Black Cake(69)

How are you, Puppy-Man? the boy always asked her dog, and Bobby always answered the boy with a little leap. That boy, now almost a man, used to go to school with her son, used to clamber up trees with her son, kept coming back to see her son when he was home on holiday from school. When Giò first left for boarding school, the neighbor boy would sit on the front steps of Marble’s building, running a stick along the ground until Marble would open the door. Over the years, she struggled to look at his broadening shoulders, at his downy, new mustache, at this child who kept on growing right before her eyes while her son was so far away. But this kid had known her son since the two of them were in diapers, so finally one day she said to him, Want to watch the dog for me?

The iguana shifted its neck, then settled back into its gray-and-white stillness. Marble closed her eyes and imagined herself as the lizard, morphing into a lichen-covered mass of stone, sleeping through the long, chilly hours of the night and coming to life only in the warmth of the sun. She was holding on to this thought when her mobile phone started to vibrate.

An unlisted number.

“Hello?” Marble answered. No one spoke but she heard an intake of breath.

“Hello-o?”

Nothing. The signal was gone.

She waited for a while before putting her phone away. She knew that if it was important, whoever had called her would call again.

But they didn’t.





Benny is in the bathroom, washing her hands and looking at herself in the mirror. She has only ever seen her father’s features in her face, plus her mother’s lopsided smile. Now she knows what else she’s inherited from her mother’s side of the family. Her skin, for one. Benny is so pale in comparison to her brother and parents that if she didn’t look so much like her brother, she might have doubted her origins. This must have come from her mother’s father.

It has never really bothered her before, not knowing everything about her family. Benny and Byron were raised to believe that their parents were both orphans. Unanswered questions came with the territory. This is who they have always been, an African American family of Caribbean origin, a clan of untold stories and half-charted cultures.

Now Benny finds herself wondering more specifically about the generations that came before her parents, the arrivals from distant regions, the lives they lived, the different cultural influences. Benny is thinking, too, about another kind of inheritance, a spirit of defiance that she sees, now, comes from her mother. Her mother, too, struggled to find her way despite other people’s expectations, other people’s definitions of the kind of woman she was supposed to be. Her mother, too, kept closing doors and moving on.

If only she had said something sooner.

In her recording, Eleanor says that Benny’s dad really did lose both of his parents, though by then he was already a young adult. After Gibbs Grant moved to Britain to study and then dropped off the radar, folks back home must have assumed that Gibbs, like others before him, had simply drifted away on the current of his new, immigrant life. His mother’s relatives might have tried to find him, but surely they could not have imagined that he would be hiding in plain sight under an altered name with a woman who was believed to be dead.

Benny’s mother talks about feeling like a ghost after the death of Benny’s father, feeling like there was no one around anymore to recognize her for who she really was. The reality of her mother’s situation is beginning to sink in. Over time, Eleanor Bennett had given up parts of herself until most of who she had been was gone. Family, country, name, even a child. And she hadn’t felt free to name her losses. Benny and Byron would never have been enough to fill the gaps that remained, would they?

Benny and Byron had never been enough.

Benny pulls a towel off a rack, sits down on the toilet lid, and buries her face in the mound of terry cloth, taking care not to let her brother and Mr. Mitch hear her crying.




Down the hall, Byron is in the kitchen grinding more coffee, looking down at his hands. He and Benny look so much alike, they could be twins, were it not for the nine years and several shades of color between them. Apparently, Benny takes after their mother’s father, that Lyncook guy, the man whose mistakes drove their mother away from the island.

Being the children of people from the Caribbean, Byron and Benny have always taken for granted that they might have ancestors from various backgrounds. But in his heart, Byron is a California kid and a black man first. This is his identity. Of course, in the minds of others, he is a black man, first, second, and always, which would be fine if it weren’t to the exclusion of everything else.

If Byron ever has any doubt about the weight of color in his world, he only has to look at Benny. His sister was always a sloppy driver, capable of putting the fear of God in you on the freeway, but Benedetta Bennett, with her sand-colored skin, has never been pulled over by the police, while Byron averages three or four times a year.

It’s getting to the point where Byron is afraid to drive at night. It’s getting to the point where he’s declined to visit certain friends in certain neighborhoods after a certain hour, not out of a fear of crime but out of fear of being stopped by police. It has gotten to the point where the last time he needed a new car, he bought a less sleek model, one that wouldn’t catch the eye of someone who didn’t think a black man should own a certain kind of vehicle. Because there’s that, too. But he would never admit this to anyone, except Cable.