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.
Pages 260-320Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 260-320 Summary
Shortly after Eleanor Bennett is told she will begin chemotherapy to arrest her cancer, she is surfing the web when she happens to see a pop-up ad for chayote, a Caribbean vegetable, a kind of squash with a bumpy, tough skin. The ad makes Eleanor immediately think back to her childhood, when the vegetable was used in family recipes. She absently clicks on the image and watches a short video by an apparently famous London food expert all about the uses of the vegetable. It takes only a moment for Eleanor to realize this food expert, identified as Marble Martin, is none other than the daughter she gave up for adoption nearly 50 years earlier. She is certain, and she realizes in that anguished moment how much a mother “could love a child taken away from her” (284). Using the resources of the Internet, Eleanor secures Marble’s phone number, but though she gathers the courage to make the call, she cannot bring herself to say anything when she hears her long-lost daughter say “Hello.”
The focus turns briefly to Marble Martin’s epiphany as a teenager when she is first developing into womanhood that she is physically strikingly different from her very white parents—she is taller, her body curves are fuller, her hair is more tangled, her nose is noticeably squashed, and her skin color is darker. It occurs to her that perhaps something is not right about her sense of her identity.
After Eleanor’s death, her lawyer, Charles Mitch, sends a text message to Marble Martin as per Eleanor’s instructions. Marble is in Italy researching a new book project on the complex history of sugar. When Marble reads the text message urgently requesting a meeting about the estate of someone named Eleanor Bennett, she knows in her heart what it is about. She flies home to London to be with her parents when she takes the call from the attorney. When she arrives at her parents’ home, her mother sees in the face of the child she raised as her own that the time she dreaded has arrived. Within days, Marble heads to Los Angeles to meet the brother and sister she never knew she had. Her emotions are mixed: resentment about the time she was denied with her biological mother; anger over the tangle of lies her now-adoptive parents let her believe; and hurt over being a child her own mother could do without.
At the airport in LA, Benny and Byron wait nervously to meet their half-sister. In the time since their mother’s memorial service, they have both reflected on the revelations of their mother’s recording. Byron is uncertain who he is and what his family is. For her part, Benny considers her identities—Californian, West Indian, American—and wishes now that she had known of her mother’s past. That would have made it easier to share with her mother the pain of her own emotional life. Indeed, the night before the memorial service, Benny is moved by the revelations of their mother’s recording to share with her brother what she never shared with anyone: the truth of her stormy relationship years earlier in Arizona with Steve, who, when he found out about Benny’s affair with Joanie, beat her to the point that she required hospitalization. Byron knew nothing of that—and in a moment of unanticipated emotion, the estranged brother and sister embrace. Later that night, Benny, unable to sleep, finds her mother’s recipe for black cake as she rummages through the junk drawer in her mother’s kitchen. Benny is perplexed. The recipe lists the ingredients but no measurements to guide baking the cake.
Byron gets a phone call from his ex-girlfriend, Lynette. She is incensed over an ugly confrontation between her nephew and the local police in which her nephew was harassed because of racial profiling. When Byron watches news accounts of the protests about Lynette’s nephew, he is shocked to see his ex-girlfriend is noticeably pregnant. Byron calls her, but she coolly tells him to relax: The baby will be hers, and she expected nothing from him. Byron is floored: “Why is she treating him this way? The baby is hers? More than his?” (303).
After the lawyer reveals to Byron and Benny the name of their half-sister, Byron uses the Internet to look up his British sister but stops, wanting to meet her first. At the airport, both brother and sister are nervous. As they wait, Benny casually sketches a drawing of a fancy cake using the bold colors of her Caribbean heritage; a woman waiting for a plane praises the sketch and asks Benny about her interest in art. The woman even gives Benny her business card, which identifies her as the director of an art department for a marketing company, and tells Benny to give her a call.
The initial meeting of Eleanor’s children is predictably awkward at first, but after the first night at Eleanor’s home, Byron hopes the new siblings can find their way to a family dynamic. Benny and Marble even talk about their mother’s black cake recipe and maybe trying to bake one together. The next morning Byron and Benny finds a note from Marble saying she needs some time to process all that she has learned and is returning to London. It appears the new family is already over.
