Maya Deren, the Ukrainian American filmmaker who went to Haiti in the 1950s and was initiated as a manbo in Vodou, is the case at the center of this essay. Daniels asks what drew her to the religion, how she built ties with other devotees, and what her path suggests about white North Americans who take up traditions practiced mainly by people of color.

Getting there requires some theoretical work on whiteness itself, and Daniels reads earlier North American conversions to Buddhism as a precedent for white entry into African Diasporic religions. Deren's position as an immigrant and an artist, on this account, gave her a slanted relationship to whiteness and let her cast the trip to Haiti as a return home.

The essay concludes that Deren was absorbed into a system of ritual kinship whose ties extended past the limits of the living world.