II - Consciousness and Interaction: Cultural Expressions, Networks and Ties, Geographies and Space

3 “God knows what I do”: Ritual Free Spaces

Global African Diaspora communities experience overlapping forms of systemic oppression, economic exploitation, and marginalization such as physical and social segregation (Harris [1982] 1993; Hamilton 1988, 2007). The seemingly penetrating reach of plantation domination seems to have prevented scholarly exploration of the social world of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, perhaps because they were considered “socially dead” – personae non-grata – in most social, economic, and political terms (Patterson 1982). The Code Noir intended to restrict enslaved people’s everyday movements and activities, while the hierarchy of commandeurs and plantation managers readily used torture as punishment aimed to prevent rebellious behaviors. However, as agents of their own humanity, resistance, and social change, African Diaspora members formed social networks that used cultural and ideological tools in their collective liberation efforts (Hamilton 2007: 31–33). Enslaved people had one free day per week; and the population imbalance between them and plantation personnel inadvertently created social environments that were under the direction and control of blacks themselves, wherein they shared space and time without much European surveillance. Africans’ ritual gatherings at burial sites, in churches, and at nighttime calenda assemblies served as free spaces where they could re-produce aspects of their religious cultures away from the observation of whites. Free spaces, or other monikers like communities of consciousness, safe havens, sequestered sites, or spatial reserves, are “small-scale settings within a community or movement that are removed from the direct control of dominant groups, are voluntarily participated in, and generate the cultural challenge that precedes or accompanies political mobilization” (Polletta 1999: 1). These liberated sites allowed African descendants to transform existing social institutions into sites for collective struggle and social change, where they could freely articulate their understandings of self and cultivate shared oppositional consciousness, collective identities, cultural formations, and political agendas (Evans and Boyte 1986; Couto 1993; Fantasia and Hirsch 1995; Morris and Braine 2001). Various manifestations of African Diaspora communities’ free spaces have been crucibles for participants to assert declarations of freedom and liberty (Evans and Boyte 1986); heighten awareness of unequal social conditions and invoke historical memory of past resistance strategies (Covin 1997); stake political claims for racial justice (Hayes 2008); and take part in civic activism, mutual aid, and community uplift (Hounmenou 2012).

This chapter argues that ritual free spaces in Saint-Domingue had several functions beyond cultivating an environment for cultural and spiritual expression, and that these gatherings allowed participants to: procure and employ sacred technologies to correct the imbalances of enslavement and reclaim personal and collective power; enhance oppositional consciousness through seditious speech; mobilize and establish social networks between enslaved people and maroons; revere women as important figures in ritual life; and build racial solidarity between African ethnic groups and enslaved and free blacks by binding each other to secrecy. Africa-inspired rituals flourished in free spaces over the course of two centuries, despite consistent repression from French Caribbean planters and failed attempts to Christianize newly arrived Africans (Peabody 2002). Africa-inspired rituals both reproduced and were the products of collective consciousness, identity construction, and participants’ respective cultural and religious homeland practices (Durkheim 1912). Rituals are an often-repeated pattern of behavior set apart from other ways of acting, in such a way that aligns one with ultimate sources of power (Sewell 1996b: 252; Kane 2011: 10–12). Participants are aware that the focus of the activities concern ultimate power, and therefore feel solidarity through mutual connection to the power source and its symbolic representations. Symbolic meanings involve pre-existing concepts in the mind that are communicated via historical memory, images, and materials objects. They are historically constituted and transformed through intergenerational usage (Kane 2011: 10–12) – or, in the case of Saint-Domingue, through the constant replenishing of the Africa-born population through the transAtlantic slave trade. Though rituals are largely everyday occurrences, they can also punctuate major historical events and be incited by the collective excitement of revolutionary processes (Sewell 1996b), for example the Bwa Kayman ceremony that took place in August 1791 (see Chapter 8). In a non-sacred sense, rituals can be the hubs of forging political and cultural alliances that function as counterhegemonic structures. Through micro-level struggles common in colonial contact zones, disparate identity groups come together through identification with shared symbols, ideas, or goals that have a wider appeal to facilitate coordination and the exchange of ideas, strategies, and political goals, commitment to a cause, and identity development (Pratt 1992; Ansell 1997; Harris 2001; Kane 2011).

