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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our day of novel adaptations with the story coming to Hulu this fall based on a book by Charmaine Wilkerson. When siblings Byron and Benny reunite after their mother's death, they are presented with a voice recording of their mother describing a woman and a past they never knew. The postmortem gift comes with a side of black cake, a traditional Caribbean dessert, and the titular dish of Wilkerson's debut novel.

What follows is a series of shocking revelations. Secret identities, romances, and sacrifices. Wilkerson takes readers on a journey across continents, from California to London to Italy, to an unnamed Caribbean island, mapping connections across time and space. Ultimately, Black Cake weaves the hidden histories, beloved recipes, and longstanding traditions of the Caribbean diaspora into a thrilling mystery and heartfelt family saga spanning generations. A serialized adaptation of Black Cake, co-produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films, is scheduled to premiere on Hulu in November.

In the meantime, here's Kerry Nolan with author Charmaine Wilkerson.

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Kerry Nolan: Let's begin with the title itself. What is Black Cake?

Charmaine Wilkerson: Well, you hinted at it. Black cake is a traditional Caribbean fruit cake. In my family, we call it rum cake or plum pudding, but many Caribbeans call it black cake because it's so dark in color with all of those ingredients.

Kerry Nolan: There's a quote from a character in the novel who's made a career out of looking at food from kind of an anthropological perspective. They note that "We cannot always say at which point one culture ends and another begins, especially in the kitchen." How does this relate to Black Cake, both the food and the novel's larger themes?

Charmaine Wilkerson: Starting with the food, the black cake really is recognized by many people as sort of a descendant of the good old-fashioned English plum pudding. There is a difference, the ingredients are different. They reflect more closely the agriculture and the Caribbean rum and the dark brown cane sugar, but how did you get from a plum pudding a couple of centuries ago to the beloved Caribbean fruit cake? What happened in between is what happens very often in the histories and stories of food and families. There are economic and political changes.

In this particular case, you have colonialism, you have forced labor, you have the sugar and rum economies, and then you go forward in time. What you have now is a beloved cake that represents a lot of wonderful things for many families, especially at the Christmas time period of the year and for weddings. But what is the cake? It's not just what it is now when it's on the plate in front of you or me. There's a whole history. That anthropologist character in Black Cake is highlighting that. The fact that we can't just cut off our histories, cut off our pasts, and claim our identities without looking back.

Kerry Nolan: It's very interesting that you bring that up because there is a moment in the book when Byron, one of the main characters who was raised in the US, is really frustrated by his mother's love for that cake. He says that it was, as you said, essentially a plum pudding handed down to the Caribbeans by colonizers from the cold country, and he wants to know why she claims the recipes of exploiters as her own.

Charmaine Wilkerson: To what--

Kerry Nolan: I-- Go ahead.

Charmaine Wilkerson: Go ahead, Kerry

Kerry Nolan: No, no, no. It's your turn. [laughs]

Charmaine Wilkerson: Thank you. Exactly. All that really is - and you're laughing because in fact it reaches almost comic proportions for Byron, the son in this story - is that on the surface it's just Byron having a different level of attachment to this recipe. He enjoyed the cake, but it's just not that big a deal to him. He also thinks, "Well, whose tradition?" If you really want to talk about tradition, why not all those other foods?

He comes close to the attitude of the other character you mentioned, who will emerge as Marble in the story, a secondary character who loves traditional foods that are truly indigenous. That have been around for at least 1,000 years if they didn't grow in that particular region. She tends to be not only a purist, but she tends to love foods that are-- or find them interesting if they've always been around, always been in a culture. In a place like the Caribbean and in many places, certainly the United States, it's very difficult to find a food that didn't come from somewhere else or didn't move. That didn't go through a history that was influenced by external forces like economics, politics, migration.

In the story Black Cake, this narrative, you have this mother who leaves her children a small black cake sitting in her freezer, and then that long voice recording which you've mentioned. The black cake becomes a symbol of the fact that she has presented herself in one way, but she really has this entire past behind her that had not been revealed until the beginning of this novel.

For Byron in particular, and his sister Benny, being made to hear the truth won't necessarily feel like a gift, which is what their mother thinks. It'll feel like betrayal. Being made to hear the truth feels like betrayal to them because they're not prepared to embrace it all.

Kerry Nolan: My guest is Charmaine Wilkerson. She's the author of the new book Black Cake. A major theme, Charmaine, in Black Cake, as you've been discussing, is past lives and memory. Your writing, which I find so fascinating, uses sensory experiences to connect to the past. It's the smell of a person or the taste of a dish. It almost becomes a portal to another time. Did you feel that?

Charmaine Wilkerson: Me, I did. I did not set out to do that intentionally, but this is the way in which it emerged. I think that sometimes we, in our real lives, experience things like this. There are things like colors or ideas or repeated phrases that connect one person in one generation to another, or one person on one side of the Atlantic to another, and they don't know it, but there's something that's almost in the DNA.

Kerry Nolan: It seems like an awful lot of research went into this novel, and specifically into building the world of a fictional Caribbean island in the 1960s. Can we talk a little bit about that?

Charmaine Wilkerson: Sure. I don't think I would've imagined this story and these worlds quite as I did had I not come from a family with a Caribbean past. Both of my parents grew up in the Caribbean. I, for a period of time, moved to the West Indies, so a lot of the sensory details were things that were sitting there in my head. The story is not autobiographical, it's not even biographical, and it is not based on the research in that I didn't say I'm going to write a story about certain time periods, migration to the UK, et cetera, et cetera.

