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

Forms of Marronage
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found that most female fugitives in Barbados during the nineteenth century
went to rural destinations – and, interestingly, that most male runaways
headed for Bridgetown or Speightstown, perhaps because many of them were
skilled or semi-skilled. Newspaper advertisements of runaways in South
Carolina indicate that the enslavers believed that about twice as many women
as men were headed for some urban area, but, perhaps strangely, they also
thought that more women were headed for a rural than an urban destination
(Morgan 1986, 67–69).
We cannot draw any firm conclusions about the urban or rural disposition
of female fugitives until much more work is done on the subject. However,
we can say with greater assurance that many more enslaved women were
Maroons in spirit than those who actually made a spirited attempt to escape
the physical trammels of slavery. McFarlane (1986, 149), commenting on the
enslaved persons who did not make a formal bid for freedom through flight,
argues that “this did not efface the vision of freedom, but made its pursuit
more complex and variegated”. A dramatic episode comes to mind: an
enslaved woman in Maryland, on learning that her overlord had willed that
she should be set free if he died without heirs, killed his three children
( Jordan 1968, 392). This sad event occurred because the slavery system caused
her to perceive such an act as the only way out of her nightmare of bondage.
Some Maroon women stand out as much as men for their efforts to escape
bondage and create free communities. Lise, a midwife and repeated fugitive
in Haiti, fled wearing an iron collar and dragging a withered right leg
(Fouchard 1972, 392). Sally, of the Danish West Indies, made her bid for freedom
though “far gone with child” and with one ear severed because of a previous
attempt at running away (Donoghue 2002, 150). Hazard, belonging to
the same colony, though only twenty-two years old, was apparently a frequent
rebel and escapee. She was advertised in the colony’s Gazette as being
lacerated “on her back with the whip in several places” (Donoghue 2002, 151).
The overlord of Isabel, a fugitive in Guatemala, sold her, dubbing her a “crazy
runaway” (Lokken 2004a, 47). Rosette, of Haiti, is perhaps the most frequent
runaway on record. A doctor in 1783 declared that she had deserted for the
hundredth time, brandishing a knife, though the number of desertions was
most likely exaggerated (Fouchard 1972, 391–92).
The story of Zabeth, who constantly sought freedom, is worth repeating.
Both sad and noble, it is a story of remarkable eloquence. What makes it all
the more striking is that she was a Creole, a category of enslaved persons