Cultural activities such as rituals use material artifacts, and participants perform symbolic representations that give actors access to shared knowledge, values, and power, and enhance solidarity and mutual connection (Johnston 2009; Kane 2011: 10–12). Africa-inspired ritual gatherings in Saint-Domingue may have been strictly coordinated on ethnic lines in the early eighteenth century,¹ but there was more than likely inter-ethnic collaboration and exchange to meet the needs of Africans who were not part of the dominant Bight of Benin or West Central African ethnic groups. Africans and African descendants from varying backgrounds or statuses were aware of free space ritual gatherings and sought to participate in them to connect to something culturally familiar that affirmed their humanity. Though they were outlawed by the Code Noir, planters largely ignored secret night-time dances, burials, and all-black church services and thus they happened frequently. These were opportunities for people to perform the sacred rites associated with their religious and cultural background, encounter and network with maroons or other enslaved people from nearby parishes, buy and sell ritual artifacts, and be audience to lay-preachers, priests, and prophets to further comprehend the state of their collective existence and ways of seeking retribution. Therefore, I argue that participation in free space ritual gatherings and/or using individualized sacred technologies produced and exchanged within those spaces not only helped mediate everyday issues, provide healing, and facilitate relationships with spirit beings, but also cultivated a growing oppositional consciousness aimed toward resisting enslavement and enacting collective rebellion.

Death was one of if not the leading everyday occurrence with which enslaved people contended using sacred means. Ritualists who had proficiency in healing, prophecy, assembling spiritual objects, and either inflicting death upon wrongdoers or protecting others from death were prominent figures within the enslaved community. Those believed to have supernatural powers traveled between plantations performing rituals and were mainly consulted by the enslaved, but in some instances even free people of color and whites utilized their services. These charismatic leaders claimed power from the non-material world, which in turn reinforced their power and influence within the plantation system. Similarly, African notions of political power and leadership, particularly in regions like the Bight of Benin and West Central Africa, were deeply connected to the spiritual realm. Rulers were ultimate sacred authorities with access to knowledge and power from the non-material world. As Chapter 1 discussed, kings and queens from the Bight of Benin and West Central Africa were keenly aware of their ability to wield spiritual power for political purposes. This provides a context for how enslaved people in Saint-Domingue would have conceptualized sacred ritual leaders like Pierre “Dom Pedro” or Jérôme Pôteau as fulfilling political roles that were of equal significance.

While most of the ritual leaders discussed in this chapter were men, it is important to note that women figured prominently in free space ritual practices as sacred authorities in keeping with West and West Central African gender roles. In the Dahomey Kingdom, women held important spiritual, political, and military positions as vodun ancestral deities, kpojito queen mothers who counseled kings, and “Amazon” soldiers who composed all-female regiments.² West Central African women like Queen Njinga and Dona Beatriz wielded political and spiritual power to marshal defenses against the slave trade and civil war.³ On the other side of the Atlantic, gendered, racial, and class hierarchy relegated black women, especially those who were Africa-born, to the most labor-intensive work in the slavery-based political economy. Therefore, black women were marginally represented in spaces of formally recognized power in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. However, ideas from Black/African Diaspora Studies, Sociology, and Anthropology help frame black women’s social positionality as the springboard for “bridge” leadership activism that is most potent in culturally-driven free spaces, such as ritual gatherings, and that connects rank-and-file grassroots efforts to larger movement organizing (Terborg-Penn 1996; Robnett 1997; Kuumba 2002; Kuumba 2006; Perry 2009; Hounmenou 2012).

