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

54 Flight to Freedom
driven out of a particular area. Armed bands were also common in Peru,
Mexico, the Dominican Republic and the United States, among other places
(Bowser 1974; Esteban Deive 1989; Pereira 1994; Blassingame 1979). An official
report to the Spanish Crown concerning what was taking place in
Mexico in the late sixteenth century stated that the highways had become so
perilous that people could not travel them except accompanied by a large
military guard, and still much fear existed. The danger was compounded by
coalitions involving Chichimeca raiders, Mulattos, Mestizos, vagabonds and
formerly peaceful Indians (Palmer 1976, 123).
The periods during which enslaved persons most commonly absented
themselves temporarily were the Christmas holidays (which usually lasted
two or three days) and the crop season. Most managers granted passes to
their servile charges for the holiday seasons (such as Christmas and Easter)
to visit friends and relatives on neighbouring plantations, though these trips
were usually limited to a single day. Frequently, however, people stayed away
for several days without receiving any sanctions, except perhaps a warning.
State laws generally regarded absenteeism without permission for more than
a few days as desertion. However, few modern scholars regard such absence,
without any evidence of intent to stay away permanently, as marronage.
Debien (1979, 110) dismisses the use of the term in speaking of absences of
up to a week that, according to him, enslaved persons took because they were
lazy and libertines. Esteban Deive (1989, 13–14) asserts that such absences
usually related to some temporary disaffection with the working conditions,
escape from punishment, or desire to visit a companion, and could hardly be
called marronage. Fouchard (1972, 382) views it as more like truancy from
school than a determination to abscond. He dismisses detailed analysis of
this kind of activity with the comment that usually when these persons
returned, their overlords would forgive them with a simple reprimand or a
few strokes with the rod of correction. Manigat (1977, 484) submits that in its
original etymological sense, marronage meant “to run wild”, and a person who
absented himself to visit a girlfriend, for instance, cannot be said rightly to
have been “running wild”.
Frederick Bowser (1974, 190) makes the rather startling statement that in
Peru some instances of flight seem to have been a game or a symbolic gesture.
Here he fails to distinguish between “fleeting absence” – that is,
absence with intent to return shortly – and “flight”, which we take to mean
the intention to stay away indefinitely or permanently from the place of