Dayan assembles episodes across two centuries to show how a vocabulary of taint and containment keeps being reissued against Haitians. She opens in the present: refugees held behind razor wire at Guantánamo in the only camp ever built for people with HIV, a blood-donation ban, and the 2003 ruling that made arrival by sea itself a security threat. She then turns back to Jefferson's arithmetic of deportation, to the emigration societies that shipped thousands of free African Americans to Haiti in the 1820s, and to Boyer's Rural Code of 1826, which bound cultivators to the land and which she reads alongside vagrancy law and convict leasing in the American South. The longest section follows Frederick Douglass as minister in Port-au-Prince, pressed by an admiral and a shipping magnate to secure the Môle Saint-Nicolas, blamed by the press when Anténor Firmin refused, and made in the reporting into a rehearsal for the 1915 occupation.