Bridge leaders occupy roles that defy components of traditionally recognized forms of leadership, such as holding titled positions within formal organizations. Instead, black women bridge leaders have mobility within non-hierarchical spaces and employ individualized interactive styles of mobilization and recruitment (Robnett 1997: 17–20). In the context of enslavement, women created social networks among themselves and others to ensure their survival (Terborg-Penn 1996: 223) and to coordinate liberatory actions. As Chapter 4 will show, adult women maroons in Saint-Domingue were more likely than men to have escaped with the assistance of a free person of color, a family member, or a relationship tie to another plantation, further indicating that women activated and maintained social networks beyond their immediate vicinity. This chapter will introduce readers to women like Brigitte Mackandal and Marie Catherine Kingué, whose skills with administering or healing poisonings made them highly regarded spiritual figures among enslaved people across several plantations. Later chapters of this book will highlight how enslaved women served as vaudoux queens, poison couriers, spies, protectors of sacred knowledge and secrets held by rebels, and mobilizers during the early Haitian Revolution insurgency. For example, Cécile Fatiman led the sacralizing ceremony for the August 1791 mass revolt, “Princess” Amethyste galvanized women fighters under the symbolism of vaudoux to help Boukman Dutty attack Le Cap, and other vaudoux queens discovered by Colonel Malenfant refused to identify their male rebel counterparts. Through the lens of black women’s bridge leadership, we might think of Africa-inspired sacred rituals as a collection of localized idioms and practices that formed cultural resistance against the imposition of Western Christian values and were a vehicle for organizing mobilization networks (Kuumba and Ajanaku 1998).

This chapter follows the thesis put forward in previous chapters, that the insurrectionary activities of the enslaved that gave birth to the Black Radical Tradition were ontologically grounded in the non-physical, sacred realm and exemplified aspects of the non-material world that were beyond the reach of racial capitalism’s early plantocractic manifestation. However, while Robinson argues that the violence that characterized the Black Radical Tradition was largely contained within enslaved black communities as a form of internal regulation – and this appears to be the case with some poisoning cases to be discussed below – much of the symbolic and physical violence perpetrated by enslaved people in Saint-Domingue targeted the owners and means of plantation production. More specifically, ritual practices helped to mediate and undermine the racialized subjugation of enslavement. African Diasporans’ re-creation of rituals was rooted in their sacred understandings of the world, and they included participants and leaders from varying backgrounds and statuses: Africa-born, colony-born creole, mixed-race, free, enslaved, and runaways. Further, the Africa-inspired sacred ritual practitioners incorporated symbols, performances, and artifacts from diverse cultural groups to cultivate shared meanings, solidarity, and oppositional consciousness. For example, herbalist and poisoner François Mackandal used calenda gatherings as spaces to invoke the history of racial domination in Saint-Domingue and to prophesy the formation of a future black-led state. As we will see in Chapter 8, Boukman Dutty employed religious symbols from various ethnic groups in organizing the Bwa Kayman ceremony in the days before leading the August 1791 insurrection. Other ritualists escaped enslavement, used herbal packets as poison and for healing purposes, organized underground networks and cultivated large followings, and advocated for rebellion and independence. Over time, African Diasporans’ collective consciousness became increasingly politicized and hostile toward their social conditions.

Poison

As Chapter 1 explains, many Africans in Saint-Domingue originated from societies in which imbalances, disharmonies, and disruptions in political, economic, and social spheres were managed and mediated through spiritual means. Conversely, the spiritual realm had the responsibility to serve as a check and balance against, and at times protector from, malevolent political and economic forces. African royal figures had the social and moral responsibility to rule with fairness, which their engagement in the slave trade directly countered. Especially in the Kongo lands, unethical behavior or the abuse of power could result in accusations of witchcraft, prompting ritualists to use nkisis as self-armaments and to conduct poison ordeals on order of the king. By the time African captives disembarked at Saint-Domingue’s ports, they had already lost the social, spiritual, and military battles against the encroachments of the transAtlantic slave trade; they had not, however, lost the battle to gain their freedom from enslavement itself. While they did not have the necessary structures, such as shrines, to fully re-create their religious systems, African Diasporans relied on free space gatherings to piece together and exchange elements of their rituals such as the affinities to spirit beings and sacred technologies. These spaces, and the rituals themselves, then reinforced a sense of opposition to enslavement by enacting inter- and intra-racial justice against those deemed as witches or slave trade participants (Thornton 2003; Paton 2012). Poison was one tactic within enslaved people’s repertoire of contention, a collection of resistance actions that also included marronnage, that was useful in the struggle against slavery. Repertoire tactics can change over time, or be discarded or appropriated, according to how participants assess its effectiveness (Tilly 1995; Traugott 1995; Taylor and Van Dyke 2004; Tilly 2006; Biggs 2013; della Porta 2013; Ring-Ramirez, Reynolds-Stenson, and Earl 2014). On the African continent, poison ordeals were associated with those in power, while in the Americas, the powerless adopted the poisoning tactic as a means of challenging inequality.

