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

32 Flight to Freedom
the whole gamut of possible reactions: prayer, go-slow, downing of tools,
feigned sickness, destruction of crops, poisoning, desertion and armed revolt.
It was the last two options, often combined with others, that became the ultimate
tool for the enslaved people in their quest for freedom. Naveda Chávez-
Hita (1987, 141) points out, in the context of Córdoba, one of the important
plantation areas in Mexico, that by the second half of the eighteenth century
the sharp confrontation between enslaver and enslaved had become a natural
part of social relations.
Ascriptive Criteria for Freedom
Whiteness came to be regarded as the ultimate badge of freedom and
Blackness that of bondage. There was, of course, a penumbra along the continuum
from bondage to freedom in which Whites and Blacks, free and
enslaved, occupied common space, participated in festivals (for instance,
Christmas and the feasts of St John and St Louis), and even shared amorous
embraces (though these were usually forced rather than voluntary, in the case
of Black women). But a wide chasm still existed between Whites and Blacks.
White people did not have to justify their access to freedom: it was taken
as a natural condition of their Whiteness. Black people, in contrast, had to
justify their claims to freedom, to show themselves deserving of it
(Thompson 1995). Ultimately, in slave society Black freedom was viewed,
from the legal standpoint, not as a gift from God but as a result of the largesse
of the White community. Blacks had to find favour in the eyes of Whites
through various behaviours, including fidelity to their masters, willingness to
betray servile revolts, and – in the case of women – willingness to have sexual
relations with their overlords. Even so, freedom granted could be revoked any
time the White authorities felt that the freed persons constituted a burden
on White society, failed to live up to specific social, moral and other obligations
that the society imposed on them, or engaged in activities that the
authoritarian state considered inimical to its interests (Thompson 1990,
138–39; Franco 1979, 38). In 1731 the Jamaican legislature passed a law imposing
loss of freedom on any free Black or free Coloured person who refused to
serve in the militia against runaways (Campbell 1990, 61). In 1754 the Viceroy
of Mexico proclaimed that any freed Black person caught fraternizing with
Maroons would lose his freedom (León 1924, 10). In 1769 Laurent Macé, a