Black Cake

Although many adjectives can be applied to Coventina Lyncook—resourceful, feisty, proud, defiant, independent—those adjectives reflect her tempestuous and adventurous life from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom and ultimately to Los Angeles. If those adjectives suggest what she is, however, they do little to define who she is. That question is the source of the character’s triumph and her tragedy.

Coventina, as her three deaths and four names suggest, searches for her identity. A biracial child whose mother simply vanishes when she is five, Coventina has a love/hate relationship with her own identity and struggles to come to terms with who she is even as she makes her way first to London and ultimately to the comfortable life of Southern California under a new name, essentially a stolen identity. She is uneasy with her own past. She is haunted by the memory of the baby she was forced to give up to adoption. She is uneasy over how little her two grown kids know about her life on the island, her disastrous brief marriage, the death of her first husband, and the catastrophic train accident that gifted her with a new identity. The recording she shares with her kids only after her death reveals the depth of her tragedy—how she kept that secret and, with it, maintained an emotional distance from her own kids.