Enslaved ritualists used poison to disempower evildoers – members of the plantocracy and enslaved people suspected of cooperating with planters. When understood through the worldview of the enslaved population, spiritual activities like poisoning were not merely supernatural phenomena, they were critiques against the slave trade and racial slavery. The Atlantic slave trade was perhaps the most destructive force against African social, economic, and political formations (Rodney 1982); and enslavement in the Americas was deadliest in the sugar colonies, most prominently Saint-Domingue. One of the first recorded acts of using poison in Ayiti/Española against a slave owner was in 1530 when an enslaved woman was burned at the stake for attempting to kill her female enslaver.⁴ In 1723, a runaway leader named Colas Jambes Coupées and several of his accomplices were arrested in Limonade and executed as “sorcerers” who poisoned other blacks, terrorized white planters, and conspired to abolish the colony.⁵ Jambes Coupées, whose name suggests that one of his legs had been chopped off as punishment for repeated marronnage, was a predecessor to François Mackandal and other fugitive ritualists who cultivated a following of maroons and enslaved people. Chapter 7 will further explore the case of Jambes Coupées and marronnage in the early eighteenth century, an understudied period of Saint-Domingue’s history. But as this chapter will show, marronnage, the convergence of spiritual and political leadership, and the fear of white death due to poison and slave rebellion in the late eighteenth century came to be synonymous with only one name: Mackandal.

The Mackandal Affair

Mackandal was formerly enslaved on a northern plantation owned by Sieur Tellier and he often worked for Lenormand de Mezy in the Limbé district.⁶ Though one source identifies Mackandal as a Mesurade from the Windward Coast, an often-cited account from 1787, Extrait du Mercure de France: Makandal, Histoire Véritable, explains that Mackandal was brought to the colony at age 12 from the Upper Guinea region of West Africa, and that he was a “Mahommed,” or a Muslim, who had at least some Arabic linguistic competency.⁷ He was a distinctive character, with acquired skills and gifts in music, painting, sculpting, and herbal medicine. He attempted escape from enslavement several times before his final retreat into the mountains after losing a hand in a sugar mill and later tending to animals. Mackandal’s 18-year escape into the Limbé mountains is where he developed a strong following as a charismatic leader. He claimed himself to be immortal and was considered a prophet who secretly traversed plantations spanning the northern plain, from Fort Dauphin to Port-de-Paix, to speak during night-time assemblies or in an “open school,” as Moreau Saint-Méry described it. Early descriptions claim that Mackandal foretold the overthrow of enslavement, using different colored scarves as a metaphor to illustrate that the island once belonged to the “yellow” indigenous Americans, was under domination by white Europeans, but would soon be under the control of black Africans. Legend states that he aimed to rid the colony of whites by producing and distributing packets of poisonous mixtures that slaves could use to kill their owners and other enslaved people who were perceived as being in solidarity with whites.⁸ Mackandal infiltrated plantation systems by recruiting an underground network of people who were willing to transport packets of poisons, potions, or remedies. The goal of this campaign, as he communicated at the evening religious gatherings, was to overthrow enslavement by poisoning the white colonials.

