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

64 Flight to Freedom
a plantation in Haiti, is also worthy of note. An elderly individual, according
to his manager, he was the leader of a trio that included old Nanette, his wife.
They were apprehended after about three weeks. We do not know whether
Jasmin was a habitual deserter. Not long before, he had been transferred from
a sugar plantation in the west to a coffee plantation in the south as part of a
group whose work performance had declined because of some disaffection
with their driver. Their overlord hoped that the change would have a salutary
effect on their performance. The immediate cause of their desertion may have
been the compulsory move that took them away from their friends and possibly
other family members. Strangely, the manager declared that they had
absconded without motive (Debien 1979, 121–22).
Jasmin’s flirtation with freedom did not end with this first apprehension.
Placed under the guard of the driver of his new plantation, he was off sometime
before the following daybreak, only to be picked up a few days later,
showing signs of intense suffering due to inclement weather and hunger. He
had survived on green corn and raw yams. He had constant diarrhoea and
swollen feet (Debien 1979, 122). The old man died two days later. It is clear
that he and his companions could no longer bear the burdens of slavery, in
which, even at an old age, they had no control over their lives. He made what
the manager considered an almost suicidal bid for freedom or for home. The
manager claimed that Jasmin confessed before he died that he had intended
to return to his home on the sugar plantation. As a possible explanation for
his flight, that is highly improbable, since he and his companions must have
realized that they were likely to be punished or, at the very least, sent back to
the coffee plantation from which they had fled.
Enslaved persons of all ages ran away. Two enslaved children in Peru,
Angelina Criolla, eleven years old, and Juan Criollo, twelve, ran away, but in
both cases it was to the house of one of their parents. The Haitian list
includes Rosette and Mars, ten years old; L’Amérique, Jean-Pierre Belaly,
Henri and Azar, all between twelve and fourteen; Marie, thirty-eight; Alexis,
sixty; Lisette and Frances, seventy; and Congo André, at least eighty. The
oldest fugitive in the records consulted was a ninety-year-old unnamed
Fulani man in Haiti (Bowser 1974, 193, 195; Fouchard 1972, 284–87; Geggus
1986, 124). Although there was a wide age spread, the main age range of runaways
in Haiti was seventeen to thirty-five years, followed by the eight-tosixteen
cohort (Fouchard 1972, 286–87). A study of 134 eighteenth-century
newspaper advertisements of runaways in the United States revealed that 76