51 pages • 1 hour read
Charmaine WilkersonBlack Cake
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Virtue of Endurance
You cannot win, Byron is fond of telling his school-aged audiences looking to him for motivation and inspiration, if you don’t play. Covey is first introduced as a long-distance open-ocean swimmer. As a teenager, she drew strength and courage from challenging, long, and empty stretches of the sea around her Caribbean island, cutting over powerful waves and knifing through riptides. Her friend Bunny will find her identity later in life as a champion long-distance open-ocean swimmer, celebrated for tackling some of the most treacherous and lengthiest stretches of water on four different continents.
The novel parallels the strength, courage, independence, and tenacity open-ocean swimming requires to the virtue of endurance that emerges in the novel’s most heroic characters. Despair is not in the DNA of Covey or her family. When times are most pressing and the horizon most distant—when Lin watches helplessly as his shop burns to the ground; when Benny understands she will not stay in school because of her sexual orientation; when Covey, in the days following the train accident, comes to understand the implications of her “death”; when later Covey must sign over her daughter for adoption; when Byron understands his race will forever prevent him from career success in the oceanographic institute he loves—when, in short, surrender would be the simplest and most logical choice, the characters tap into hope.
When Covey, now Eleanor, at the age of 60 and facing her most difficult emotional moment—her husband dead for five years, estranged from her daughter, abandoning hope of ever finding her long-lost daughter—tries to die by forcing her surfboard into a dangerous wave, a lifeguard rescues her and compels her to recommit to the code that had given her life its purpose and its meaning: “Eleanor had always taken pride in being a survivor. She’s been raised to be strong. She’s been strong enough to run, strong enough to give up her past, strong enough to raise her head and always, always, move forward” (202). Byron does not for a moment buy the story that it was an accident. He realizes the importance then of survival, of hope. The next time he makes his presentation for schoolkids about the importance of studying the oceans, he closes by writing in huge letters on the chalkboard words that could serve as the theme of the novel: “RIDE THE WAVE” (211).
The Reward of Family
At the complex center of this ambitious novel with its crosshatch of interrelated plotlines and its dozens of named characters, each given a detailed backstory, is the saga of a single family. All the storylines across four decades and three continents trace to Eleanor and Bert Bennett, or more accurately the island girl Covey Brown and her lifeguard boyfriend, Gibbs. For all the heartache, lacerating emotional traumas, and deliberate acts of emotional terrorism, the two plot points most tragic are events that, in effect, shatter the family bond: when a young and impoverished Covey, living on her own in London, carrying the child born from her rape, is maneuvered into placing her daughter into the foster care system; and when a careless and heated holiday exchange over Benny’s ongoing crisis of identity, specifically her abandoning her education and then the reality of her first serious relationship with a woman, allows the family to forget for a moment what a family does: A family supports. Eleanor realizes this years later when after too long a period of time has lapsed without her daughter in her life, she records an apology to Benny:
I have lived long enough to see that my life has been determined not only by the meanness of others but also by the kindness of others, and their willingness to listen. And this is where your father and I failed you. You didn’t find enough reassurance of that, in our own home, to dare to stick around (285).
It is through the agency of Eleanor’s recording that she engineers, after her death, the restoration of her family. In the boat heading out to the ocean in the closing pages, for just a moment, three generations of the family come together.
The subplots each endorse the powerful pull of family. In the slow-motion reunion between Eleanor and the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption; in Byron’s difficult embrace of Lynette’s pregnancy; in Bunny and her significant other’s decision to raise the child Bunny had with her male lover before she commits at last to her identity as a lesbian; in Benny’s traumatic experience with Steve and how his abuse, physical and emotional, showed her the danger of a family without love or empathy or compassion; in Charles Mitch’s hesitant move toward the gravitational pull of the widowed Eleanor and his absolute certainty that when facing the diminishing returns of old age, family “gave direction” to what would otherwise be a terrifying spiraling into mortality—in short, in its complex of storylines, the novel celebrates the joys and sorrows, the aggravations and love, the agony and irony of the family unit.