Court documents from the Mackandal case associated the macandal packets with gris-gris from the “langue mennade” – a direct reference to the Mende linguistic origins of gris-gris amulets produced by Muslim marabouts in the Upper Guinea region, which Pierre Du Simitière also observed in Léogâne (Figure 2.5). These amulets were leather pouches that contained written scriptures from the Qur’an for protective purposes. Clients ported gris-gris underneath head wraps; around their necks, arms, waists, ankles or knees; they could be mounted over doors or placed under beds.⁹ In François’ case, he wore his gris-gris or macandal under a hat. He combined other artifacts and prayed over the materials with what seemed to be an Islamic incantation of “Alla[h], Alla[h],” which he claimed invoked the power and blessing of Jesus. These sacks were composed of human bones, nails, roots, communion bread, small crucifixes, and incense that were bound together in holy-water soaked cloth and twine.¹⁰ Individuals who had the expertise to compose the macandals and to invoke the spirits embedded in the sacks were considered to be of the first order, or the highest leadership rank among the community of ritualists. Each macandal was named after an individual who occupied a rank, which was delineated by knowing secret phrases or names of macandal producers. Those who gave the name of “Charlot” were of the first order, indicating women played indispensable roles within the network.¹¹ The macandals could be used for strength, to attract love, to protect a person from a slave owner’s whip for committing marronnage, or to make the slave owner confused or the target of misfortune. After granting supplicants’ requests, the macandals had to be “re-charged” with food left for them to eat, an antecedent to the ways that contemporary Haitian Vodou practitioners sacrificially “feed” the lwa, or spirits.

The anonymous letter Relation d’une Conspiration Tramée par les Nègres estimates that as many as 30–40 whites, including women and children, and about 200–300 other enslaved people and animals were killed in the Mackandal conspiracy. A man named l’Éveillé agreed to poison his first owner, an upholsterer named Labadie, as well as the wife of a slave owner, and a surgeon from Limonade. In Le Cap, a merchant named Mongoubert and Mme. Lespes were both poisoned by black women who were convicted and condemned to death. Several other cases emerged: Marianne, the “chief poisoner” at Le Cap was connected to Mackandal through his wife Brigitte. Marianne, Jolicoeur, and Michel poisoned a hairdresser named Vatin, because he would not allow them to partake in a Sabbath dinner in his kitchen. A woman who previously lived with Jolicoeur poisoned the wife of Rodet and wanted to kill Jolicoeur’s enslaver, Millet. Henriette was accused and convicted of poisoning her female enslaver, Faveroles. Cupidon allegedly poisoned another black man named Apollon, as well as two Decourt women, and the owner himself. The following were also suspected of poison: black men and women belonging to M. Hiert, M. de la Cassaigne, Lady Paparet, Sieur Delan, and M. le Prieur. Thélémaque was condemned for poisoning with “vert-de-gris,” or the green leaf that was the container for poison and synonymous with macandals, that he hid in a dish of sprouts, resulting in nearly all the houseguests becoming sick.¹² On April 8, 1758, three people, Samba, Colas, and Lafleur, were sentenced to death for their part in the poisonings that occurred in the northern department, and six slaves on a Limbé plantation were executed as punishment for allegations of poison.¹³

African-Atlantic Ethnic Solidarities

People associated with François Mackandal’s poison network represented various ethnicities originating from Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, and West Central Africa, suggesting his prophesy of black rule was not merely rhetoric but was based on the lived experience of building a diverse network of Africans and creoles – even free people of color – who collaborated based on shared principles and common practices. Mackandal’s speeches about restoring racial justice to the colony were particularly important in cultivating a sense of collective consciousness and solidarity among enslaved Africans of varying backgrounds. Solidarity can be thought of as a sense of loyalty, shared interest, and identification with a collective that enhances cohesion, and advances the idea that the well-being of a group is of such great importance that it will yield widespread participation in collective action (Fantasia 1988; Gamson 1992; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Hunt and Benford 2004). François Mackandal was probably indeed a Mende-speaker of Senegambian or Sierra Leonean origin from the widespread Guinea region, as early sources have suggested, and had some familiarity with Islam – which had been the driving force of the Futa Jallon and Futa Tooro anti-slavery movements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹⁴ Given the dire circumstances of enslavement, he collaborated with Africans of different ethnicities, such as his Kongolese associates Mayombé and Teyselo, whose fundamental worldviews were probably not incompatible with his own, particularly since Africans generally did not restrict their religious beliefs to fixed orthodoxies.¹⁵

