![]() It also reminds the reader how little she thinks she has given her son in the daily practice of raising him. Such a belief not only foregrounds that Eleanor, as a migrant, has been alienated from the very place whose traditions and culture she hopes to pass on to Byron. On the other hand, it’s devastating that a mother might think that all her child has to inherit from her is food. Even if it isn’t, what parent in their right mind would endanger their child for a not-yet-baked rum cake? Fruits can be replaced a son cannot. ![]() ![]() On the one hand, the jar may already be broken by the tremors. This is, at once, hilarious and poignant. It is all Eleanor feels she can bequeath her children. The container holds ingredients for the titular dessert. He thinks his mother could not possibly expect “her only son to risk his life by going back into their kitchen to pull a two-liter glass jar, sixty-eight ounces of ebony-colored slosh, out…while a seismic event was in process.” But she does. When they escape the building, his mother exclaims, “The fruits, Byron, the fruits!” Byron hesitates. Having long prepared for the big one, the type A marine scientist Byron grabs his emergency bag and the hand of his widowed mother, Eleanor. Late in Charmaine Wilkerson’s ravishing debut novel, Black Cake, an earthquake strikes California. ![]()
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