When Dessalines was assassinated in 1806 and his body left in the street, a woman gathered the remains and saw them decently buried. Haitian history has kept the story while stripping it of meaning, filing Marie Sainte Dedee Bazile under madness rather than politics.

Lamour reads the act as a deliberate intervention and the erasure as typical. Women enter Haitian historiography in footnotes, defined by the men they were attached to, remembered through nicknames and anecdotes; the founding generation is all fathers, with no corresponding mothers of the nation. She places her work alongside recent efforts to recover what has been pushed aside, from an early thesis on Haitian women to studies of women in the Caco movement and to novelists and artists reworking the national epic.

The present is part of the argument. In 2020, mourners for the dead of La Saline gathered under a call to repeat Defilee's gesture, which is Lamour's evidence that the inheritance remains usable.