![]() ![]() “We had to be perfect to make up for the fact that our family is built on a colossal lie,” Benny laments.īlack Cake is told from multiple perspectives, darting between Eleanor’s younger years in the sixties, Byron and Benny’s upbringing, and the siblings’ lives in the present day. ![]() The siblings have not spoken in eight years, and the recording that their mother leaves them challenges everything that they knew about Eleanor and how she raised them. ![]() Charmaine Wilkerson conjures similar scenes in her debut novel Black Cake, in which a deceased Caribbean woman named Eleanor Bennett leaves a black cake and a lengthy audio recording filled with secrets for her adult children, Byron and Benny.īyron is a successful oceanologist in California who wants to be the perfect immigrant son, a “shining example of the American dream.” His younger sister, Benny, is a wayward queer artist living in New York City who feels estranged from her family. This was serious business, an operation that covered my grandma’s living room and kitchen with vat-sized mixing bowls and various ingredients in order to make cakes for family and church members. Last Christmas, I helped my grandmother make black cake for the first time. ![]()
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