Lasirenn belongs to a wide family of Afro-Atlantic water spirits, kin to Mami Wata and to mermaid figures from both African and European sources, and her attributes have shifted with the circumstances of those who serve her. Szeles takes that fluidity as the point, and pursues it through the stories told about her, her rituals, and above all her drawn signs.

Much of the essay is close reading of the vèvè. Spirals become eggs, or the southern point of the Kongo cosmogram where things begin again; a vertical line marks the axis toward the ancestors; a diamond refracts one self into many facets, and the whole figure resolves into a womb. What these images offer, in her account, is a means of repairing the natal alienation Orlando Patterson identified as slavery's core injury — reconnecting the living to Ginen and letting a person gather her disparate versions into a whole.