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

328 Flight to Freedom
Runaways who made it to safe havens – usually states that had abolished
slavery and refused to extradite them – immediately experienced a marked
difference in their emotional and psychological condition, and often in their
physical circumstances, even where they were forced to work as common
drudges. In the first flush of freedom, William Wells Brown (1999, 713)
exclaimed, “I was no more a chattel, but a man!”; and again, “The fact that I
was a freeman – could walk, talk, eat and sleep as a man, and no one to stand
over me with the blood-clotted cowhide – all this made me feel that I was
not myself.” 4 This is what Frederick Douglass (1973, 111) experienced when he
arrived in New Bedford via New York, after escaping from slavery in
Baltimore, Maryland:
In the afternoon of the day when I reached New Bedford, I visited the wharves,
to take a view of the shipping....[A]lmost everybody seemed to be at work, but
noiselessly so, compared with what I had been accustomed to in Baltimore.
There were no loud songs heard from those engaged in loading and unloading
ships. I heard no deep oaths or horrid curses on the laborer. I saw no whipping
of men; but all seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand
his work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness, which betokened
the deep interest which he felt in what he was doing, as well as a sense of his
own dignity as a man. To me this looked exceedingly strange.
There is no denying that the free states were not characterized by the
sound of the cracking whip; the cries of people being broken and disfigured
for life; the sight of heads and other body parts displayed on poles along the
highways, in the public squares and elsewhere; the agony of people being
wrested from their families, never to be seen by them again; the apprehension
of Whites who had to walk about armed and often in groups for safety; an
atmosphere charged with tension and fear of both the known and the
unknown. Freedom did not bring material or social equality to Black persons,
for they were discriminated against in the free states in various ways.
Post-emancipation societies experienced their own traumas and new kinds of
revolts, riots and other forms of worker protest. But they did not have to face
marronage with its troublesome consequences for everyone in the society.
In an otherwise very interesting article, Schweninger (2002, 19) comes to
the strange conclusion that “If the great majority of runaways did not die at
the hands of a group of White planters led by [a] slave (who later received his
freedom for his betrayal) theirs was largely a futile effort.” Her conclusion