Black Cake

Shortly after Eleanor Bennett is told she will begin chemotherapy to arrest her cancer, she is surfing the web when she happens to see a pop-up ad for chayote, a Caribbean vegetable, a kind of squash with a bumpy, tough skin. The ad makes Eleanor immediately think back to her childhood, when the vegetable was used in family recipes. She absently clicks on the image and watches a short video by an apparently famous London food expert all about the uses of the vegetable. It takes only a moment for Eleanor to realize this food expert, identified as Marble Martin, is none other than the daughter she gave up for adoption nearly 50 years earlier. She is certain, and she realizes in that anguished moment how much a mother “could love a child taken away from her” (284). Using the resources of the Internet, Eleanor secures Marble’s phone number, but though she gathers the courage to make the call, she cannot bring herself to say anything when she hears her long-lost daughter say “Hello.”

The focus turns briefly to Marble Martin’s epiphany as a teenager when she is first developing into womanhood that she is physically strikingly different from her very white parents—she is taller, her body curves are fuller, her hair is more tangled, her nose is noticeably squashed, and her skin color is darker.