew me in.

What ultimately decided for me was that it was a debut novel, love those most of the time, and my reading list is seriously lacking authors of color and I’ve been saying for years I’m going to expand my reading list. And holy shit y’all I’m so glad I did, this book took me for so many rides.

At its heart, Black Cake is the story of Covey a young Caribbean woman who flees her home due to her father’s gambling debt who basically sells her to the local mobster. We follow her, her friends, and her descendants across three continents, so many cities and countries while they navigate relationships, social expectations, racism, and oppression. The meandering nature of the narrative weaving from past to present and character to character kept me on my toes and engaged the entire read.

Every time his mother made a black cake, it must have been like reciting an incantation, calling up a line from her true past, taking herself back to the island. (Part 4: “Byron”)

I can’t even start to cover everything wonderful about this novel. Every single character stands out, even those that barely appear on the page (looking at you Mathilda, and OG Eleanor).

Benny and Etta stand out for me because of their rainbow identity (bisexual and lesbian) and the struggles they faced on and off the page because of their identities. Etta’s unrequited love for Covey changes the entire story and provides that “hold your breath shit’s going down” moment at the end of the book. And so many of Benny’s battles with her family and feeling isolated just hit home for me.

Ma was right about one thing. It was true that Benny’s relationships had been complicated. People had a tendency to relate to only one thing or another, not to people like her, not to inbetweeners, not to neither-nors. This had been true in politics, it had been true in religion, it had been true in culture, and it sure as hell was true when it came to the laws of attraction. (Part 3: “Cake”)

And Wilkerson’s delicate handling of the explosive topic of police brutality and systemic oppression was so well written and emotionally draining that I read some of Byron’s passages multiple times just to try and understand his experience (and the experience of Black men) when it came to law enforcement.

Byron wants to believe that this epidemic of mistreatment, this bullying of unarmed black men is just that, an outbreak, though prolonged, that can be brought under control. He wants to keep believing in law enforcement officers, to respect the risky work that they do, knowing that every day they step into unknown territory. He wants to know that he can still pick up the phone and call the cops if he ever needs to. There’s a lot of anger out there. A lot of hurt. Where are they all gonna end up—black, white, whoever—if things don’t get any better? What would his father say, if he knew that things were still this way in America in 2018? He has a fleeting thought, a blasphemous thought, that maybe it’s just as well his dad isn’t around anymore to see the way things are. (Part 4: “Byron”)

But what tied all of the stories together, apart from Covey, was Wilkerson’s writing and descriptive prowess. From the island coves to the character’s emotions, Wilkerson pulls you into the story so you feel the sand on your body or the anger and rage rising at the same time it’s bubbling to the surface for Byron or Benny. There were so many wonderful descriptive passages, but for some reason, this one stands out to me:

To say the vase was blue was about as imprecise as calling a person interesting, but everyone agreed that it was, at the very least, blueish. Benny sat staring at the waist-high object for what felt like an hour, pulling her gaze up from the mostly emerald lower border, through its rich celestial middle, to the pale aquamarine splash at the top, the flecks of gold and amber near the upper edge, and finally, part of the lip and bulge of the vase, which had been left uncolored, the natural, reddish tone of the pottery exposed. Benny contemplated the vase, then looked over at Joanie. And Joanie smiled back at her in that way that Benny would come to know. (Part One: “What You Don’t Say”)

It’s not a profound scene for the novel, Joanie plays the smallest of parts, but the way Wilkerson describes this vase and Benny’s feelings before and after this scene gave me such a visceral response that I can see the vase but I can’t describe it in any other way than Wilkerson does ¯(ツ)/¯

In addition to her descriptive prowess, Wilkerson creates a universality with her characters that allowed me, a white man growing up and living in the US, to identify and empathize with many of the characters. She somehow strips you of your identity and drops you into each of the characters’ lives—it’s how she writes the settings and emotions, I’m telling you.

It wasn’t that Benny didn’t know how to stick to a call center script, as her supervisor had suggested. It was that she understood that one of the things that made you human was your willingness to deviate from the script. The problem was, scripts were like battles. You had to choose when to go with them and when not to. And you had to be prepared to live with the consequences. (Part One: “Homesickness”)

This ability of Wilkerson’s and the above quote really came across with Marble, she knew something was off and could never put her finger on it and when things started to slot into place, she knew the battle had come.

Recommendation: Black Cake is an incredibly beautiful and powerful debut novel. The journeys (because there are so many in this novel) Wilkerson takes you on are exhausting yet immensely fulfilling. As the story wrapped up I wasn’t sure I wanted to know some of the things I could see coming, but Wilkerson made it so I had to know. Whether things would reach a complete resolution I was there for the complete journey and even though some things were left unspoken at the end it was incredibly satisfying to be on that boat for the final scene.

*I received a copy of Black Cake via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.

Opening Line: “He should have known it would come to this.”

Closing Line: “Then Marble, Byron, and Benny take what’s left of their mother’s last black cake, crumble it, and let it fall into the water.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from Black Cake
“Benny had always thought of her parents as being made for each other. Her parents would have had a lot in common, both being from the Caribbean, both orphaned, both having immigrated to Britain before moving to the United States together. But it might not have mattered, it was love at first sight, they’d always aid that, and some people were meant to find each other, no matter what.” (Part One: “Sister”)

“Even after Benny grew up and moved out, Christmastime baking with Ma remained an annual ritual. She would come back each winter for the blacking of the sugar, the rubbing of the butter, the sifting-in of the breadcrumbs. And each time, she brought the old measuring cup with her. Whenever her ma saw it, she would wrap her arms around Benny and kiss her on the neck, mwah-mwah-mwah.” (Part One: “Now: A Piece of Home”)

“The Bible said for dust though art and now Elly saw what it really meant. She knew that she had been part of the world forever and always would be, and had nothing to fear, nothing at all. And she would do whatever it took to realize her dream. She would study the dirt and shells and rocks at the heart of her world, because that was her destiny.” (Part Two: “Then: Elly”)

“The truth is, Benny had wanted to go to that university almost as much as her parents had wanted her to be there. But then when she’d though 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.” (Part 4: “Farewells”)

“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.” (Part 4: “Mrs. Bennett”)