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

Forms of Marronage
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bondage. Flight, at least in this sense, was a dangerous game to play, a dalliance
with death through the activities of bounty hunters or the caprice or
sadism of a given overlord. It was not a game of trivial pursuit (see chapter
5). For instance, in the early nineteenth century, Virginian militiamen could
legally seize any Black found away from his supposed place of abode and
shoot him on sight, unless they could stop him in some other way
(Schweninger 2002, 13). The same was true of Maroon hunters in the
Danish West Indies in the eighteenth century (Donoghue 2002, 150). As
Werner Zips (1999, 7–8) notes, petit marronage sometimes brought about
severe punishments. Therefore, Fouchard, Manigat and Bowser take all too
lightly the significance of short-term absence in relation to the safety and
well-being of the enslaved people.
The case of Michael, an enslaved person in Berbice, Guyana, belonging to
the British Crown, is an interesting one of desertion without intent to stay
away permanently, though he absconded frequently as a way of expressing his
discontent with the operation of the system of bondage. The extant record of
his life as a deserter began in July 1821, when Michael was twenty-seven, with
his superintendent’s observation that his colleagues had probably been providing
asylum for him and his companion, Andries, for the previous month.
These young men, like other enslaved persons belonging to the Crown, were
driven to this situation by the failure of the colonial authorities to take seriously
their complaints against the manager of the Crown’s plantation
Berenstein. They had gone to the manager a little over a month earlier, complaining
of heavy task work and unfair and cruel treatment. Michael was particularly
peeved that the manager had refused to allow him to visit his
mother, and also that he, in common with the other people at Berenstein,
was suffering from shortage of rations.
The young men therefore chose to desert, moving from place to place,
until in August they were apprehended on plantation Prospect and delivered
over to the judicial authorities in town. The fiscal (chief judicial officer) sentenced
them to fifty-five lashes each at the public market place and three
months on the chain gang, but released them after confinement of a little
over a month. The superintendent later dispatched them again to Berenstein,
from where Michael absconded in less than a week. However, his freedom
was abridged once again, this time within five days. On this occasion the
fiscal gave the superintendent permission to work him in chains, either on
the plantation or in town, for three months. Gone again at a time not