Inter-cultural exchange within the sacred realm is a window through which we can begin to understand how collective consciousness and solidarity were forged within African descendants’ ritual life, Mackandal’s actions, and his network of Senegambian, Bight of Benin, and West Central African poisoners. The calenda, vaudoux, and other sects with which Mackandal was familiar shared commonalities of (1) levels of initiation, (2) herbal medicine practices, (3) spiritually charged objects, (4) divination and prophecy, and (5) anti-slavery sentiments. We might think of François Mackandal as an African-Atlantic “creole” from the Upper Guinea region whose early exposure to Islam in Africa, and later to West Central African practices in Saint-Domingue, provided him with socio-cultural and linguistic flexibility (Landers 2010) to interact with Africans of varying backgrounds and assert a racially themed prophesy of impending upheaval. Sugar plantations in the northern plain tended to have more ethnic diversity than coffee plantations, which West Central Africans increasingly dominated midway through the eighteenth century.¹⁶ Some individuals, like Mackandal, would have participated in foreign rituals and had flexibility with sacred symbols from varying cultural groups, contributing to a wider appeal to the masses. Mackandal’s main associates, Teyselo and Mayombé, like him, originated from a region that was dominated by or had ongoing contact with monotheistic, Abrahamic religions – Christianity in the Kongo Kingdom and Islam in the Senegambia region. For example, Mackandal incorporated small crucifixes into his gris-gris artifacts to invoke blessings from Jesus, which would have appealed to Africans from the Kongo Kingdom who either were already baptized before their arrival in Saint-Domingue or who later embraced Christianity.

Enslaved women who worked within the domestic sphere acted as bridge leaders, constituting the main poison transporters.¹⁷ François Mackandal’s wife Brigitte seems to have been his main courier and was knowledgeable in the ritual process involved in creating macandals, stating “God knows what I do, God opens the eyes to those who ask for eyes.” Brigitte transported macandals between François and Marianne, a woman who was the “chief of the poisoners of Le Cap.” A Poulard woman named Assam, a domestic on the LaPlaine plantation in Acul, admitted to witnessing a Bambara man named Jean transport poison between several plantations using other women as couriers. The two women, Marie-Jeanne and Madeleine, were Niamba and Nagô, respectively. In Petit Anse, a Yoruba man named Hauron was accused of giving poison to other slaves. Assam’s testimony – combined with a spontaneous confession by an enslaved man named Medor in Fort Dauphin who admitted that the goal of the conspiracy was to collaborate with free people of color in destroying the colony so the enslaved could escape and be free – was what eventually exposed the network and led to François Mackandal’s arrest in November 1757.¹⁸ A number of women and three free people of color were among the 140 arrested for allegedly following Mackandal and providing arsenic to poison slave owners in support of slaves gaining manumission.

The Politics of Death

Those arrested in connection with the Mackandal affair were noted to have sung a song in Kreyol: “ouaïe, ouaïe, Mayangangué, zamis moir mourir, moi aller mourir, [… my friends are dying, I will die …] ouaïe, ouaïe, Mayangangué.”¹⁹ The words of the song reveal a sense of shared fate, and perhaps hopelessness, in response to the overwhelming volume of deaths among enslaved people. It might be argued, however, that death was not necessarily viewed as a condemnation, but as a path to freedom from bondage, a return to the homeland “Guinea,” and an entry into the spirit world where there was an opportunity to further influence the natural world. Mackandal’s wife, Brigitte, may have transitioned into the world of the lwa as Maman Brigitte, who has authority over cemeteries.²⁰ Mackandal’s claim that he was immortal, and the imminence of death reflected in the song were possibly more than spiritual messages – they could have been threats to unleash the power of the dead on the living. If we consider that Mackandal was a Mende speaker, as his familiarity with gris-gris would suggest, it appears that aspects of Mende cosmology fit Mackandal’s profile. Within the Mende were decentralized structures, including societies based on ritual knowledge and the principles of justice, retribution, and secrecy. Mende leaders held the power of life and death and inflicted punishments on intruders or those who committed offenses against individuals or the whole community. Moreover, women were indispensable in Mende societies – even those that were male dominated – and were needed to mediate the human and spirit realm, which helps explain women’s centrality in Mackandal’s inner circle.²¹

