Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons

4. Daily Life at the Borderlands

[ 97 ]  [ 4 ]  Daily Life at the Borderlands As they settled down at the margins of the slave world, borderland maroons embarked on a life that had little in common with the old one. Working under duress from “sun up to sun down” was over. Although they were now free to manage their own time and organize their own lives as they wished, their closeness to inhabited areas brought tremendous risks and imposed many restrictions on that independent existence. Coming and going in broad daylight, and making the noises that the most ordinary tasks generate, were prohibited. If self-determination was their guiding principle, self-sufficiency, in contrast, was never on their minds, as their environment prevented them from growing the crops and breeding the animals that could ensure their survival. Borderland maroons enjoyed few of the freedoms that a hinterland refuge provided, and yet their location also had its rewards, closeness to loved ones being the most important. Finding adequate shelter, victuals, tools, utensils, information, weapons, ammunition, and clothes became the maroons’ major preoccupations , as was outsmarting the patrols, slaveholders, overseers, and drivers constantly making their rounds on farms, plantations, and the surrounding areas. To succeed in their endeavor they had to find the best ways of profiting from the nearby world from which they had exiled themselves but could still easily access, and of solidifying the social networks that would help them make the most of their unique situation. Daily Life at the Borderlands [ 98 ] From Trees to Caves The new life of the borderland maroons started with the obvious: their living quarters had to blend into the landscape to the point of becoming invisible. Some “homes” were so rudimentary that they could scarcely pass for shelters and were truly indiscernible from the outside: for example , Harry Grimes lived in a tree trunk.1 A hollow gum “sufficiently large to contain 6 persons with much comfort” was the home of Jack Stump and Bristol near Edenton, North Carolina.2 The top of trees also provided refuge to some maroons, who built platforms of branches and covered them with leaves and grass for comfort.3 Louis from Alabama established his quarters in a big oak tree behind the pasture on his owner’s plantation , about a hundred yards from a path. He carried poles and grass up the tree and made himself a bed that doubled as an observation point: “[B]ut you can’t see it from de groun’. When I get up dar I can see all ‘roun,” he recalled.4 One Louisiana man was known to have lived for three years in the crown of a large cypress tree.5 Joe Sims from Virginia had nothing more than a bed he had fashioned out of moss and branches, and two men devised an unusual stratagem: they put cotton seeds in the fields to rot and lay on the natural fertilizer to keep warm.6 The maroons’ habitat could change over time, from a simple refuge at first to a more elaborate structure, as tools and additional materials later became available. William Kinnegy lived in a densely covered area and he upgraded his shelter as soon as he could: I slept under the boughs and on a bed of pine blooms for a month or two (mid-winter and plenty of rain) until spring, when I began to build me a hut. I cut down small trees, and from an old fence got some boards, and soon built a place large enough to sleep in. I had to get a saw, so as not to make a noise; the sound of an axe would be heard a much greater distance.7 Maroons also lived in caverns. They were a natural refuge that offered more space and better protection than trees, as Josh of Richmond County, Georgia, found out. He first tried to live inside a hollow trunk, Daily Life at the Borderlands [ 99 ] but when a bear got the same idea, he had to find other accommodations: large caverns bordered his owner’s plantation and Josh appropriated one.8 George Womble of Valley, Georgia, knew a couple who stayed in a cavern near their plantation and raised their children there. Their cover was so good and they were so successful at eluding capture that they only reappeared after the Civil War.9 The borderland maroons’ most emblematic lodging, though, was neither a tree, nor a cabin...