The sentient pound cake

And the fear of disproving family legends

The South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, photographed by Sean Rayford for The New York Times

I’m not interested in genealogy, but I am interested in family legends.

Let me give you an example, this time from the paternal side of my family. It’s about a cake.

A lemon pound cake, to be exact. A cake that’s a mandatory menu item at every family gathering, a cake with a closely guarded recipe, a cake that only a select few can make. It’s a towering cake, unadorned yet imposing. A single slice lies heavy in your hand, yet is somehow light, with a plush and tender lemon-yellow interior. Also, possibly, it’s haunted.

Let’s back up. In the ‘90’s my paternal great-grandfather, Dan Dan, was erroneously committed to the state-run South Carolina Lunatic Asylum. An elderly man who may have been suffering from dementia, he took a few too many pills one evening, which sent him to the ER, where the doctor labeled him suicidal and sent him, within an hour, to the state hospital instead of the aged care facility he needed. Once he was inside, the family couldn’t legally get him out for weeks.

The hospital was far from his home, but close to where my nuclear family lived at the time and, so my parents visited Dan Dan as much as they could. By my mother’s telling, it was an absolutely hellish place. It closed down shortly after my great-grandfather was there, but the level of inhumane abuse that happened there had my extended family pushed to the point of hysteria.

One day, my very young mother (already with three kids under five) decided to bake Dan Dan a lemon pound cake. His wife, my great-grandmother, was the original pound cake baker, but in a shocking move, my mom, who is both a Yankee and not a blood relative (two major strikes), but is a great cake baker, was given the recipe. Desperate to help in some way, my mom decided to bake the cake and take it over to Dan Dan, in the hope that it might give him a small moment of pleasure and humanity.

She prepared the cake with extra care, carefully following the dozens of intricate instructions, mixing in perfect order, and folding with expert gentleness. Just before she put the cake into the oven, to be extra safe, she sent my siblings and me outside to play, lest we make the cake fall with our jumping and thumping and general rambunctiousness.

The cake baked in the quiet house.

And yet, when it was time to take it out, the cake had fallen. It had looked fine when she checked halfway through, but now it was half of the height it was meant to be. My mother cried. She told me that she couldn’t believe it—this felt like the most important cake she’d ever made and she’d messed it up. She racked her brain, trying to think of what went wrong, but couldn’t figure it out. She didn’t have time to bake another one, and so she turned it out of the pan, let it cool, and hoped that my great-grandfather might not notice, as sick as he was and as alone as he felt.

Later, at the hospital, he devoured it with no comment on the density. Or on her failure.

Soon after, my grandmother brought my great-grandmother down to visit her husband. Afterward, they went out to eat with my family, which is when my mom mentioned that she’d brought Dan Dan a pound cake the week before, leaving the part off about how, for the first time in her life, she had not baked it well.

“Oh,” my grandmother said. “That’s so nice of you. It’s funny—he always liked that cake best when it had fallen.”

The thrill I used to get when I heard my my mom deliver this line, this turn in the story. I still get chills—even now, typing it to you. It is a gift, this story. And I absolutely do not want it to be disproven.

I’d rather know the story than the facts. I’d rather have the image of my great-grandfather reveling in this cake than know that, actually, he liked it light and fluffy just like the rest of us. I’d rather think that some sympathetic spirit or some other cosmic force made the cake fall that day, not the fact that my mom’s baking powder might be getting a little old.

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This is something I think about a lot—when to research and when to let stories stand. The most legendary figure in our family’s lore (at least on my maternal grandfather’s side) is the woman who once owned my house. Her name was either Amelia or Amela (immigration documents show both) and she came here from Lithuania as a replacement bride for my great-grandfather, whose wife had died in childbirth. Or so I’ve heard.

I’ve also heard that she spoke Lithuanian, Polish and English (with a heavy accent), called her grandchildren “little shits” and baked dark black bread. I’ve heard that she was a relentlessly hard worker—had to be, since her husband died relatively young, of stomach cancer, leaving her to raise their 6 children and run the dairy farm. I’ve heard that her favorite piece of furniture and, perhaps, the only one she’s been seen to actually use (forever standing, forever working) was a rocking chair.

I have, many times, thought about trying to fully research her life, both for curiosity’s sake but also as the backbone for a novel I’ve long thought about writing. I've thought about using this newsletter to do just that—interview the people who remember her, do my own research into her genealogy, what her life might’ve been like in Lithuania before she came over by boat, what her life might’ve been like as a widow in rural Upstate New York in the 1920’s. So far, though, I’ve resisted.

These stories—these myths—are so precious to me, I’m afraid of undoing them, and not just because I love a good story (and I do—I really, really do).

If I unravel them, if I find them to be exaggerated or false, where will that leave me? None of us are free from the stories we’ve been told about ourselves. We stack stories about who we were, who we are, and who we will be, layer upon layer, to try and understand or make ourselves understood. It is a compulsion without end.

For now, I’m choosing to leave my stories whole, but I could be easily convinced otherwise.

In the meantime, while I continue to wrestle with this—tell me your favorite family legend?