After his initial arrest in November 1757, Mackandal escaped jail and was again free until he was later seized at a calenda ritual dance gathering at the Dufresne plantation in Limbé, then burned at the stake in Cap Français on January 20, 1758. Witnesses claimed that Mackandal’s body evaporated before the flames engulfed him and converted him into a mosquito, a plague of which he had earlier prophesied would bring destruction to the whites. Several African belief systems include notions of an afterlife, the transmigration of spirits from one physical entity to another, or the elevation of a human into a pantheon of revered spirits.²² Enslaved Africans’ reaction to Mackandal’s death, and the “ouaïe, ouaïe, Mayangangué” chant, can be considered part of a larger mortuary political stance, the “profound social meaning from the beliefs and practices associated with death … employed … [and] charged with cosmic importance – in struggles toward particular ends” (Brown 2008: 5). Death was ubiquitous in Saint-Domingue – nearly half of incoming Africans perished within five years – as were attempts to prevent it, symbolize and commemorate it, or inflict it. African Diasporans’ belief in Mackandal’s immortality was not merely a sense of mourning and reverence, but one that connected private emotions and conceptions of death and the afterlife with wider concerns about enslavement and freedom. Moreover, the macandal packets that he and others assembled and sold contained fragments of human bones, suggesting the dead carried sacred powers that were important and effective for navigating the natural world.

Mackandal’s death supports the notion that funeral rituals involve both grieving and burying the dead, and provide time and space to address social, economic, and political issues (Tamason 1980). In pre-colonial African societies, especially those of the Bight of Benin and West Central Africa, spiritual leaders were revered and often held important political positions. Vincent Brown has argued that since enslaved ritualists “drew their most impressive power from the management of spirits and death, the prohibition [of ritual practices] amounted to a strategy to limit the prestige the enslaved could derive from association with the spirits of the dead, while maximizing the power of the colonial government’s ‘magic’” (Brown 2008: 151). The ability to communicate with or marshal the spiritual energy of the dead, to protect oneself or others from death, or to inflict death translated to a type of community-endorsed political power that transcended colonial authority and therefore was a threat to the social order. Mackandal – and as we will see with several poisoners who followed him, organizers and participants of calenda ritual gatherings, and later the midwife Marie Catherine Kingué – negotiated matters of life and death and at times relayed messages condemning racial slavery, which elevated them to the level of political significance. Mackandal’s message regarding racial stratification, power, and control over land and resources infused into Africa-inspired rituals a politicized awareness of and oppositional attitude toward the oppressive colonial situation. This melding of the sacred and material worlds would not have been foreign to the bondspeople of Saint-Domingue, especially those of African origin from places like the Bight of Benin or the Loango Coast, where religion informed political and economic shifts and vice versa. The enslaved population likely would have welcomed such an articulation to facilitate comprehension of the new world into which they had been violently thrust, and as such revered Mackandal and his legacy.