The Complexity of Identity
When Covey wakes up after the train accident and finds herself being called Eleanor, she stares into one of the hospital’s hand mirrors and ask, “Then, who are you?” (117). It is easy to confuse characters in the novel. It is a giveaway in a novel in which the central character has four names, dies three times, and twice assumes an entirely new life. When does she stop being Coventina Lyncook and become Covey Brown and then aspiring nurse Eleanor Douglas and then Eleanor Bennett? In a novel in which characters routinely undergo traumatic identity changes and try out new names with alarming frequency, in which characters adopt professional name changes (Mathilda Martin, for instance, becomes food guru Marble Martin; and Bunny becomes Ella Pringle) or go by a variety of nicknames (all the underworld figures back in Covey’s youth), the novel explores the very nature of identity, the relationship between a name and a person’s existential being.
The novel draws on the unpredictable ways in which race and ethnicities come to influence, reshape, deform, even destroy identity. Is identity defined by the accumulated pressures of the past—acts heroic or cowardly, planned or spontaneous, grudges, resentments, terrors—or through the courageous engagement of the present? Can identity exist in two tenses—was and is—simultaneously? In the novel the examination of the implications of identity is further complicated by how richly each character’s life is informed by ethnic and cultural identities. Coventina grows up biracial, suspended between her identity as a Caribbean and her identity as an Asian. In an otherwise stellar career, Byron struggles with the quiet racism in his oceanographic institute. Covey’s own daughter Mathilda (later Marble Martin) is herself the product of a rape by a white Scotsman and is raised by a white British couple. In this confusion of cultural and ethnic identities as well as familial and personal identities, the novel draws on the symbol of the black cake, a delicious island confection with its rich profusion of sweet spices and fruits that come from multiple continents, a recipe that defies being written down because at its heart it has the same unpredictability of identity. Identity here is forever suspended between and among tenses, forever drawing its definition and its integrity from the fusion of strikingly different genetic pools and environmental influences.
The Corrosive Effects of Secrets
For nearly 50 years, Covey Lyncook lives something of a lie. Over time, she never tells her own children who she really is, where she came from, how she came to live in Southern California, and, perhaps harshest of all, how they have a half-sister somewhere in the world. In keeping those secrets, she has also ensured that her kids will grow up unable to piece together any notion of their identity because Covey has opted to hide so many critical pieces. The novel explores the moral difference between a lie and a secret. A lie is a desperate strategy of self-preservation, a selfish, deliberate action taken to avoid the threat of revelation. A secret is something different.
In listening to his mother’s recording, Byron, despite his education, age, and experience, undergoes a kind of painful coming-of-age moment. His initial reaction is telling (and hyper-dramatic): “Had Byron’s parents ever told the truth about anything?” (189). Benny is not quite so melodramatic or selfish. Her mother’s secrets, not lies, are revealed one by one on the recording: “Benny’s mother had continued to mourn a series of losses so great that not even Benny can begin to imagine. Her first family. Her own identity. Her first child” (188). Lies destroy; secrets create distance (and the novel uses the image of both Covey and Bunny as long-distance, open-ocean swimmers).
Unlike with lies, the emotional distance secrets create can be closed with honesty. Lies are absolute—that level of betrayal and directed deception shatters relationships and is that much more difficult to forgive, much less get over. Lies are intended to end things; secrets assume some tonic future when secrets can finally come out. Lies are absolute, an end to themselves; secrets are designed to be temporary, always expressed against the assumption (or fear) that someday, under some circumstances, the secret will come out. When they come to light, unlike lies, they have a context, something that Byron, as he comes to handle the implications of Lynette’s pregnancy is listening to his mother’s recording, will come to understand. Because secrets are designed to spare others rather than protect the self, secrets, once outed, do not lead to paranoia, distrust, resentment, or even anger (those are the emotional by-products of lies); rather, their revelation promises to lead to healthier relationships. Indeed, as Covey/Eleanor says in the opening moments of her recording, she records this message in the hope that in at last revealing her secrets, her children, sparring emotionally for no reason now for nearly eight years, will come together: “You can’t afford to lose each other” (9). In the end, the revelation of a secret heals; the exposure of a lie only wounds.
