Black Cake

“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”

In responding to a desperate complaint expressed by one of the customers she calls as a telemarketer, Benny deviates from the prepared company script and consoles the woman by agreeing with her, a gesture for which she is summarily fired. The spontaneous and poorly considered decision to engage the caller as a person epitomizes Benny’s life up to her mother’s death: her thoughtless sympathy, her reckless compassion, and her willingness to engage with life spontaneously.

“Black cake was essentially a plum pudding handed down to Caribbeans by colonizers from a cold country. Why claim the recipes of the exploiters as your own?”

The black cake symbolizes bringing people together. As a fancy cake, the confectionary is saved for holiday gatherings or for community rituals such as weddings and birthdays. Eleanor’s plan—to make one last black cake and freeze it against such time as her three children would finally come together as a family—reveals a similar argument. In a novel in which identity is defined by how rich and diverse that identity is, the black cake, with its hodgepodge of fruits and liqueurs, brings together elements of the islands and the UK, elements of Caribbean culture and the much-despised white colonizers.

“From far below that came something that felt like thunder in the distance, like a howling wind coming off the sea, like a wild animal approaching. And now she was that animal, and she was unlatching the gate and running into the street, tears wetting her face, wetting her neck, wetting her shirt.”

Not often in this novel does Eleanor/Covey surrender to helplessness. Here she adjusts to the dark reality that, despite her love for Gibbs, she is to be married to the reptilian island gangster Little Man as a way for her father to get out of the debt he owes the crime boss. In tapping into a deep helplessness, Covey surrenders her humanity. It is hope that makes us most human.

“Bunny, with the address of someone who could be trusted. Bunny, who loved enough to make sure that she would get away.”

Bunny’s tragic heroics happen quietly—her profound love for Covey when they are growing up on the island, because of the cultural proscriptions against gay relationships, leaves her wanting. This unrequited love compels Bunny’s act of self-denial that here ensures Covey a way off the island after the disastrous wedding reception. Bunny secures Covey her passage to England and the job as a nanny, all done, as Bunny acknowledges here, to ensure that the woman she loved would leave her behind.

“Sometimes stories we don’t tell each about ourselves matter even more than the things we do say.”

Taken from the recording Eleanor leaves behind, this quote exposes a problem with secrets: So complete is her commitment to sharing everything with her kids, the news revealed by the recording stuns them. Here Eleanor admits as much. For all she has shared with her kids—and the stories she shares about her childhood in the orphanage plagiarize the stories that Elly told Covey on the train to Scotland decades ago—Covey is most revealed by what she elects for decades not to share.

“’Everything is connected to everything else, if you only go far enough back in time.”

The ever-expansive, ever-redoubtable Elly, before her death at a young age in the trainwreck on the way to Edinburgh, reassures Covey of the essential oneness of the human experience. For all the drama over nationalities and borders, ethnicities and religions, as Elly points out to Covey using the metaphor of the great global tectonic plates ever so slowly moving toward each other, all humanity is fundamentally one.

“Until what happened next stunned Eleanor into silence.”

This is the second tipping point in the novel in which Covey (now Eleanor) experiences a kind of helplessness. Covey has been raped by her supervisor at the trading company where she works. She says nothing after her rape. Her silence reveals the nature of Covey’s trauma and foreshadows similar moments when Covey edges toward surrender of hope as she struggles to get back her child, born of this assault.

“Why hadn’t she pounded on doors, robbed a bank, sold herself, done anything to keep her child? Had her daughter, all these years, ever lain awake at night wondering, like Eleanor, about the mother she left behind? Had the questions burrowed into her bones like a wormwood?”

Eleanor is haunted by the baby she was forced to give up for adoption after she was raped. She wonders why she didn’t try more to keep her baby and why, once the paperwork was duly signed, she did not go back on her word and go look for her baby. Here she wonders whether the child she signed over ever wonders about her mother or thinks about trying to find her.

