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

Forms of Marronage
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Esteban Deive (1989, 14–15) regards classic or grand desertion (cimarronaje
clásico or gran cimarronaje) as a much higher level of class struggle: in his view,
people engaging in such activity displayed a greater consciousness of their
state of servitude and of the real possibility of satisfying their longing for
freedom. Grand marronage also offered the deserters an opportunity to create
for themselves a way of life that was structurally and socially of a much higher
order than that to which they had been subjected as enslaved persons. It is
for this reason, he argues, that while the enslavers regarded petit marronage as
a deep-seated vice that had to be arrested, they considered grand marronage
as sedition and as a crime that they had to combat vigorously and without
remorse, using all means at their disposal. Jean-Pierre (2000, 109) posits that
the colonists in Haiti perceived grand marronage not simply as an act of brigandage
but as the germ of revolution. He goes on to say that the Maroon settlement
was a real war academy where the enslaved person learned that the
options were conquest or death (ibid., 111).
Sometimes the quest for personal freedom led people to make very hard –
and sometimes not entirely rational – decisions. This was the case with those
runaways, both men and women, who left spouses and children behind. It is
perhaps rightly assumed that this practice was less frequent among women
than men. Vanony-Frisch (1985, 33–36) identifies seven female runaways who
had left children behind, among the forty-two who had absconded from the
Lepreux plantation in Guadeloupe between 1768 and 1783. Blassingame (1979,
199–200) tries to recapture the moments of parting, based on the autobiographies
of some American deserters:
Mothers and wives argued passionately against it. . . . Henry Bibb said that when
he left his family enslaved it was “one of the most self-denying acts of my whole
life, to take leave of an affectionate wife, who stood before me on my departure,
with dear little Frances in her arms, and with tears of sorrow in her eyes as she
bid me a long farewell. It required all the moral courage that I was master of to
suppress my feelings while taking leave of my little family.”
No doubt, on many occasions, people who for various reasons could not
join the ranks of deserters nevertheless encouraged family members to do so.
William Wells Brown (1999, 688 passim), an enslaved man in Missouri from
1816 to 1834, told of his determination not to leave his beloved mother and
sister behind, and of their pleading with him to go. He also wrote of his
agony on bidding these women farewell when their overlords took them away