People like to think that, above all else, they know their family well.
In a world where a great many other things will disappoint, horrify or surprise, we can be assured, so we tell ourselves, that we know the ins and out of family members, for better or worse, especially when it comes to parents who are usually the closest ones to us.
After all, we have spent all that time with them – how on earth could they shock us in any way?
The luminously good Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson very quickly disabuses us of this notion, as estranged brother and sister Byron and Benny, coming together for the first time in eight years for their mother Eleanor’s funeral, discovers a good many secrets about the woman they thought they knew better than anybody.
In a startling will reading that goes far beyond the usual allocation of assets, the siblings discover that their mother fled her Caribbean island home many decades before under suspicion of murder, a revelation that among a mass of other stunning surprises, completely upends who they thought their parents were, what the basis of their family was and the real nature of their current issues with each other.
What is so wonderful about Black Cake is that it doesn’t make this reveal, and the others that follow, some Joan Collins-heavy piece of Dynasty-like turgid melodrama; rather what we get is a thoughtfully meditative story of two people, and a key number of others who enter the picture in surprisingly meaningful ways, who discover, secret by secret that you don’t know always family as well as you think and that perhaps, shock aside, that’s not such a bad thing.
“From then on, with each move, first back home to California, then Italy, then Arizona, Benny yearned for one thing more than any other, a life that felt emotionally unremarkable. A life that felt safe.” (P. 82)
Certainly, Eleanor thinks that her deathbed confessions will ultimately lead a healing of the rift between the siblings, with a fervent wish expressed that the family’s treasured black cake, the only part of her family heritage that Byron and Benny’s mother had left to her name, be shared among her children “when the time is right”.
It’s a heartwarmingly lovely thought but at first, it looks about as likely as the brother and sister embracing without rancour or lingering sense of betrayal.
Black Cake makes it poignantly clear though that these two once-close people – Byron is senior by nine years and was always protective of his little sister until she pulled away from the family on one argumentative Thanksgiving – are deep down searching for each other but they doing so based on knowledge of who they were as kids, and who they thought they were in relation to their parents.
When that is effectively blown to smithereens, though again it’s done in an movingly nuanced way that resonates with its quietly impactful revelations, the two must work out what this means for them and how they can relate as adults now everything they know has been revealed to be, if not a lie, then not precisely, or in some cases, remotely the truth.
The humanity and heart that sits at the centre of Black Cake and which suffuses every last page, whether it is revealing unknown family history or exploring the state of Byron and Benny’s relationship before the funeral and well beyond, is palpable, giving the novel a real sense of thoughtful connection even when it is tenuous at best.
It emerges again and again that the siblings, and indeed everyone in the family including mum Eleanor and dad Bert, are all longing for connection, just as we all are.
It may not manifest itself in close and enduring bonds, and in the case of Benny, who has long sought to work out who she is – artist? cook? loving daughter or not? – it has left to a profound dislocation of connection, but beneath all the brokenness and loss, there is a deep need for family and home trying to break through, a dynamic that began with Eleanor and a lifelong quest for a sense of security and safe familial space, and has continued through her children.
Both accidentally rebellious Benny – she never sets out to be the black sheep of the family but somehow, in her search for her own truth and the havoc that plays with her relationships with Byron and her parents that is precisely what happens – and dutifully successful Byron who’s happy with his lot but who wonders at what cost it has come, simply want to feel as if they belong, authentically and for the duration.
“If this were only about her, at this age, Eleanor would be willing to shed a lifetime of pretense … But the fact was when you lived a life, under any name, that life became entwined with others. You left a trail of potential consequences. You were never just you, and you owed it to people you cared about to remember that.
Because the people you loved were part of your identity, too. Perhaps the biggest part. (P. 242)
Eleanor, as any good mother she should, and she is at heart a very caring and loving mother whatever her necessity-driven missteps, knows this of course and her entire will reading is in service to the goal of reuniting her children, and then her wider family of blood and friendship, many of whom have been spun out into the vast periphery of the past but whom Eleanor, in one final post-deathbed act seeks to have brought resolutely and resoundingly into the present.
Writing with poetic assurance and prevailing sense of empathy and understanding, Wilkerson never once succumbs to any sense of hysteria or melodrama; Black Cake is at every turn a carefully-executed and beautifully thoughtful meditation on what it is to find out who your parents, and thus the family they have created, really are.
While there are revelations aplenty, and secrets littered on the ground like confetti, the novel never once becomes anything else that a rumination on what people will do to create a safe place of love and belonging when that has been so long denied to them.
Touching on the racial politics of being Black people in an often cruelly white America, Black Cake goes long and hard, in vibrantly affecting ways, to celebrate the power and inclusiveness of family, and how, initial shock and surprise aside, the truth can actually, and eventually, set you free.
In the brilliantly immersive world of Black Cake that adage is not trite religious or inspirational bumper sticker but rather a powerful and real thing that shows how knowing who you, and your family really are, is less a confronting thing, though it is without a doubt very much that in the first instance, and more a tool of healing, understanding, belonging and familial renewal, the kind that persists long after a hug or a dinner and which, freed of the shackles of the past and the deception that breeds, can truly reinvent your world in ways that, in all the ways that matter, set you loose from the prison of your own making.