“She’s always hoped that things would work out in the end, that she’d find her first daughter, that she’d explain everything to her other children, that she wouldn’t feel the way she does now. No longer hopeful.”

When Eleanor tries to stage her own suicide, she speaks in a language that is uncharacteristically dismal, even despairing. Eleanor here is in full surrender. In deciding to head out into the dangerous Pacific morning surf to make it seem as if she was killed in a surfing accident, she acknowledges that with her husband dead, her kids estranged from her, and her first-born daughter still lost somewhere, hope is impossible to sustain. This is Eleanor’s de profundis moment. That she does not succeed marks the novel’s movement toward hope.

“‘This is what I would like to be able to say to you folks, that in life, you should just catch the wave and ride it. But what if you don’t see any good waves coming your way? You need to go looking.”

Byron here marks the beginnings of his re-education in the potent mystery of love and the risk the heart always demands. He is suspicious of his mother’s claim that the surfboarding mishap was an accident. He sees it as a cry for help—and here he tells a roomful of slightly puzzled schoolchildren what he does not at this point have the courage to tell his mother: Life is the open ocean; grab a longboard.

“Because baking a black cake was like handling a relationship. The recipe, on paper, was simple enough. But its success depended mostly on how you handled the ingredients.”

The black cake offers a motif for the novel’s argument about family, identity, and love—a basic set of ingredients that can be mixed into an endless number of variations, each cake thus the same and entirely new each time. Here the black cake emerges as the novel’s symbol for the complexity of families, love, parenting, and even identity. In bringing together so many different ingredients, in encouraging the baker to adlib with the seasonings each time, and because the recipe itself lacks any specific metrics, the black cake represents all the varieties of family, love, and relationships in the novel.

“Was this why she wanted to lock herself up in some concept hole? To keep herself from having to function in the real world with real relationships? How was she supposed to live a decent life with this kind of confusion?”

If her brother protects himself from the real world of messy relationships and lurking heartbreak by entombing himself in the scientific world of observation and data analysis, Benny manages to avoid engaging that same world through the vehicle of near-constant flight. Her dream—to open up a bakery/café where people could come and insulate themselves from the world in the quiet atmosphere of a themed coffee shop—reflects her sense of living with the world rather than living in it. 

“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. Because the people you loved were part of your identity, too. Perhaps the biggest part.”

Eleanor, just after watching the convention presentation from her old friend from the island, Bunny (now Ella Pringle), begins to come to terms with the implications of her relationship with her abandoned daughter as well as her problematic relationships with Benny and Byron. Under the pressure of her approaching death, she understands that even as her chemotherapy necessarily focuses her on herself, that self is defined ultimately only by others.

“‘My tastes reflect who I am, and, like many people, I’m an in-betweener.’”

Using food and the ways in which recipes bring together food from a variety of cultures to create stunning dishes, here Marble Martin (whom we find out later is Eleanor’s long-lost daughter) is herself a food guru. Here she explains her concept of ethno-food, how dishes define place and, in many cases, defy place. Food circulates the globe in what Marble calls a food diaspora. In that same way, identity, like the rich foods she creates, reflects diversity. Everyone, within the logic of the novel’s vision of the complexity of identity, is an in-betweener. 

“A tiny burr that had lodged itself somewhere under her rib cage and, bit by bit, had expanded over the years, poking at her from the inside. A feeling that someone else, a long time ago, may have decided that baby Mabel hadn’t been worth loving and coddling and investing in.”

Marble, before she is notified by her mother’s estate, can never quite get around the feeling that long ago her mother wanted a life without her. The exorcism of guilt is critical to embracing the optimism offered in the closing chapters. Forgiving herself for what circumstances or limited choices or economic realities compelled her to do is central to the emergence of Covey/Eleanor into redemption. This moment marks the nadir of Marble’s emotional life—like Byron, like Benny, Marble will experience redemption under the direction of a mother who never stopped loving her.

