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 94-189Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 94-189 Summary
The story of Coventina dominates these chapters. We return to spring 1965. Covey is 17. Her father, unbeknown to her, is deeply in debt to Little Man Henry, the local loan shark, a repulsive little man more than 20 years older than Covey. When Little Man starts hanging around the Lyncook home, Lin tells his daughter he is there to court her, an idea repellant to Covey. Do this for me, the father pleads. Little Man’s awkward courtship of Covey, made more sinister when Little Man makes vaguely threatening comments about Gibbs, moves very quickly to a marriage proposal, which Covey feels obligated to go along with. Gibbs for his part is heading off to London to begin his law studies and begs Covey to go with him.
The day of the wedding, Covey moves about the ceremony in a kind of haze, uncertain and uneasy. At the reception, in a stunning moment, her new husband collapses, “gagging and stumbling” (122). In the confusion, Covey disappears. When Little Man dies on the way to the hospital, rumors fly that Covey poisoned the reception’s splendid black cake. Search parties quickly focus on the island’s coast—they are certain Covey would try to swim to safety somewhere on the island—but no one finds any evidence of the runaway bride. Covey indeed heads for the ocean and swims all the way to the tiny inlet where she and Gibbs first met. With the help of Bunny, Covey secures safe exit off the island, and she heads to London and a position as a nanny in a family that Bunny knows.
There, she is out of place, an island girl surrounded by a culture and a people she does not know. Covey struggles for nearly two years to establish an identity. She calls herself Covey Brown, taking her last name from her mother. Bunny secured her work as a nanny for a London family, and she lives in a boarding house with other island girls. Every so often she strolls along the streets by the university where Gibbs studies, hoping to see him. She dares not look for him, fearing the long reach of Little Man’s crime syndicate. It is better if everyone assumes she is dead. She decides she needs a livelihood and signs into the neighborhood hospital’s associate degree program in nursing.
The narration now shifts to the story of another Caribbean island girl living in London named Eleanor Douglas. As a child back on the islands, Eleanor, her mother dead and her father abandoning her to an orphanage, finds comfort in the shells and rocks she finds on the beach. Early on, she is fascinated by geology and the study of the ages of rocks: “She knew she was part of the world forever and always would be, and had nothing to fear, nothing at all…everything and everyone was connected” (147). She dreams of studying geology in distant London. A scholarship program in nursing, however, gives her the opportunity she needs. England needs nurses. She decides she will apply herself to a nursing license, and by showing her diligence and commitment to science, she will be able to gain admission to study geology.
While working at the teaching hospital, she meets Covey. They get along right away. Soon Elly shares her frustrations with Covey—no matter how much education they earn, the two of them, because they are island girls, will never have equal opportunity for career-type jobs. They decide to get a fresh start, a new life: They will head to Edinburgh. Elly lines up a secretarial job in a shipping office and promises Covey she will get her work. The two head up to Scotland. The express train, however, crashes on the way. Elly is killed instantly.
In the chaos after the accident, Covey is taken to a hospital, where she is admitted with Eleanor’s purse and papers, which were found near her. Because the two friends were roughly the same age and build and both were from the islands, the hospital processes Covey as Eleanor Douglas. At first, Covey is confused, but then she reasons here is her chance at a fresh start away from the fear over Little Man’s long reach. Elly had no family or friends. Covey takes the clerical job and begins her life anew. She settles into her new role. Her supervisor continually praises her work until one night, when the two are alone in the office, he sexually assaults Covey.
Covey is stunned and shaken, uncertain what to do. It is 1970, and women in her position have no voice. The supervisor pretends nothing happened, but Covey decides she will return to London. She stays at a hostel for unwed pregnant women, and when the time comes, she reluctantly signs away her baby, a daughter she names Mathilda after her own mother. Even as Covey secures a modest secretarial job and takes up residence in a boarding house, she promises herself someday to find her daughter.
More than a year later, she happens to encounter Gibbs on the street. Gibbs at first believes seeing Covey, whom he has been told was killed in the train crash, “was just another one of his daydreams” (187). The reunion is at once tender and passionate. Gibbs tells Covey he has started an entirely new life, shortening his name and going by his middle name—he is now Bert Bennett.
Fast forward to 2018. Benny and Byron Bennett try to take in what their mother tells them through her recording. They have learned in a single day that their mother was not who said she was—that she was really somebody named Coventina Lyncook. Moved by his mother’s profuse and teary apologies on the recording, Byron remembers the last visit with his mother: Given his mother’s island background and her love of swimming, he took her to one of those inspirational, motivational conferences to see one Etta Pringle, a celebrity athlete, a champion long-distance swimmer from the islands now well past 60 and still swimming. It was quite an emotional moment for her mother.
