Black Cake

Benny is deliciously, tragically self-involved, always apart, never quite a part. Her character has been defined by friction. A misfit—biracial, bisexual—who finds herself in nearly constant conflict and often nasty confrontations with others—in the novel’s opening chapters, she has a hilarious showdown with her boss at her telemarketing job in New York when Benny careens off script to lambast a customer for their lack of concern over the environment. Benny does not speak to her parents for years and is estranged from her brother. Her most meaningful communications with her family are through phone messages. She drifts through disastrous relationships, most notably with a female graduate student in ceramics whom she meets during a stint in Arizona, and later with the volatile Steven, who verbally and physically abuses her. However, she is not as defiant and egocentric as her rebel persona might suggest. She longs for the comfort of her mother, she breaks down as she watches the funeral of her father, and after her mother’s death she cradles the measuring cup the two of them used to make her mother’s signature black cake. An artist who dreams of owning a café, she is a contradiction: a cynical romantic, an impractical pragmatist, a lonely egomaniac.

Until her mother’s death compels her to return to her past and begin the difficult work, at the age of 37, to define who she is, Benny has drifted. Much like her mother, who has been on the run from her own past since she slipped out of the confusion of her wedding reception, Benny’s preferred strategy for survival has been flight, a global pilgrimage from herself, a strategy “to keep herself from having to function in the real world with real relationships” (236). When neither her mother nor her father shows sufficient sympathy when she opens up about her bisexuality and the messy end of her relationship with the grad student Joanie, Benny sees that as an excuse to run. In her recording, her mother begs Benny to reconsider that life strategy: Let your life be “determined not only by the meanness of others but also by the kindness of others” (285).

In the closing chapter, Benny reveals her emotional evolution as she joins her new half-sister and her brother in scattering the ashes of their mother into the welcoming blue of the Pacific. Her return to her family home, her return to her roots, and her acceptance of her identity and the imperfect love of her family mark her transformation as a character. It would be too much to gift her character with a happy ending—rather, she is now open to the possibility of happiness, as her chance encounter with a man while she is dressed as a meerkat promises. 

Compared to his younger, free-spirited sister, Byron Bennett is a straightlaced, forward-looking young professional. A Black man in a field dominated by whites, Byron has grown up minding his business. He has completed his stellar education, earned prestigious grants, and worked his way through a series of accomplished appointments, publishing in the right journals and attending the right conferences. As an oceanographer and, thanks to his charismatic smile and his presence on social media, one of the rising stars in the field, Byron Bennett has ambitions to do nothing less than map the ocean’s floor, despite the obvious: The pull of currents, the sheer depths of the ocean, and the constant change in the earth’s dynamics mean such a map will always be doomed to be ironic. Before the death of his mother drops him into a world that does not entirely make sense—that cannot entirely be mapped—Byron has faith in the reward of resolution, the logic of understanding. At 40, he is self-sustaining, self-justifying, and self-generating. That is his problem.

His breakup with the long-suffering Lynette begins his evolution into a greater awareness, specifically his acceptance of uncertainty and his embrace of others. He is, Lynette tells him on her way out the door, “too full of himself” (30). Finding out how little he knows about his mother (or, to put it in terms he sees, how his mother so deliberately fed him incorrect data) and then the sudden reality of a half-sister upends his comfortable, insulated perceptions. Turns out you cannot entirely, reliably map the bottom of the ocean.

In the course of his reunion with Benny, whose messy, contradictory, and entirely unpredictable and illogical behavior he has long dismissed as a distraction, static within an otherwise organized energy field, Byron comes to see the logic of contradiction, the need for experimentation rather than observation, and ultimately the need for a system to factor in its own limits. He must make his peace with what he sees initially as his mother’s lifelong deception. It is when he veers off script during one of his classroom presentations, evoking his mother’s love of engaging the ocean as a swimmer rather than measuring it as a scientist, Byron begins his pivot. Ride the wave, he tells the spellbound students. At the end of the novel, Byron heads to the ocean with his longboard on a morning when the local weather station cautions against surfing. Out he goes, without a helmet, just Byron and the unpredictable energy of the ocean. As he rises to the curl of the first wave, “Byron slips into a long, still moment in his head that whatever else his mother was in her lifetime, no matter her name or address, she has always been part of his world, and always will be” (369). Even as Benny opens herself up to others, Byron the scientist embraces the fetching reality of mystery.