Black Cake

“And what about a person’s life? How do you make a map of that? The borders people draw between themselves. The scars left along the ground of one’s heart.”

As Charles Mitch, the Bennett family attorney, a widower, and Eleanor’s last lover, listens to Byron outline his ambitious project to use robots to finally map the ocean’s bottom, he thinks of the human heart. As the tension within the Bennett family and within his own heart, devastated by Eleanor’s death, testifies, it would be great to chart the movements of the heart, but it is impossible.

“It was that she understood that one of the things that made you human was your willingness to deviate from the script. The problem was, scripts were like battles. You had to choose when to go with them, and when not to”

In responding to a desperate complaint expressed by one of the customers she calls as a telemarketer, Benny deviates from the prepared company script and consoles the woman by agreeing with her, a gesture for which she is summarily fired. The spontaneous and poorly considered decision to engage the caller as a person epitomizes Benny’s life up to her mother’s death: her thoughtless sympathy, her reckless compassion, and her willingness to engage with life spontaneously.

“Black cake was essentially a plum pudding handed down to Caribbeans by colonizers from a cold country. Why claim the recipes of the exploiters as your own?”

The black cake symbolizes bringing people together. As a fancy cake, the confectionary is saved for holiday gatherings or for community rituals such as weddings and birthdays. Eleanor’s plan—to make one last black cake and freeze it against such time as her three children would finally come together as a family—reveals a similar argument.