he sea is no mere spectator in Charmaine Wilkerson’s Black Cake. It has not been attributed any human virtues by the author but is instead a formidable and paradoxical creature, transmogrified by memory and a hunger that laps incessantly at the lives that it hems in. The revered St Lucian poet Sir Derek Walcott aptly said, “The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it.” This awe can be seen percolating through the pages of Black Cake from the very beginning.

Other than the sea, the prime character of the book is the plucky Eleanor Bennett. The book opens in the present and the lives of her children - son Byron and daughter Benny - who reunite on the eve of her funeral. Estranged for years, they are surprised to learn that they have inherited a traditional Caribbean black cake and recordings of Eleanor recounting the many secrets of her life. These are secrets that will upend everything that the Bennett siblings have held sacrosanct. These are also secrets which Eleanor hopes will reunite the mistrustful siblings. Eleanor’s voice on audio unnerves Byron and “splits him down the middle.” She says, “Please forgive me for not telling you any of this before. Things were different when I was your age. Things were different for women, especially if you were from the islands.” From that moment on, Wilkerson plunges us into Eleanor’s past with unrelenting haste. We are furiously pulled into the tempestuous events of Eleanor’s youth and to her earliest moments, where she began life with the name; Covey.

Covey, born to Lin and Mathilde, grows up with the “radio dial turned up to calypso and rockabilly” in the kitchen from where her mother runs her successful cake business. Her earliest memories are of her mother dancing with a batter-covered spatula in the air, bobbing her head to joyful Jamaican music. She recalls how her mother would “pull her into a kind of shuffle, giving off a smell of granulated sugar and butter and hair pomade as the two of them spun into the dining room and towards the living room.” The thrilling laughter, delectable black cakes laced with rum and fruit, and magnetising music that she associates with her mother, remain treasured motifs in Covey’s unconscious. The latter will soon abandon her and her father.

Mathilde’s abandonment of her family proves a devastating turning point for them. Her husband is utterly distraught and turns to drink. Covey is rendered sleepless, waking up “in the middle of the night, sniffing at the air for the scent of roses and salt,” yearning for her mother, who was always fragrant with rose perfume. Though Black Cake pivots around the destruction that familial abandonment wreaks, it is also a novel about the astonishing and curative powers of friendship. Bunny, whom Covey meets at the swim club as a fifteen-year-old, makes her no longer feel like an only child. She feels as though she has “found a sister on land and on water.” They take to the water like fish. Wilkerson writes that if “Covey moved like a dolphin, then Bunny was like one of those giant turtles you heard about that were capable of crossing the world without losing their way.” Covey and Bunny are also described alternately as swimmers who are like “lightning” or “conquerors” by family and friends. As they turn sixteen and turn into “young ladies”, people start warning them “to have more respect for the sea” and what it could do. That they ought to stop courting danger by going out into the bay.” There is a pricking sense of foreboding in these lines, foreshadowing a crisis that will culminate in Covey fleeing from the island as a runaway bride. The incident that triggers her escape haunts her for decades.

Later in the book, we find Covey in Britain. Achingly alone and a young nursing student, she forms another friendship that enriches her life. This new friend is an aspiring geologist and orphan, Etta. Etta is from the same island as Covey but has grown up sequestered at a convent. Etta extols the ocean in the same kind of venerating spirit as Covey. This is the binding agent that cements their affection for each other. The black cake is another adhering substance as we see how on Etta’s birthday, Coventina and other girls present her with the delicacy, having been “soaking the fruits and setting aside the eggs just for her” and how the black cake signifies that “Elly was still motherless, still fatherless, but not alone.”

The rich fruit-laced black cake is also the last memento that Covey leaves her son and daughter, Benny. In a touching moment of grief, “Benny stands there in front of the refrigerator, letting the cool air fall on her toes, and thinks of the last cake her mother ever baked. She knows it’s sitting in the freezer but she can’t bear to look in there right now. Instead, she leans her forehead against the upper door of the fridge. “This is your heritage,” her mother used to say when they were making black cake, and Benny thought she knew what her mother meant. But she sees now that she didn’t know half of it. The black cake of Wilkerson’s book is no modest cake, it is the sweetest of anchors, the most meaningful of totems, a viscid metaphor for country and heritage that moors the rippling narratives of the book together.

It is, however, the wisdom of the sea vis a vis the act of surfing that Covey impressed upon her oceanologist son, Byron. “What you need to do, Byron, is to know who you are, and where you are, at all times. This is about you, finding and keeping your centre. This is how you take on a wave. Then you might find that you need to practice more, or there’s a storm swell coming in, or the wave is simply too much for you. You might even decide that you’re just not cut out for the surfing and that’s all right, too. But you cannot know which of these is true unless you go out there with your head in the right place.” This was true of surfing and it was true of life, his ma said.

For Eleanor Bennett, the power of one’s heritage is that it fortifies you for perpetuity. It can even keep you steady above the roiling swell of the waves if you play it right.

All in all, Black Cake is a dense book, juggling an omniscient narrator with first-person narratives, the present and the past and heaps of fiery, dramatic montages. It is a fine introduction to the literature of the Caribbean for any reader, for it functions as a cultural anthology of the islands - complete with a playlist in its end pages – which includes the track Take her to Jamaica by Lord Messam. There is also a recipe for the black cake, which one learns is not a slapdash cake, for one must soak raisins, prunes and currants in dark rum for at least four months prior to baking. The making of black cake is then an act of deliberate love. One feels that the life of Eleanor Bennett, as described by Wilkerson, is also an effort to love life, making it and re-making it anew, folding in secrets and tribulations, yet topping it off each time with incredible, irradiant hope.

Black Cake

Author: Charmaine Wilkerson

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2023

Pages: 432, Hardback

Price: Rs 3,295

The reviewer is a senior contributing editor at The Aleph Review and a columnist at Libas Now