Black Cake

In these middle chapters, by far the darkest in the novel, Eleanor attempts to commit suicide, overcome by a life she sees as one grand failure and one grand disappointment after another: “The false narrative that Eleanor had woven for the benefit of her loved ones had become a net that had trapped her” (200). Feeling alone and “no longer hopeful” (202), Eleanor heads to the ocean to stage her suicide. That she ends up in the hospital provides her life narrative its most dramatic pivot. Her decision to abandon hope, to surrender, leads in turn to her reunion first with Byron, who comes to stay with her concerned over her precarious mental health, which in turn leads to her reunion with Bunny and ultimately to her love affair with the adoring lawyer whom Eleanor seeks out and eventually share her secrets with because of Bunny’s sudden return. Everything, recalling young Elly’s fascination with geology, is connected, and one must trust the circuitous and often maddeningly frustrating logic of life’s unfolding narrative. The alternative is surrender to despair, and as Eleanor finds out here, despair can never be the last word.

Ride the wave, the catchphrase Byron uses to infuse his classroom presentation with unexpected energy, comes from the celebrity life of the woman—he has no way of knowing this—who was his mother closest, really only friend in her childhood. In that bumper sticker phrase, Byron appears to understand the challenge he is delivering as much to the kids in the schoolroom as to himself. However, he is not yet ready to embrace the obvious logic of that surfing axiom. He has not found the story about his mother’s young life; he has not met his half-sister; he does not know his ex-girlfriend is pregnant. For him, “ride the wave” is an intoxicating closer for his classroom speech. For Byron, at this point, his mother’s legacy of engaging the open ocean is more about being prudent and planning every step. His mother taught him “the value of strategic thinking, of calculated action” (212). He still sees the value of prudence and the necessity of thinking ahead—and he still disparages his kid sister, Benny, for having a “kind of reckless streak” (212).

The chapters juxtapose Byron’s stability and his careful sense of measured judgment against vignettes of Benny’s life in New York, specifically how she tries for years to find a way back to her family after the Thanksgiving blow-up over her revelation of her sexual identity. She takes the time apart from her family to evaluate her bad decisions and unforced emotional errors: “In trying to live with an open heart, Benny had set herself up to be perpetually mistrusted” (218). Her struggle to reach out to her mother with the package of photos of the black cake she makes reflects how much she wants the stability of her family. These chapters in turn reveal how Eleanor and Bert, for their part, struggle with how to reconcile with Benny, how often Eleanor phones and leaves cryptic messages, how many trips Bert makes to New York to make sure Benny is okay, wasting time, as Eleanor a few weeks from her death sees as “time that was never [hers] to squander” (222).

The family appears at an impasse that even Bert’s death does not resolve. It is only when Byron takes his mother to hear the motivational speaker Etta Pringle that the novel moves toward honesty and engagement and the possibility, at last, of redemption.

It is then that the novel introduces the famous food maven and media celebrity Marble Martin. Her argument is both simple and telling: In a world riven by politics, economic status, religion, and race, food brings us together. Much like Benny and Byron as they listen to their mother’s recording initially and wonder who Coventina Brown is, the reader wonders who Marble Martin is. Her bestseller is on how foods crossing ethnic boundaries and geopolitical lines come to create food that in its rich diversity becomes a socio-cultural statement: “The diaspora of food, just like the diaspora of people, has helped to shape many cultural traditions” (251). As Marble is interviewed about her concept of culinary culture, her argument illuminates Covey’s own family life, its admixture of ethnicities and cultures: “I write about food with a strong sense of place” (252). Inevitably Covey’s specialty, the island black cake with its spices from three different continents, brings nations together, fusing disparate elements of different culture “for better or worse” (269), and over time creates a satisfying whole. A Caribbean shopkeeper where Eleanor shops for her baking supplies rebukes the argument of Marble Martin (whose YouTube cooking show episodes the old woman watches) and summarizes Marble’s theory with disdain: “She say we wouldn’t have black cake without the Europeans dem coming over to this part of the world and bringing certain foods over here wid dem” (190). Exactly, the novel argues. Parts become a whole, for better or worse, and what can be said about exotic desserts can also be said about families.