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

Totalitarianism and Slavery
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When the governor saw her at the end of that period, he found that her frail
body had been badly torn in places, and it was only his intervention that
secured her release (Thompson 1987, 118).
What do we make of the sexual sins of a manager in Suriname who
stripped naked a young Coloured woman about eighteen years old, tied her
up with her hands suspended to a tree branch and gave her two hundred
lashes because she had refused to allow him to invade her body sexually
Stedman (1988, 264–66), who recorded this incident, declared that she was
being “skinned alive”, and that when he, Stedman, intervened on the young
woman’s behalf, the manager was so furious that he decided to give her
another two hundred lashes! Stedman wrote that after the first whipping she
was dyed in blood from her neck to her ankles. The sexual violation of
women, both married and single, was one of the cardinal sins of the enslavers
and led to frequent violence between them and their enslaved charges. It was
often a reason for desertion, as illustrated by reference to the Venezuelan
Maroon Juan Antonio, who declared that he had decamped because his overlord
violated his wife (who presumably absconded with him) (Brito Figueroa
1985, 241).
Court records in Cartagena from the late seventeenth century recount the
statement of Francisco, seventy years old, about why he had deserted. He
related before Governor Don Marín de Cevallos Lacerda (Martín de
Ceballos y la Cerda) that since his childhood he had served Pedro Pérez, his
overlord, with much love, and that he had married an enslaved Mulatto
woman with whom he had sired eleven children, eight of whom had survived.
Though Francisco had not given his master any motive for umbrage,
the latter decided to sell him, thus separating him from his wife and children.
When Francisco could find no one to help him, he fled to the Tabacal farm
and from there to a palenque. Later, he decided to go with other Maroons to
Pedro Pérez’s place to rescue his wife and four of his children, who were the
only ones that he could find (Navarrete 2003, 47–48).
There was also the case of Juan Alejandro, in Venezuela, who declared
that he had fled from his overlord five years before because the latter had
kept him shackled in irons, given him only a scrap of meat without bread
once daily and no water unless he asked for some, forced him to sleep halfnaked
on the floor, and, for greater torment, during the day kept him in a
cattle pen, tied up with a dog chain, because he had refused to perform the
duties of headman (Brito Figueroa 1985, 240–41). But this case pales into