60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

The Imperative of Freedom
95
Stedman (1988, 495) recorded an almost unbelievable instance of brutality
in Suriname on a woman who had broken a crystal tumbler. Although she
was eight months pregnant, her overlord caused her to be whipped until her
intestines protruded through her body. Many miscarriages occurred because
pregnant women were whipped severely, placed in stocks, kicked in their bellies
and subjected to other brutalities. Women were allowed little time to
nurse their infants, who were usually removed from them and placed under
the care of nannies (generally superannuated women) during the day. The
worst part was that children born to enslaved mothers legally belonged to
their overlords, who could dispose of them as they saw fit, by either sale or
gift, without the parents’ having any recourse to the law to reclaim them.
This situation existed until late in the slavery period, when in some jurisdictions
the separation of families by enslavers was deemed illegal. 5
Naturally, a large number of children were born in Maroon settlements,
especially in those that remained in existence for several decades. Moreau de
Saint-Méry (1979, 140) mentions that among the Bahoruco Maroons there
were men sixty years old who had never lived anywhere but in the forests
where they had been born. According to Gautier (1985, 231), the demographic
profile of the settlement in the 1780s showed that 80 of the 133 inhabitants
were born there. The Curuá mocambo in Brazil, which a military enterprise
subverted in 1877, was said to include among its inhabitants children and
grandchildren of deserters, who had been born there (Conrad 1983, 392–93).
Thus marronage provided parents with the opportunity not only of raising
their children in a slave-free environment but of producing children who had
never been branded as someone else’s property. Moreover, it allowed both
parents to play a greater role in the child’s upbringing than was possible on
the plantations, especially when the parents belonged to different plantations.
Of course, none of this should be taken to mean that adult Maroons
never abused their children.
The mechanisms by which deserters sought to gain their freedom were
varied and sometimes quite ingenious. Deserters usually left quietly during
the night or in the early hours of the morning; on long weekends or during
festivals, when they were allowed much greater mobility to visit friends and
relatives on other plantations; when they had been sent on errands or during
expeditions that they joined to apprehend Maroons. They went on foot, on
horseback, by boat; along roads, and through swamplands and thorn bushes.
Blassingame (1979, 200) says that deserters in the southern United States