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

The Imperative of Freedom
105
310). Haiti provides an outstanding example of a small to medium-sized
country where Maroons embedded themselves in the urban centres and
passed for free with relative ease (Fouchard 1972, 33–40). Deschamps
Chapeaux (1983, 14; see also 17–18, 53–54) writes that the outer suburbs of
Havana constituted an immense palenque to which many deserters fled. Wade
(1968, 104, 105) explains how the phenomenon of “undisciplined low life”
in the southern cities of the United States lent itself very readily to urban
marronage:
In the metropolis the worlds of bondage and freedom overlapped. The line
between free blacks and slaves became hopelessly blurred. Even whites and
blacks found their lives entangled in some corners of the institution of slavery.
No matter what the law said or the system required, this layer of life expanded.
Though much of it was subterranean, at points it could be easily seen. The mixed
balls, the numberless grog and grocery shops, the frequent religious gatherings,
and the casual acquaintances in the streets were scarcely private. Physical proximity
bred a certain familiarity that most residents came to expect.
In these cities, as in many others, hiring out of enslaved persons or placing
them on self-hire (hiring them out to themselves for a sum of money) was
common, despite the unavoidable risk of their desertion – and many of them
did desert. Even in more cloistered circumstances they found means of escaping.
In Lima, Peru, an enslaved female in the convent of Santa Clara disguised
herself as a male and slipped out among the construction crew that
was working on the building (Bowser 1974, 189). Thus we find a curious situation
in which people fled both to and from the urban areas to escape slavery.
But, as we shall see shortly, they also fled to and from certain slavery jurisdictions
for the same reason.
An interesting feature of rural-to-urban and sometimes urban-to-urban
marronage was the emergence and development of the Underground
Railroad 10 in the United States to transfer runaways surreptitiously from the
southern slave states to the northern free states and Canada. The uniqueness
of the Railroad lay not in its conception but in the degree of organization,
the scope of the network, and the dedication of a large number of Whites,
Coloureds and Blacks, who risked their freedom and often their lives to
ensure the freedom of enslaved persons, in defiance of state and federal laws
relating to the sheltering of fugitives. They encouraged enslaved persons to
flee from their overlords; organized rest houses along the escape route; pro-