Pages 260-320 Analysis
Leading up to the closing in which Eleanor’s family at last finds its way to each other and in turn to the blessing of family, however complicated, these chapters introduce critical questions about the relationship between an individual and their family, and how to define identity within the context of the family. It is for Eleanor an act not only of reclamation, the opportunity in the closing weeks of her life to be Covey again, but, more to the point, to share with her two grown children the redemptive possibility of honesty, the reward of engaging with life, and ultimately the sheer joy of tapping into the stability and communion of a family, not the pretend family that Eleanor sustained across 40 years but rather real family, imperfect and scattered: “I have lived a life of happiness,” Eleanor shares with Benny and Byron on her recording. “And now I get to share it with you” (265).
The emergence of Marble Martin and Byron’s awareness of Lynette’s pregnancy are the emotional centers of these chapters. The story of Marble Martin is a story of an identity crisis. Adopted by a respectable white British couple and raised as their child, Marble notices in her adolescence how different she is from her parents and begins what will become a decade-long effort to define her identity. Her interest in food, which becomes her profession and her passion, not only reflects her connection to a biological mother who, at this point, she still does not know about, but also points her to a bold reading of identity itself. The food she makes the focus of her professional work reflects the idea of food being in constant motion, representing a place and then fusing with foods that represent other places and how ultimately such a movement creates the magic of baking and cooking.
Against the unfolding story of Marble, Benny has an important epiphany that her mother’s recipe for black cake is only a list of ingredients. There are no measurements given to guide the baking. Because, as she listens to her mother’s recording, Benny begins to see the remarkable complexity of her own identity, the metaphor of the black cake is clear to her: “Benny finds herself wondering more specifically about the generations that came before her, the arrivals from distant regions, the lives they lived, the different cultural influences” (272). Benny mirrors Marble’s investigations into how a recipe brings together cultures—no recipe is a recipe of a single place. In this moment, Benny resolves to hang on to every fragment, every part of her identity, to never lose her complexity as her mother did; “over time, Eleanor Bennett had given up parts of herself until most of who she had been was gone” (273). When it comes to identity, Benny sees, there are no metrics. At this point, Benny wishes she could talk to her mother because now she realizes that her mother would have understood her own complex emotional life better than Benny ever realized she did.
Even as Benny begins her emotional evolution into the redemptive power of others and the need to embrace rather than retreat from complexity, her brother remains too cautious, too cerebral, too resistant to the idea of surrendering to the chaos of confusion: “Byron doesn’t know any more if his parents gave him a gift or did him a disservice to make him think all these years that he was someone special” (278). The family he believed he understood, the relationships upon which he constructed his identity, and the perception of himself generated and sustained by parents he thought he knew have all been upended. His own family is now an ocean bottom that resists being mapped, much like an ecosystem with poor resource management, which he fears the Earth is becoming. Revelations confuse rather than engage Byron. As his free-spirited sister discovers the magic, wonder, and energy of these revelations, Byron tells himself his career, his scientific work, and his relationship with the Earth and its oceans should have prepared him better for the revelations of his mother’s recording: “After all, the Earth and its oceans were in a constant state of agitation” (279).
The emergence of Lynette’s pregnancy will prove to be instrumental in Byron realigning his perceptions of himself, his family, and his identity. The discovery of his pending fatherhood is anything but traditional. Initially Lynette, certain of Byron’s stubborn egotism and his carefully maintained system of moats around his heart, assures Byron the information about the pregnancy is a simple factoid that he needs to know, appended to a longer phone conversation about other things. It’s my baby, she says, you do not have to worry. Byron’s immediate reaction—what do you mean, your baby?—is telling and positions him as character ready to change: “How he realizes he’s been getting it wrong for years, not quite knowing how to be there for the people he loves” (304). The Byron first introduced in the research facility, in the classroom presentations, in the lawyer’s office looking askance at his misfit sister, that Byron would never have thought that the time had come for him to change. That evolution will be directed by a half-sister he has not even met yet.
