Freedom on the Move: Marronage in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America

Maroons and the concept of marronage—broadly imagined as individual or collective flight from slavery into the relative security of woods, swamps, or mountains—have recently experienced a swell in critical attention by historians and social scientists studying slavery, freedom, resistance, and geography in the United States. While marronage has long been studied in the context of Central and South America and especially the Caribbean, its significance in British North America and the United States has until quite recently been downplayed or outright ignored. This is in large part because the Caribbean and Latin American models of marronage—most closely associated with places such as Jamaica, Suriname, and Brazil, where large-scale maroon communities won autonomy from colonial control through military action—have dominated the critical discourse surrounding the practice since the 1970s. In his landmark study of enslaved resistance in the United States, for example, Eugene Genovese discounted the presence of US maroons precisely because their tactics and potential to instantiate widespread political revolution did not resonate with those of the famed Caribbean maroons: “[T]hey [US maroons] typically huddled in small units and may be called ‘maroons’ only as a courtesy” since “[t]hey occupied unfavorable terrain with only minimum security and rarely had an opportunity to forge a viable community life. Consequently, many degenerated into wild desperadoes who preyed on anyone, black, white, or red, in their path” (77). However, three recent works—Sylviane Diouf’s Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (2014), Neil Roberts’s Freedom as Marronage (2015), and Daniel Sayers’s A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp (2014)—have sought to push back against the kinds of assertions exemplified by Genovese by definitively establishing the presence of maroons and marronage in British North America and the United States and by expanding the terms by which we apprehend marronage. Diouf and Sayers painstakingly detail, through archival/documentary history and cultural archaeology, respectively, the