“Byron grew up understanding that Earth and its oceans were in a constant state of agitation, and by the time he reached college, he knew he wanted to spend most of his time listening to the seas.”

Byron is ever ready to listen to the play of the Earth and the seas in his quixotic endeavor to understand nothing less than nature itself—at the expense of listening to others, like his troubled sister, his long-suffering girlfriend, and his mother. Early on he chafes against listening to his mother’s recording—he fidgets, he complains, he walks out of the room—but in the end, he does more than listen: He hears and in turn opens himself up to the complexity of the relationship with Lynette.

“It is only now that Benny realizes that the recipe has no numbers, no quantities at all. Just a list of ingredients and the occasional verb. Wait, was it always this way?”

What her brother learns astride the longboard, Benny learns when she goes through her mother’s kitchen junk drawer and finds her mother’s recipe for black cake. The scribbled recipe illuminates what Benny needs to understand and what Covey learned long ago when she first challenged the open ocean as a swimmer: Life is not a recipe.

“How he needs her to spell it out for him, tell him what to do, tell him what she really wants. How he realizes he’s been getting it wrong for years, not quite knowing how to be there for the people he loves.”

In the novel, unexpected pregnancies upend tidy and neat perceptions of the world and how it works. At 40, an accomplished scientist and international social media darling in his field, Byron might seem beyond the need for any more learning. In his reconciliation with the pregnant Lynette, however, Byron here finally accepts how much of the world is beyond control, prediction, anticipation, or even expectation. For the first time in the novel, Byron shows that he understands, at last, the limits of his ego, the need for others, and the reward of humility.

“You have always known who I am. Who I am is your mother. That is the truest part of me.”

Eleanor anticipates how her grown children may react to discovering, after her death, that they really had no idea who their mother was. In the end, after a lifetime of running away from who she was, Eleanor, even as her recording winds down, tells her son and her daughter the one reliable thing about an identity that for her has been anything but reliable: I am your mother.

“How it begins: in a parking lot at the shopping center in the suburbs.”

Because of its sense that no relationship can entirely begin or end on any kind of cue, the novel leaves Benny in a most curious kind of non-ending. She is dressed like a meercat and hustling a plaza shopping center, drumming up business for an appliance retailer, when she meets a man, a “bear” of a man, she says, at the plaza with his son. The two exchange a quiet conversation, and Benny, in costume, feels her face turning crimson as she takes in his smoky cologne. Thus, perhaps, love begins.

“Machines are sophisticated but they cannot read love. They cannot tell researchers what it feels like to be part of the sea, to be a blip of arms and legs, a small cavern of a mouth, skimming the briny surfaces of the world.”

Etta Pringle, who quietly emerges as the novel’s moral center, here reflects on the tonic wonder of embracing the open ocean rather than pretending to measure it. In this transcendental moment in which she feels part of the ocean, Etta/Bunny justifies a life spent advocating to protect the oceans, to protect the vital open wonder of the unpredictable, the ever-changing. Be a swimmer in it, Etta tirelessly champions, not a user of it.

“The beauty of a thing justified its plunder. And nothing was more beautiful than a girl who was fearless.”

In a novel in which male characters one after another reveal character flaws because of moral or emotional cowardice, it is left to Covey’s father, the weakest of the male characters, to offer the novel’s thematic perspective on its women: Whether Covey or Bunny, Benny or Lynette, Marble or Elly, nothing is more heroic than a woman who is fearless.

“Byron slips into a long, still moment in his head where he sees that whoever else his mother was in her lifetime, no matter her name or address, she has always been part of this world, and always will be. And this is the one place where he knows he can always find her.”

In the ocean, on a longboard, Byron finally makes his peace with his late mother. After going through the initial uncertainty over the implications of his mother’s confession, he has made his peace with the world of chance, misfortune, uncertainty, and surprise.