Pages 94-189 Analysis
In focusing now on the backstory of Coventina Lyncook, the novel appears to abandon entirely the opening story of two grown children in Southern California who come together after their mother’s death and discover they have a half-sister. That story, tantalizing in its premise, seems all but forgotten as the novel navigates through the messy courtship of Coventina with an island crime boss and the vague insinuations that her own father has negotiated his daughter in payment of the debts he accrued through a gambling addiction. Even before the confused Benny and Byron begin to understand that the narrative unfolding on their mother’s recording is, in fact, the story of their mother’s life, the two apparently separate plots are in fact counterpointed. They work together to reveal the novel’s larger theme: the need to engage the unpredictable, the unexpected with an open heart and a resilient spirit.
Covey’s adolescence and her love of open-ocean swimming introduce the novel’s metaphor for that willingness to engage life with courage and directness. Covey is a long-distance open-ocean swimmer, self-taught, and learning the diligence and courage that open-ocean swimming requires. She immerses herself (literally) as she practices daily in an environment where, as the hurricane demonstrates, risk is real and unpredictable. When Covey finally figures out that her father intends to marry her off to a repulsive man twice her age, Covey is tested to apply the lessons of her open-ocean swimming regimen. Not surprisingly (she is young and in love), she cannot find that heroic sense of emotional resilience: “From below that [feeling] came something that felt like thunder in the distance, like a howling wind coming off the sea, like a wild animal approaching” (116). As she runs through the town that night in the stormy rain, she feels more like an animal, trapped and desperate, unable to find the words for her anger and her sorrow, finding instead only groans and howls.
It is her friend Bunny, who pines for her like an unrequited lover and whose love for her Covey does not even suspect, who frees Covey. The novel will not reveal until the last pages the most likely scenario for Little Man’s death, but his unexpected death at the reception frees Covey to begin what will be an adventurous life, certainly, but a life in which she will drift away from herself and become this other persona, Eleanor Douglas. Benny suspects as much as she listens to her mother’s recording: “Surely her mother must have felt, sometimes, that her past, and the effort it was taking to conceal it, had been too much to bear” (164).
The circumstances of the high-speed express train accident underscore the novel’s perception of the unpredictability of life, the need to be ready but not prepared for the surprises life will inevitably bring. On the way to Edinburgh, convinced the new life with her new best friend will remedy her problematic past, Covey is confident that escaping her past through flight is a sound strategy: “Covey told herself that it was the way to survive, to keep putting distance between her and her own life before” (156). When the train crash gives her the opportunity to switch identities entirely, Covey sees this as the way to finally be rid of her past: “A door had opened up,” she says on the recording, “and I walked through it” (165). For the second time, she admits, she died. The new identity promises her security and predictability—she settles all too easily into the identity of another “West Indian girl” (165). Identity, it seems, is interchangeable. No one missed Elly Douglas—her family abandoned her to an orphanage, and she had no family and few records—so Covey simply became Elly Douglas: “The new Eleanor Douglas finally stopped looking over her shoulder wherever she went, afraid of being recognized by someone” (177).
The tactic, however, recalls both Byron and Benny from the opening chapters. The story of how Covey Lyncook dies and becomes first Covey Brown and then Eleanor Bennett is one of an elaborate strategy of denial. In dramatically becoming someone else entirely, twice, Covey pursues her own iteration of the strategy of retreat and escape. It does not work. Just as she settles into a comfortable predictability as someone named Eleanor Douglas, life upends her tidy world. The rape is never recounted in the narrative, as if even years later that horrific violation, that crushing sense of helplessness, the deep scar of victimhood still cannot be admitted in language, having “stunned Eleanor into silence” (177). Eleanor has no clue the supervisor who is so lavish in his praise of her as she masters the routine of the shipping company is a cunning and deliberate predator, all the while moving in for the assault. She has no clue until “he put his hands there” (177). The sexual assault and the subsequent pregnancy evidence how no life can be planned, no one can live within expectations of what will happen, and such naïve confidence is living in a dangerously self-sustaining fantasy. Eleanor falls silent. Her life from the moment of that violation is defined by what she does not, will not, or cannot say. That is a silence that Eleanor will maintain until the approach of her own death compels at last her decision to speak.
