Candomblé is the Afro-Brazilian religion that took shape in nineteenth-century Bahia, carrying West African orixá worship across the Atlantic and reassembling it on Brazilian soil. This system is drawn from one scene: February 2 at dawn on the Salvador shore, devotees in stark ceremonial white wading into Iemanjá's blue-green sea with baskets of white flowers.

White is the figure here, never the page. The ground is deep ocean. Each orixá is named in the saturated color of its beaded contas — Xangô's red, Oxóssi's green, Oxum's gold — strung against the water like a living legend. The voice is warm, handmade, and reverent without being solemn.