Maya Deren traveled to Haiti in the 1950s and was initiated as a manbo. Daniels uses her case to ask what it means when white North Americans convert to religions long practiced almost entirely by people of color — a question she approaches through Vodou's own cosmology, in which the dead come to rest in Afrik-Ginen, an underwater homeland described as the legendary site of racial origin but never expressly closed to whites.

The essay sets out a working theory of whiteness, then treats the earlier history of North American conversion to Buddhism as a precedent for white initiation into African diasporic traditions. Deren's standing as an immigrant artist, Daniels argues, gave her a sideways relation to whiteness and let her understand the journey to Haiti as a homecoming. What she entered was a system of ritual kinship whose obligations reached well past the boundaries of the living.