Black Cake(24)

“Give her some time,” Byron said to his parents. When Benny said something about the diaspora of food and the recipes that intrigued her, Byron picked up on this. He suggested Benny go back to college and do something related, like a major in anthropology. But Benny just shook her head no. Then off she went, and when she came back, she decided to study art. How the heck was Benny going to support herself, Byron wanted to know.

There was a time when Benny would have debated the idea with him, at least, but something had shifted in her, something had gone brittle. She only seemed like she was still his kid sister when she was in the kitchen with Ma.

His mother used to say she would make a black cake for Byron and Benny when each of them got married, but neither of them had. Ma’s cake was a work of art, Byron had to admit. That moist, loamy mouthful, the tang of spirits behind the nose. But Byron had never shared his parents’ emotional attachment to the recipe. Tradition, his ma used to say. But whose tradition, exactly? Black cake was essentially a plum pudding handed down to the Caribbeans by colonizers from a cold country. Why claim the recipes of the exploiters as your own?

Tradition? How about coconut gizzada? How about mango ice cream? How about jerk pork, rice and peas, Scotch bonnet peppers, coconut milk, yellow plantains, and all those flavors that Byron had come to enjoy, thanks to his mother’s cooking? Now, that was what he called island food. But no, these had never been enough for his ma. More than any other recipe, it was the black cake that brought that creamy tone to his mother’s voice. That shine to her eye.

When Dad died, Ma buried what was left of their anniversary black cake with him, but she still kept a jar of the fruits soaking in rum and port in the lower kitchen cupboard. There was always Christmas to think of. She used to wait to make black cake every winter with Benny, even after Benny had moved out to live on her own. But after Benny walked out on them that Thanksgiving Day, Ma never made the cake again. Or so Byron had thought.

Now he knows that his mother did make at least one other cake.





Distance





The pendulum has swung. After a few tense hours, Byron and Benny are now being extremely polite to each other, their earlier hostility doused by the strain of hearing their mother’s story.

“Do you know this guy?” Byron says to Benny, flicking his chopsticks toward the television screen. “Ma was really into him.” They are watching images of a Frenchman who’s been forced to abandon his swim across the Pacific due to bad weather.

“Yeah, I’ve read about him,” Benny says. “She was into all of that stuff.”

Benny and Mr. Mitch are nodding. They have ordered Thai takeout, having stopped listening to Ma’s recording after the umpteenth knock on the door by neighbors who’d seen the lights on. Earlier, Byron took one look at the grief casseroles in the fridge that visitors had brought over and decided that he just couldn’t go there. For the first time all day, he and Benny were in agreement on something.

“It’s the thought that counts,” Benny said, as they stood side by side, eyeing the long, rectangular dishes with their sauce-topped contents. “The fact that they went to the trouble to make these and bring them over, that’s what really matters, right?”

Byron nodded.

“And we appreciate that, don’t we?”

“We do,” Byron said. “Let’s serve them tomorrow after the funeral.” Byron started scrolling through the numbers on his smartphone for the name of his mother’s favorite takeout. But now, as they sit around the kitchen table, they’re all stabbing at their dishes without actually eating anything.

It’s too late in the evening now for anyone else to come by the house. After this break, they’ve agreed, no cellphones, until they get further along in their mother’s recording. There’s no way they’ll hear the entire thing before the funeral tomorrow, though. They’re just too tired. Strange, Byron thinks, how it can be hard to keep your eyes open at a time like this, even when the most important person in your life is gone, even when you hear your mother’s voice telling you that much of what you grew up believing about your family was a lie.

It really is a pity about that Frenchman. Byron had been following his swim, too, especially the science aspect, the collection of samples, the campaign to improve ocean health. But his mother was into the pure challenge of it, man versus water. Ma had been tracking the swim on the Web every day. You would have thought that she was the one in the escort boat, marking the direction, keeping an eye out for sharks, handing out bananas. Byron could almost feel her heart rate ticking up, up, up, as she looked at the screen.

For sure, his mother would have been watching, too, for news of the American who is fixing to land his mini-submarine on five of the deepest points of the seafloor. That series of expeditions will be sending information to ocean-mapping scientists like Byron. But Ma would not have been as impressed by this project. It was the direct interaction between the human body and the elements that always had fascinated her most.

He was intrigued by the look on his mother’s face as she peered at the French guy’s website, the same look she’d get whenever she stood at the breakers looking out over the sea. Is that what he looked like, Byron wondered, right before he slammed his board down on the water? It was his mother who had taught him how to surf, how to find his center, how to look ahead for that window of opportunity. It was his mother who had taught him how to focus his hunger, how to be one with himself.