Food can also play a role in anchoring individuals, families, and entire cultures amid change. But people migrate, marriages break up, people remarry, strangers move in together. We know that food helps to build connections between people. When a younger relative texted me to ask for the recipe, it started me thinking about inheritance and how we choose to keep some things closer to our hearts than others-especially in a multicultural family like mine. The recipe includes instructions for making a rum-soaked fruitcake, or black cake, as many Caribbeans would call it. It eventually stepped off the page and worked its way into the broad landscape of my imagination, inspiring the title of my debut novel, Black Cake. The recipe, written on lined notebook paper by my other mother, did more than bring back memories. It had belonged to a beloved aunt, and by giving it to me, she’d kept it in the family. The mother who gave it to me never liked it, but I did. The kitschy potholder with its imitation-quilt cow makes me smile. The ceramic plate makes me think of fruit pies, and summer barbecues, and autumn leaf-raking parties amid the burnished red of fallen maple leaves. Both are gone now, but they live on, in part, through the workaday keepsakes whose value no one would guess. Both formed families with men from other cultures. Parents lost, dreams given up, some wishes fulfilled. Small-town Jamaica versus small-city New England.

My mothers’ upbringings could not have been more different, though sometimes they seemed similar in the telling. The women who took turns raising me in different periods of my childhood in their blended households. Seemingly innocuous items from the kitchens of my mother and stepmother.

The book black cake