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

28 Flight to Freedom
in the title of his 1982 book that it constituted a form of social death, and in a
later publication (1991, 331) he argues that enslaved persons suffered from
three common disabilities: powerlessness, social degradation (or dishonour)
and natal alienation. Some scholars feel that he has been too sweeping in his
assignment of all enslaved persons to these three categories since, they argue,
the oppressed continuously asserted their rights as human beings in a number
of ways, both individually and collectively. Among these were cultural
retentions (especially in religion, language, music, song, dance, family and
kinship relations, and arts and crafts), the strong gerontocratic basis of their
communities, and – particularly significantly, according to Patterson’s critics
– resistance and revolt.
Marronage and Violence
Maroons have had an ambiguous reputation in popular and scholarly literature,
as both heroes and villains. Slaveholders commonly explained the flight
of individual Maroons in terms of the bad habits that they displayed, such as
being drunkards, sluggards, thieves, murderers and prostitutes. Evaristo
Ujueta declared that the runaway female Manuela, of Santa Marta,
Colombia, was insubordinate, commonly guilty of very bad conduct, and had
other despicable character traits (Romero Jaramillo 1997, 183; see also 186).
Jacinta, of the same province, was accused of having been a thief and a prostitute
since the age of fifteen. It was further alleged that no one was interested
in purchasing her because of her bad character (Romero Jaramillo 1997,
183). The numerous pejorative terms employed concerning Maroons as a
group included: wild men, beasts (or beastly), snakes, gangrene, vermin,
wretches, perfidious villains, cut-throats, pernicious scum, chronic plague,
lurking assassins, desperadoes, lawless freebooters, rebellious rabble, sneaking
and treacherous rogues, skulking runaways, monsters and hydra. 2 A South
Carolina enslaver even referred to one of his runaways as “a stately Baboon”
(Wood 1975, 246). Esteban Deive (1989, 15) observes that the classic description
of the Maroon was that of a common delinquent given over to rapine
and robbery. In 1662 Archbishop Francisco de la Cueva Maldonado dubbed
the typical Maroon community in the Dominican Republic a den of barbarous
thieves, pagan and without laws. However, in the same letter he
showed that they did have communal laws, including the death penalty for