“The cake symbolizes the history of this family, in which the children, who are now grown, really don’t know the half of what their parents went through. And then there are the stories that are not told, or concealed, or not fully revealed,” she says. “It’s about the idea that there’s the story you tell about your life, about your family history, about your culture.
Wilkerson didn’t want readers to presume that this is simply a culinary tale.
I am not the neatest person in the world, but I have always kept that recipe in a place where I keep precious things.”ĭon’t expect to find the recipe within the pages of this novel, however. “I don’t think I’d looked at it for years,” Wilkerson recalls, “but I knew exactly where to find it. Later, after Wilkerson’s mother died, a younger relative asked her for a copy. Long ago, Wilkerson’s mother mailed her a copy of her recipe, filled with comments and instructions. transformed, over time, by tropical ingredients.” This is your heritage.” Wilkerson, who grew up in Jamaica and New York and now lives in Rome, explains during a video call that the Caribbean fruitcake known as black cake has long been a family favorite, a descendant of “the good old-fashioned English plum pudding. When Benny was growing up, her mother taught her to make the special titular black cake, saying, “This is island food. “I have always kept that recipe in a place where I keep precious things.” “Please forgive me for not telling you any of this before,” she says. The novel begins with a short, enigmatic prologue set in 1965, then jumps ahead to 2018, when an attorney summons Byron Bennett and his estranged sister, Benny, to listen to a lengthy recording made by their late mother, Eleanor, who divulges startling secrets about her life. Its rich plot-which includes a suspected murder-unfolds at an enthralling pace. Wilkerson’s exquisitely written novel is a globe-trotting, multigenerational family saga set in the Caribbean, California, London, Scotland and Rome.
“It just sort of walked into the story.”Īnd what a remarkable story it is. “I never intended to write a story with a cake in it,” says Charmaine Wilkerson, former broadcast journalist and, with Black Cake, first-time novelist.
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