Blooming In the Shafts: A Black Mother Scholar’s Tale of Flipping Pandemic Precarity to Educational Possibility

The closure of schools across the country as COVID reached pandemic status, laid bare the long existing inequities experienced by Black children in the K–12 system. Ironically, the chaos in educational spaces at the advent of the pandemic, offered a reprieve from physical school attendance and provided a natural experiment in educational possibilities beyond the classroom. This autoethnographic narrative utilizes the frameworks of BlackCrit and Motherwork in concert with the concept of marronage to interrogate the opportunities and limitations of one such possibility—educational evacuation as marronage through homeschooling.