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

56 Flight to Freedom
recorded, he was apprehended on plantation Smithson’s Place, sent to town
and given fifteen lashes before being sent back to work.
Six weeks later he was repeating his familiar act, but this time for only
three days before being hospitalized. About two weeks later he was in the
public jail, awaiting trial as a deserter, and he subsequently received forty
lashes on the fiscal’s order. After his release, Michael’s urge to desert
remained unsatisfied, for some months later, in December 1823, he was picked
up on plantation Vryheid, where he had beaten an enslaved person violently,
for which he received twenty-four lashes.
We do not know what turned Michael’s life around, but it might well have
been the abandonment of Berenstein as a production unit. He disliked the
plantation intensely. He was relocated to town, where he was listed in January
1825 as a member of the Government House staff, and remained there until
he fell once again under the direct charge of the superintendent when the
governor decided to reduce his staff (Thompson 2002a, 226–27).
Michael was more fortunate than many others, who lost their lives
attempting to escape from tyrannical overlords. Demby, for instance,
attempted to escape from a brutal whipping inflicted on the orders of Gore, a
Maryland overseer notorious for his gory deeds. He fled into a creek where he
was soon discovered and from which he refused to come out. Gore threatened
to shoot him if, after three admonitions to come out, he still refused to do so.
Demby refused, and Gore shot him: “His mangled body sank out of sight, and
blood and brains marked the water where he had stood.” Gore’s justification
for this murder was that if one did not take a firm line with recalcitrant individuals,
the Blacks would be free and the Whites enslaved (Douglass 1973, 25).
Price (1979, 105) describes petit marronage in the French Caribbean as a
constant thorn in the planters’ sides. However, according to him, while these
Maroons might have done some damage to their overlords’ material interests,
their absence was essentially a nuisance rather than a threat to the
integrity of the slavery system. Esteban Deive treats only grand marronage as
a phenomenon worthy of serious scholarly inquiry. He asserts (1989, 14) that,
as a social phenomenon, petit marronage doubtless constituted an outward
manifestation of the contradictions within the slave mode of production, but
it did not signify any consciousness capable of offering enslaved persons the
possibility of liberating themselves as a social class. He argues further that
enslavers scarcely showed any concern for this kind of absence, clearly
demonstrating that it did not pose any danger to the dominant class.