Johnson reads the Haitian anthropologist Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain's work on burial customs and kinship in the rural town of Kenscoff as a source for the history of women's rights organizing in the wake of the American occupation of 1915 to 1934.

Two bodies of material sit side by side: Comhaire-Sylvain's field notes from 1937 and 1938, along with unpublished writing on family cemeteries and ceremonies, and the essays she published in La Voix des Femmes, a feminist periodical of the interwar decades. Moving through the space of the dead, at once tactile and fleeting, she worked out the commitments of an emerging Haitian feminism.

Mourning and political organizing are treated as comparable settings, both places where culture and the meanings attached to gender are made and remade. Comhaire-Sylvain's research itself becomes a form of public mourning, and a way into the intellectual life of elite Haitian women early in the twentieth century.