Guest blogger Stephanie Boenawan
Cake is a type of dessert, but it is also a figure of speech such as evident in the passage below in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. The protagonist is young black southerners. In the passage he has his first encounter with cheese cake in a New York luncheonette. His unfamiliarity with cheese cake indicates his culinary roots. The luncheonette scene in the novel reads, “I thought you might like a piece of cheese cake,” says a radical white northerner who is a ranking committee member of the left of center “Brotherhood.” He attempting to recruit the protagonist as a leader of its Harlem office. “‘Cheese cake?’ I said. ‘I've never heard of it.’ He smiled, cutting into his cheese cake with a fork and shoving far too large a piece into his mouth. His manners are extremely crude, I thought, trying to put him at a disadvantage in my own mind by pointedly taking a small piece of the cheesy stuff and placing it neatly into my mouth."
Stephanie Boenawan was a Babson College undergrad in Professor Opie’s course Food and the African American Canon