Black Cake
What happened next had already been set in motion two days before the wedding reception. On that Thursday, Pearl turned up the fire under the heavy-bottomed pot and opened a sack of cane sugar. She sank a measuring spoon deep into the well of brown crystals, releasing the smell of earth and molasses. It was the finest raw sugar produced on the island but it was about to be wasted, along with eight hours of labor, to make a wedding cake for what would be a sham of a marriage.
Sacrilegious.
In keeping with tradition, the bride and groom were meant to save a portion of the rum cake to mark their first anniversary. A few modern couples who’d married for love and owned electric freezers were now keeping pieces of their cakes for longer periods, slicing off a bit to celebrate each passing year. But this marriage, Pearl thought, would not be worthy of such an honor. For Pearl, Covey’s wedding day would be a day of mourning and 1965 would be a year of bitter farewells.
Pearl had known Covey since she was born, when Covey’s parents hired her through a friend. She had come to work for them on the north coast, taking time off only to have her two boys. Hard to believe that before coming here, Pearl had never left the capital city. She had grown up hearing of this area’s famous lagoon, everyone had, but not even the prettiest southern beaches had prepared her for such beauty. That seemingly bottomless pool of water with its shifting colors. The beaches nearby with their aquamarine coves, ringed by thick vegetation. The sands that lit up at night with tiny, glowing creatures.
Pearl grew to love this part of the island, grew to love a local man, and grew to care for Coventina almost as much as her own children. And Covey’s mother—Miss Mathilda, as she used to call her in front of other people—had given Pearl something that she hadn’t been counting on. A friendship.
Pearl didn’t blame Mathilda for running away from Covey’s father. Their home had been filled with regrets. What she couldn’t understand was how Mathilda could have stayed away from her own child for so long. She had promised to send for Covey, she had left money with Pearl to make the arrangements. When the time comes, Mathilda had said. But the time had never come.
Six years had passed since Covey’s mother had left and Pearl had not heard from her for the last four. Covey didn’t know this, of course. She’d never told Covey that they had been in contact after her mother’s departure. And Pearl had decided that she would never let Covey know. She hated to think that something serious might have happened to Mathilda, but it was worse to imagine that Mathilda might have, for some reason, changed her mind.
Pearl had tried to make up for some of the maternal care that Covey was lacking, but she knew it wasn’t the same. She made sure Covey kept herself clean and ate plenty of food. And before going home every afternoon, she would wrap her arms around Covey and give her a tight squeeze, even when the girl had grown taller than Pearl. But this whole wedding business had changed things between them.
At seventeen, Covey was all grown up, turning heads everywhere she went, though she didn’t seem to notice. All she seemed to care about was the Grant boy and Bunny and the swimming. Always, the swimming. But Little Man had put a stop to all that. He came by the house almost every afternoon now, his voice all cheerful-like but eyes like stone.
Covey had a habit, when she was feeling low, of slinking into the kitchen, slumping onto the stool, and saying Pearl’s name in the way that she had since she was little. Peaaarrrl. But as the day of the wedding approached, Pearl watched as Covey slipped away from her. She stopped coming into the kitchen. Only spoke when she was spoken to. This wounded Pearl’s heart, though she could see why it was happening.
Earlier in the week, Covey had walked into the kitchen and found Pearl gathering supplies for the wedding cake.
“What is this?” Covey said, when she saw what Pearl was doing. Before Pearl could answer, Covey stalked out of the room and as quickly as that, their relationship had changed. Pearl understood that Covey felt betrayed. By Pearl, by her father, by people who should have been protecting her from such a fate. But how, exactly, could Pearl have done anything to stop this?
Baking could always soothe what ailed her. Pearl dropped spoonfuls of sugar into the pot and breathed in deeply. The scent took her back to the hot afternoons of her childhood, to the smell of fresh cane stalks being sliced open and stripped, to the sweet juices that slipped into her mouth as she chewed on the cane fiber, to the orange-blossomed shade of a ponciana tree. Pearl had shared this special treat with Covey when she was little, just as she later did with her own two boys.