Drawing from my memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life, this paper will focus on how, even as the daughter of white Southern Baptist missionaries in Nigeria, I was influenced for the better by my early proximity with Yoruba sensibilities. I use the word “jinxed,” which means “supposed influenced for the worse,” as we might in thinking of the Yoruba divinity Esu. His influence may seem to bode badly but it doesn’t always. I grew up at the crossroads. In the 1950s and 60s, when I was young in Nigeria, the dominant aim of my parents’ first culture (US American) was to bring Christian theology and Western medicine to the West Coast of Africa (the Baptist mission in Nigeria was already one hundred years old when I was born in Ogbomosho; my parents were medical missionaries). However, as a girl cradled in the Yoruba territory and tutored by Yoruba people, I necessarily imbibed many Yoruba ideas. Only when I wrote my memoir, during a medical crisis (kidney failure and transplantation), did I learn how Yoruba I am. The Yoruba concepts of metamorphosis, indeterminacy, *and* constancy (the idea of igbodu or holy land) will be framing devices as I explore, through autobiography, the obstinancy of Yoruba culture, its endurance over time and space, its flexibility and reliability.