ACTUAL PLOT SPOILERS: I just finished the novel Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson and am about to completely spoil the plot for you. If you’d like to read the novel without plot spoilers, skip this newsletter.
I’m trying to read more these days and I think I’m starting to really love it again (grad school nearly completely killed off my love for reading because reading started to feel like work). I’m trying to do some reading for fun every day. I get e-books from the library through the Libby app, which I then read on my Kindle. I often am on waiting lists for weeks to months waiting for books to become available. When books do become available, I tend to get them all at once. I either have none of the books or all of the books, but never just some of the books.
I recently checked out Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel, Black Cake. I didn’t know anything about it, other than it had been on my library hold list for some time. I eagerly started reading it and was enjoying the first part when the Ubiquitous Adoption Sub-Plot entered the chat. And then I wasn’t so thrilled with it.
Adopted people comprise somewhere around 2% of the population of the United States.1 (No one keeps particularly good records about adoption or adoptees, so solid numbers are hard to come by.) At their height in 1970, approximately 175,000 adoptions took place that year. These days, 18,000 infants are relinquished for adoption. Adoption numbers continue to fall, alarming the National Council for Adoption (don’t be fooled by the name—it’s a pro-adoption advocacy group).2 These aren’t huge numbers. But the ripple effect of adoption means that almost everyone has some kind of connection to adoption. (A potential topic for a future newsletter is the misleading visual representation of the adoption “triad”—adopted people, birth parents, adoptive parents— as an equilateral triangle.)
Nonetheless, despite being a small number of people, adopted people are overrepresented in several different contexts: substance abuse programs, criminal justice systems, mental health counseling, and in popular fiction.
Children’s literature and young adult novels often feature orphaned or adopted protagonists. The most evident contemporary example is, of course, Harry Potter, but he’s far from the first adoptee in young adult fiction. I don’t know exactly when adopted people started appearing as protagonists in popular fiction, but we can also add the classic historical examples of Little Orphan Annie and Oliver Twist to the list. An example from my childhood would be Lewis Barnavelt from John Bellairs’s novel, A House with a Clock in its Walls. Adopted people also appear in adult fiction, as in the Barbara Kingsolver novel The Bean Trees. As a plot device, adoption gets the adults out of the way so that the young protagonist can engage in adventures without adult rules or structures. But even beyond that practical use of adoption as a plot device, the appearance of an orphaned or adopted protagonist signals to use as readers that something extraordinary is going to happen to them because it’s profoundly abnormal to grow up without your parents. The protagonist is defined by this abnormality.
Back to Black Cake. The protagonist of this novel, set in 1960s and 1970s Jamaica, the UK, and the United States, Coventina Lyncook, technically isn’t adopted, but rather abandoned by her mother and raised by her often-absentee father, providing her space to make certain choices during her childhood (she develops a deep relationship with the sea) and adolescence while also limiting her agency in others (she’s forced into marriage to pay her father’s gambling debt). But her biggest loss of agency and personal power comes when she becomes pregnant as a result of sexual assault and coerced into relinquishing a child.
The novel’s description of the British adoption agency to which she relinquishes her child and the coercion applied to ensure that Coventina that she does so fits with what we know about adoption practices in the 1960s and 1970s. Coventina’s thought process seems cliché, filled with platitudes about how the baby deserves better parents who can provide things that she can’t and signing a legal document she barely remembers signing. On the other hand, we know that those things really happened to relinquishing mothers throughout the Anglophone world during that time; her choicelessness seems real. (The UK, Canada, the United States and Australia share histories of forced and coerced adoption.) And she does experience lifelong grief around having relinquished this child, which becomes yet another secret that she has to maintain. She tells no one about the secret child until after her death, a posthumous confession made through an audio recording. We know that this too happened to relinquishing mothers, many of whom were told to never speak of their lost children again or to pretend that their lost children were dead.
We as readers have the opportunity to get to know the relinquished and relinquished child of the novel, whose parents chose not to tell her that she was adopted. She suspects, based on physical differences between herself and her adoptive parents, but apparently her parents hoped that they’d never have to actually tell her the truth. The adoptee is FIFTY YEARS OLD when her adoptive parents confirm that she is, in fact, adopted. I can’t think of the exact wording, but there’s a few sentences about how the adoptive parents felt “safe” for fifty years because their daughter didn’t know she was adopted. And then they seem miffed that she’s a more than a little bit mad about it.
Coventina does not search for her daughter, assuming that secrets are better left in the past. Nonetheless, she does eventually locate her daughter, a search facilitated by the fact that the adoptee is a popular author and frequent TV commentator who researches indigenous food traditions. Nonetheless, they never meet; Coventina dies without ever knowing her, a trauma that compounds all of the other ones. The adoptee and her bio siblings do get together eventually and there are some ups and downs as they get to know each other, but it all seems to work out in the end. It’s too easy in fiction to assume that those meetings provide a homecoming and closure and answers. Of all the parts of the novel, I felt that this was the most undeveloped part. Adoption reunions, when they happen, aren’t usually this unproblematic.
Readers of this novel who don’t happen to share my particular filters and sensitivities to issues of adoption seem to think that this a novel about culinary heritage and cooking (???), encapsulated in the the traditional black cake of the title. I mean, read this New York Times review of the book. Does this sound like an adoption novel? I thought the adoption sub-plot overshadowed the strong culinary throughline with which the author tries to tie together these stories.
I also thought there was a missed opportunity to engage with the racial politics of adoption. There’s conversations about racism and structural oppression that never get really deep. Nor do they seem to intersect with the adoption plotline, despite the fact that the adoptee passes for white (and has white adoptive parents) and her birth family is black.
The author’s dedication is to her parents, “all four of them,” which makes me wonder if she herself is adopted. I tried Googling and wasn’t able to find out. I felt weird about reading this book, not because my own personal life story has anything to do with the Caribbean or food heritage, but because I’ve been that relinquished child, the secret child, the sibling that no one knows about. It’s weird seeing big parts of my own story reflected in a novel that I didn’t expect to have anything to do with me personally. I knew the plot twists and ending of this book without knowing anything about it because the adoption sub-plot is so ubiquitous.
If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts about it.
https://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/adoptionstatistics.htm
Thanks for writing about this, Lisa! I really appreciate you laying it all out like this. It’s annoying how adoption is such a convenient trope for so many writers. It’s like... the drama is irresistible in narrative but so easy to dismiss or ignore in actual humans.
I have never read anyone with our depth of understanding about adoption. The shame that binds all. So true! Jodi Weisz, adoptee.