Known as susu, box or partner depending on the island, rotating credit associations travelled with West Indian migrants and went on working in Brooklyn. The study traces them from the post-emancipation Caribbean, where black households pooled savings for burials, weddings, school fees and small shops while later-arriving groups came to dominate commerce, to New York, where members' occupations vary and nurses are conspicuous.

The organization is deliberately informal: no constitution, no advertising beyond word of mouth, no receipts. An organizer fixes the size of the hand and the interval, recruits people known to earn steadily, and friendship stands in for collateral. Interviews with ten organizers and a questionnaire returned by users and non-users support the reading of these bodies as structural shields — adaptive devices for first-generation immigrants shut out of ordinary credit, expected to matter less to their children, and used elsewhere for house deposits and business capital.