An estranged brother and sister must set aside their differences to deal with their mother’s death and their puzzling inheritance: an audio recording, in which she tells the story of her hidden past, and her famous black cake to be shared ‘when the time is right’. Their journey of discovery takes them from the Caribbean to London to California, and changes everything they thought they knew about their family. An immersive and deeply satisfying family drama.
Prologue
Then
1965
“He should have known it would come to this.
He should have known the day that hak gwai wife of his ran away
from home. Should have known the day he saw his daughter swimming
in the bay as a storm bore down on her. Should have known
when his parents dragged him to this island and changed their
names. He stood at the water’s edge, now, watching the waves crash
white against the rocks, waiting for his daughter’s body to wash
ashore.
A policeman beckoned to him. The policeman was a girl. He’d
never seen one of those before. She was holding a fluff of white fabric,
his daughter’s wedding dress, smeared with black cake and lilac
icing. She must have dropped the cake on herself as she jumped up
from the table. He remembered a clattering of plates, the splintering
of glass on the tile floor, someone crying out. When he looked
toward his daughter, she was gone and her satin-covered shoes lay
strewn on the lawn outside like tiny capsized boats.
Part One
Now
2018
“She’s here.
Byron hears the elevator doors peel open. His first instinct is to
rush toward his sister and embrace her. But when Benny leans in
to hug him, Byron pushes her away, then turns to knock on the door
to the attorney’s office. He feels Benny put a hand on his arm. He
shakes it free. Benny stands there, her mouth open, but says nothing.
And what right does she have to say anything? Byron hasn’t seen
Benny in eight years. And, now, their ma is gone for good.
What does Benny expect? She took a family argument and turned
it into a cold war. Never mind all that talk about societal rejection
and discrimination and whatnot. It seems to Byron that whatever
kind of problem you have in this world, you can find someone to
show you understanding. And times are changing. There’s even been
a study in the news recently about people like Benny.
People like Benny.
The study says it can be a lonely road for people like her. But
she won’t be getting any sympathy from Byron, no. Benedetta Bennett
gave up that luxury years ago when she turned her back on
her family, even though she claims it was the other way around. At
least she showed up this time. Six years ago, Byron and his mother
sat in the church across from his father’s coffin up in L.A. County,
waiting for Benny to arrive, but no Benny. Later, Byron thought he
saw his sister skirting the burial grounds in the back of a car. She’d
be there any minute, he thought. But, still, no Benny. Only a text
from her later, saying I’m sorry. Then silence. For months at a time.
Then years.
“Their mother has left them a message, the lawyer says.”
As each year went by, he was less certain that Benny had been
there that day or that he’d ever had a sister to begin with.
That he’d ever had a chubby, squiggle-headed baby girl following
him around the house.
That she’d ever cheered him on at the national meets.
That he’d ever heard her voice sailing across the auditorium as he
closed his hand around his doctoral diploma.
That he’d ever not felt the way he does right now. Orphaned and
pissed as hell.
Benny
“Her mother’s attorney opens the door and Benny
looks past him, half expecting to see her ma sitting in the room. But
it’s only Benny and Byron now, and Byron won’t even look at her.
The lawyer is saying something about a message from their
mother but Benny can’t concentrate, she’s still looking at Byron, at
the bits of gray in his hair that didn’t use to be there. What’s with the
pushing, anyway? The man is forty-five years old, not ten. In all
these years, her big brother has never shoved her, never hit her, not
even when she was little and tended to pounce and bite like a puppy.
Benny’s first memory of Byron: They are sitting on the couch, she
is settled under her brother’s arm, and Byron is reciting adventure
stories to her from a book. His feet can already touch the floor.
Byron stops to fluff Benny’s hair with his fingers, to pull on her earlobes,
to pinch her nostrils shut, to tickle her until she is breathless
with laughter, until she is dying of happiness.
The Message
“Their mother has left them a message, the lawyer
says. The lawyer’s name is Mr Mitch. He’s talking to Byron and
Benny as though he’s known them all their lives, though Byron can
only recall meeting him one other time, when his ma needed help
getting around town after her accident last winter, the one his friend
Cable insisted wasn’t an accident. Byron walked his mother up to
Mr Mitch’s office, then went back outside to wait for her in the car.
He was sitting there watching some kids skateboard down the
broad, buff-toned sidewalks between one high-end chain store and
the next, when a police officer rapped on his side window.
This kind of thing had happened to Byron so often over the
course of his adult life that sometimes he forgot to be nervous. But
most times, whenever he was approached or pulled over by an officer,
he slid down into that space between one heartbeat and the next
where he could hear his blood crashing through his body, a waterfall
carrying centuries of history with it, threatening to wipe out the
ground on which he stood. His research, his books and social media
following, the speaking engagements, the scholarship he wanted to
fund, all of it, could be gone in a split second of misunderstanding.
“A grown man of any color, sitting alone in a car watching pre-adolescents skateboard up and down the sidewalk, could elicit a reasonable degree of suspicion.”
Only later, after the officer had opened the trunk of his patrol car
and come back with a copy of Byron’s latest book (Could he have an
autograph?), did it occur to Byron that a grown man of any color,
sitting alone in a car watching pre-adolescents skateboard up and
down the sidewalk, could elicit a reasonable degree of suspicion. All
right, he could see that, it wasn’t always about him being a black
man. Though, mostly, it was.
‘Let me just warn you,’ Mr Mitch is saying now. ‘About your
mother. You need to be prepared.’
Prepared?
Prepared for what? Their mother is already gone.
His ma.
He doesn’t see how anything after that is going to make much of
a difference.
B and B
“There’s an entire file box labeled Estate of Eleanor
Bennett. Mr Mitch pulls out a brown paper envelope with their
mother’s handwriting on it and puts it on the desk in front of Byron.
Benny shifts her seat closer to Byron’s and leans in to look. Byron
removes his hand but leaves the packet where Benny can see it. Their
ma has addressed the envelope to B and B, the moniker she liked to
use whenever she wrote or spoke to them together.
B-and-B notes were usually pinned to the fridge door with a magnet.
B and B, there’s some rice and peas on the stove. B and B, I hope
you left your sandy shoes at the door. B and B, I love my new earrings,
thank you!
Ma only called them Byron or Benny when she was speaking
with one sibling or the other, and she only called Benny Benedetta
when she was upset.
Benedetta, what about this report card? Benedetta, don’t talk to
your father that way. Benedetta, I need to talk to you.
Benedetta, please come home.
Their mother left a letter, Mr Mitch says, but most of their
mother’s last message is contained in an audio file that took her
more than eight hours, over four days, to record.
‘Go ahead,’ Mr Mitch says, nodding at the packet.
Byron cuts open the envelope and shakes out its contents, a USB
drive and a handwritten note. He reads the note out loud. It’s so typically
Ma.
B and B, there’s a small black cake in the freezer for you. Don’t
throw it out.
Black cake. Byron catches himself smiling. Ma and Dad used to
share a slice of cake every year to mark their anniversary. It wasn’t
the original wedding cake, they said, not anymore. Ma would make
a new one every five years or so, one layer only, and put it in the
freezer. Still, she insisted that any black cake, steeped as it was in
rum and port, could have lasted the full length of their marriage.
I want you to sit down together and share the cake when the time
is right. You’ll know when.
Benny covers her mouth with one hand.
Love, Ma.
Benny starts to cry.”
Extracted from Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson, out now.