What I did do though, was as I wrote from my imagination, I had to go back to the research and say, "Well, is this plausible? Is it the way I thought I'd been told by someone in the past and my family? Could this be feasible?" For example, when I looked at Ocean Sciences, which comes into the story through Byron, that's an area in which I don't have expertise. I thought, "Let me take a good look. Is this going to make sense?"

The research without a doubt helped to bolster the imaginary world, but also brought new information. I didn't know that much about Chinese immigration to the Caribbean. I didn't know that much about the immigration of English-speaking Caribbeans to the UK, for example, in the sense that I didn't know what it was like for them actually working there in the post-war period. These are some of the areas in which research really helped me.

Kerry Nolan: You mentioned the Chinese immigration to the Caribbean. Why did you decide to include that aspect of history in the novel?

Charmaine Wilkerson: This really came up organically, but again, coming from a family with a past in the Caribbean, I was aware that that was part of the island's past in terms of culture and various ethnicities in the Caribbean. I also was aware that was part of my own family's past, even though the story as told has nothing to do with my own particular past.

Kerry Nolan: You describe yourself as an American author who's lived in Jamaica and now resides in Italy. All of these locations and more are featured in your book to some degree. How did you make the decision to include all of these aspects of your life in the book?

Charmaine Wilkerson: Interesting. It's such a great question, but I don't think of it as including aspects of my life in the story because the story was really a product of rather wild imagination that needed the plausibility. [laughter] I talked about the research, let's call it plausibility check. Let's just call it what it is, but certainly, I think that our minds and our hearts are made up of the stories that other people tell us. The things that we read and see and hear and worry about. All of that gets jumbled up in the head and comes out through the imagination.

This is where fiction tells a truth. Fiction touches on the emotional lives that people live. It touches on things that may be there in our memories. May worry us even if they're not directly part of our own lives but maybe the lives of other people, so it was not a conscious decision. I was writing a series of things that I thought were short stories, and lo and behold, I realized I was writing one story. The very first scenes that I wrote, which ended up in the novel, did have to do with the Caribbean and the 1960s.

I imagined these two teenagers, girls on the cusp of womanhood, who were exceptionally strong and very determined and obsessed with the sea. This life would then change their destinies. It would determine their destinies. It made sense logically for people living in those times in that area who spoke English, for example, to move to the UK. It made sense that someone who was fascinated by art history and later food, as was the secondary character, Marble, would end up living in Rome. It made sense that-- Of course the story, the multi-generational story in the present, has mostly to do with California, New York, Arizona, the US.

Kerry Nolan: The book is built on relationships, but one of the central ones is of the estranged siblings Byron and Benny. Why did you decide to make them the central relationship in the book?

Charmaine Wilkerson: Byron and Benny might be a bit like the reader, or in my case, the writer in the novel Black Cake. You have an idea of a story. I'm speaking now of a writer. I'm speaking now of myself. I see this story emerging. I see characters, but in reality, as I write I discover as I would be reading. Byron and Benny are discovering the past of their mother, and Byron and Benny are learning about other aspects of not only their mother's but other people's histories.

I think it just made sense. They just sort of shifted to the center as one looks back in the past. They represent, again, this brother and sister who were once inseparable but now are having trouble getting along. They haven't seen each other for years. They're grappling with these issues, and they're also grappling with social issues to which many of us might relate today. Then there's this journey of discovery. Well, a novel is a journey of discovery, whether you go back into the past or you go forward into the future. They represent that.

Kerry Nolan: It's interesting. Your writing also explores love for those who are absent in the present. Whether that's due to distance or estrangement or even death, and that's almost universal. It's something that so many of us have experienced in the past couple of years. How do those characters struggle to express love for someone who is not there?

Charmaine Wilkerson: There's a great deal of nostalgia in the case of certainly Byron and Benny, and also in the case of their mother Eleanor in the past. One of the ways in which that nostalgia and that sense of love can express itself is through other emotions that feel like anger, resentment, frustration, but it all comes back down to the ideal for those people, which is a closeness to the people they're missing.

Really this story, this novel, has a lot to do with the ways in which we form our identities and our ideas of being part of a family or community, and the power which stories have to shape those identities, whether they are told or not told. This is certainly the case for Byron and Benny. In the case of Byron Benny and their mother Eleanor, food is one of the languages through which stories are shared. That comes to a head as Byron and Benny must now hear the stories that have not been shared. Will that help them to reset their identities and understand how important your relationships with other people are to your identity? That's a question in the book.

Kerry Nolan: The ocean itself almost acts as its own character in Black Cake, and it's central to the livelihood of multiple characters. What does the ocean represent for you in this novel?

Charmaine Wilkerson: The ocean is everything. It is the currents that can influence your destiny. It is nature. It is the unknown world that we only see the surface, and it's also the joy of life and the joy of living, because you have a number of characters who are deeply connected to the natural world, most of them to the scene. There's a certain joy in that as well, and you see the connection between the physical and what perhaps we could describe as the spiritual worlds for these individuals.

Kerry Nolan: We only have just about a minute left. It was recently announced that Black Cake is going to be a miniseries, I think, on Hulu. Was this something that you had always envisioned?

Charmaine Wilkerson: I did not envision this. I just envisioned finishing a book and publishing it. I'm happy, but I'm thrilled. I'm delighted that Hulu was interested in a series. I'm delighted that Oprah Winfrey's production company and Marissa Jo Cerar of Women of the Movement and a Handmaid's Tale and other wonderful productions will be involved. I'm just delighted.

Alison Stewart: That was Charmaine Wilkerson for her debut novel and soon-to-be series Black Cake. In the next hour, we'll be talking about another book with a Hulu series adaptation, which is available to stream right now. This is All Of It. I'll catch you on the other side of the news.

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