Moth and Sani’s respective ancestries offer each of them guidance as they journey towards personal growth, reflecting cultural inheritance as a form of self-recognition. They both feel like outsiders in their majority-white Virginia high school. When they become friends, they discover a rare point of connection. Moth’s ancestry is defined by the Hoodoo tradition (particularly via her close relationship with her grandfather), and Sani’s is defined by the Diné, or Navajo tradition, and his relationship with his father, who is a medicine man.

At the start of the novel, however, both Moth and Sani feel disconnected from their ancestries—an estrangement they do not recognize has deeply impacted their estrangement from their truest selves. After they get to know each other, however, the historical intersection of their Hoodoo magic and Indigenous magic begins to offer the new friends an organic throughway to reconnecting with their cultural roots. For Moth, “[t]rying to forget instead of remembering [her] ancestors” (57) is a way to cope with her sorrow over her parents’ and brother’s deaths: “I guess pain does that—it makes you want to forget” (57). If she can disconnect from the lessons, myths, and customs her grandfather taught her, Moth thinks she might disconnect from her pain. While her refusal to dance is in part a symptom of her grief, it is also a way for Moth to disassociate from her heritage. 

The same is true for Sani, who has largely stopped playing guitar and making music in recent years: “He used to play all the time; / he used to sing all the time. / Before his dad got busy / & his mom got lonely & left / & his mind kept poking itself & his stepfather kept sticking him” (193). Instead of turning to their cultural inheritance for guidance through their sorrow and confusion, Moth and Sani become separated from it. Over the course of the novel, they must learn to rely on each other so they might reconnect with their respective heritages and understand themselves more fully.

For Moth, self-recognition means acknowledging what happened on the day of the accident, remembering her grandfather, and making peace with the life she must leave behind. For Sani, self-recognition means treating his mental illness while nurturing his marked artistic talent and dreams of establishing himself as a musician. Throughout the novel, repeated allusions to music are metaphors for the characters’ cultural inheritances: “The best way to get to know someone / to get beneath their skin & into the bone / is to tell a story & offer music. / A story explains who you want to be; / the other shows who you are” (86). Moth and Sani share stories and exchange songs throughout their friendship and over the course of their road trip. 

These oral and musical forms of communication originate from their respective Hoodoo and Diné histories, offering them new ways to share their soul selves with each other. They remain connected via song even after Moth leaves the corporeal world, as Sani sings and dedicates “Summer Song” to Moth in the novel’s last poem.