From Debut Novel to Hulu Series

Baking is a love language — and sometimes a rather complex one. For Charmaine Wilkerson ’82, her mother’s recipe for Caribbean black cake provided the inspiration she needed to blend a series of short stories into what would become her bestselling debut novel, Black Cake, which is now also a critically acclaimed series on Hulu.

Black cake is a rum-soaked-fruit confection that can take at least a week to prepare and is traditionally served around the holidays and at special occasions like weddings. Wilkerson says there was no question that the preparation of black cake, often undertaken by the family matriarch, would anchor the book.

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“The traditional Caribbean fruitcake plays a role in the drama at the center of the novel. It also serves as a symbol of how cultures influence one another — for better or worse — and how food helps us to share stories and community,” says Wilkerson, who is from New York and spent much of her childhood in Jamaica.

The series, whose executive producers include Oprah Winfrey, centers on a family drama wrapped in a murder mystery with underlying themes of romance, new beginnings, and the resilience of immigrant women.

The main character of the story is Eleanor, a woman who, after her death, comes clean to her children about her true identity. They learn that their mother was originally Coventina “Covey” Lyncook, an Afro-Chinese Jamaican girl forced by tragedy to flee to the United Kingdom, eventually taking a different name. Viewers travel from the beaches of Jamaica to the city of London, misty Scotland, and sunny California. Not surprisingly, the series offers sumptuous shots of Covey cooking Chinese and Jamaican cuisine and baking that delicious cake.

Wilkerson, who was just 16 when she started at Barnard in 1978, says she drew from her experience at the College when writing about how the teenage Coventina navigated the patriarchal norms of 1960s Jamaica.

“It was an advantage to be surrounded by so many smart, confident women in that phase of my adolescence,” she says. While her professors consistently empowered students to know they were special, Wilkerson says Barnard’s greatest gift to her was instilling the confidence to pursue her academic and personal goals — whether or not she achieved her original objectives — a value reflected in both the novel and the series.

“In my novel, the teenage character Covey and her friend Bunny take for granted that they will excel,” says Wilkerson. “Things do not go as planned, and therein lies much of the drama in the tale. But as young women, their sense of certainty in their own resourcefulness and determination to be loyal to one another turn out to be driving forces throughout their lives.”