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52 Flight to Freedom
thinking of these rights when she wrote about the Maroons’ quest for concrete
liberties.
Enslaved and freed Blacks were kept in their place through the watchful
eye of the enslavers, state authorities and military forces. With little room to
manoeuvre, they were subject to the daily trammels of the slavery system.
The Maroons’ situation was just the opposite. They enjoyed a recognizable,
and in some instances a substantial, measure of freedom – though, as we will
see, nothing close to complete freedom. Apart from the philosophical question
of whether anyone can enjoy complete freedom, the Maroons lived with
the threat that what freedom they had attained could be lost as a result of the
military expeditions sent against them by the slaveholding states. Constant
vigilance and preparedness therefore had to be their watchwords. Nevertheless,
they enjoyed a much greater measure of freedom than any other African
communities in the Americas during the slavery period, and what was even
more irksome to the White overlords was that this freedom had been taken
by the Blacks rather than given by the Whites. Maroon communities demonstrated
that Blacks were capable of forging a life outside the boundaries of
the plantation system and the more populous White-dominated societies.