Slavery's Exiles by Sylviane A. Diouf

Author:Sylviane A. Diouf [Diouf, Sylviane A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Cultural Studies, African-American Studies, History, Americas, United States
ISBN: 9780814724385
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2014-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

[8]

THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP

“ONE could imagine that there may be many negroes living still in the swamp, who have not yet heard that the war is over and that they are free.”1 Such was the reputation for isolation of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons that two years after Emancipation, one could hypothesize that some of them still did not know they were legally free. For the longest time, the swamp and its elusive inhabitants loomed large in the popular imagination. Mysterious, wild, savage, primitive, dreary, gloomy, dismal, oppressive: negative terminology almost always followed any mention of the people and the place, a 2,000 square mile area—until the early nineteenth century—that stretched from southern Virginia to northeast North Carolina.

The existence of hidden families, groups, and individuals in the swamp had been known about since the early 1700s but it was not until the mid-nineteenth century, as they were being aggressively hunted down, that the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp burst onto the national scene. In 1842, Henry W. Longfellow published his celebrated six-stanza poem, “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp”:

In dark fens of the Dismal Swamp

The hunted Negro lay;

He saw the fire of the midnight camp,

And heard at times a horse’s tramp

And a bloodhound’s distant bay.2

Madison Washington, the hero of Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, published in 1853, hid there in a cave for five years, to stay close to his wife. Williams Well Brown’s novel Clotel put Nat Turner and hundreds of his followers in the swamp. In Harriett Beecher Stowe’s hugely successful novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, published in 1856, Dred—the son of Denmark Vesey and a Mandinka mother—the leader of a group of maroons, advocates revolution; and Martin R. Delany’s “Blake; or, the Huts of America” has the runaway Blake/Henry Holland meet old colleagues of Nat Turner and Gabriel, who assure him that “the Swamp contained them [warriors] in sufficient number to take the whole United States.”3

Novelists immortalized imaginary maroons ready to fight the slave system, but the reality was quite different, more complex and more intriguing than fiction. While some maroons’ way of life was not unlike that of their counterparts in the rest of the South, the swamp was also home to two distinctive groups, who lived in two distinctive areas and whose experiences were simultaneously vastly different from each other and specific to the place.

Past the outskirts of the swamp lay the two sociogeographic zones that formed the larger part of the maroons’ landscape. The borderlands in this case could be well within the swamp but they were borderlands in the sense that they formed the margins of places of industrial activity: the canal, logging areas, small stores, and workers’ camps. It was the domain of mostly male maroons, while the hard-to-reach hinterland, surrounded by miles of marshes, sheltered isolated families. How both groups organized their lives, what contact, if any, they had with the outside black and white world, and what kind of safety the swamp provided these exiles

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