Poison Post-Mackandal: 1760s–1780s

Mackandal’s case inspired fear among the colonists and was a watershed event that altered the structures of the colonial order as the courts developed ordinances and divisions of police to further control and repress the enslaved population (Sewell 1996a). On April 7, 1758, the Council of Cap Français issued an ordinance regarding the policing of enslaved people in response to the Mackandal affair. Articles banned affranchis and enslaved people from making, selling, or distributing garde-corps or macandals, and issued a fine of 300 livres for any planter who allowed drumming or night gatherings on their property.²³ Yet, these codes were not fully enforced and therefore did not stop people from using Africa-inspired technologies to empower themselves to solve personal and public problems associated with their oppression. Enslaved people in the northern plain viewed poisoning as a successful repertoire tactic, given the political impact of the François Mackandal affair on the colonial order and on witnesses to his execution, and they adopted the tactic for themselves. After the execution, Mackandal’s name became synonymous with certain religious leaders, dances, medicinal blends, and poisons most specifically.²⁴ Poisoning allegations continued in the wake of Mackandal’s death, especially in northern Saint-Domingue, setting off a heightened repression of social and religious activities that were not explicitly Christian, such as using poisonous herbal blends and the calenda gatherings. Both enslaved and free black people were banned from practicing medicine in April 1764, which indicated a fear that free blacks with skills in medicinal practice and access to materials like arsenic used it to distribute to the enslaved and facilitate the poisoning of whites.²⁵ Repression did not hinder Africans and African descendants from partaking in sacred ritual artifacts or attending ritual gatherings. However, rather than hand over poisoners to the courts as in the Mackandal case, political authorities relinquished the responsibility for punishing poisoners to slave owners themselves. As poisoning accusations continued in the 1760s and 1780s, enslavers increasingly used torturous means to obtain confessions, while the colonial government abdicated its protection of the enslaved.²⁶

Across the northern plain, enslaved people and maroons were implicated as poisoners between the 1760s and 1780s, suggesting a diffusion of collective consciousness about Mackandal, the acts of marronnage and poison, and solidarity with the political ideas he represented. On April 2, 1766, a Kongolese man named Eustache was reported missing from Mr. Boyveau’s plantation in Dondon.²⁷ Not only had Eustache escaped, he had begun to assume the name “Makandal” in recent years, which can be attributed to a sense of connection, solidarity, or shared identity the former felt toward François Mackandal. Perhaps Eustache “Makandal” had been initiated in François Mackandal’s network and was given his name before he escaped the Dondon plantation. Even if Eustache was not an initiate, he was more than likely aware of François Mackandal’s life and influence given the proximity of Dondon to Limbé, less than 50 kilometers, where Mackandal was formerly enslaved.

In May 1771, a group of enslaved people went to Cap Français to complain that their owner was torturing accused poisoners, burning five women and men alive and killing two of them.²⁸ Another enslaved woman living with a white man, M. Beaufort, was accused of wanting to poison her owner, Madame Raulin, and going off as a maroon.²⁹ In 1774, a young man was arrested and arsenic was found in his bag; a black pharmacist was implicated but was dead by the time of the judgment.³⁰ Three enslaved domestics poisoned the manager at the Fleuriau plantation in Cul-de-Sac in 1776. A young boy warned the Fleuriau manager that his soup was poisoned, so they gave the soup to a dog and it died immediately. The three perpetrators admitted their actions and that they also poisoned M. Rasseteau, a former attorney; they were imprisoned and later burned alive.³¹ In 1777, near Cul-de-Sac, a man named Jacques was arrested and burned alive for poisoning one hundred of his owner Corbieres’ animals with arsenic over an eight-month span.³² That same year, another police ruling was issued prohibiting enslaved people from meeting during the day or at night under the pretense of weddings or funerals. The ruling expressly forbade drumming and singing, and, in 1780, African descendants were again banned from making or selling any medicinal substances.³³ Colonists saw a connection between the ritual gatherings and poison, since these packets were often sold and distributed at the assemblies.

An alleged poisoner from Limonade, 33-year-old Marc Antoine Avalle, nicknamed “Kangal,” was questioned on June 30, 1780, and jailed in Le Cap. Among other vices, Antoine and his accomplices Bayome, Palidore, and Pierre were accused of poisoning 25 black people and 49 animals, including mules, cattle, and horses in 1776, and were imprisoned in Le Cap.³⁴ Despite the 1780 ban on selling medicinal substances, a black apothecary was arrested in 1781 for selling a lethal drug to an enslaved person who used it to commit suicide – a common individualized response to the trauma of enslavement.³⁵ An overseer at Cul-de-Sac caught a washerwoman attempting to dump a poisonous powder into his water in 1782.³⁶ In 1784, a woman named Elizabeth “Zabeau” attempted to poison her owner with substances in his food and drink.³⁷ On May 8, 1781, an advertisement was placed for a griffe creole named Jean-Baptiste, born in Ouanaminthe. Fifteen days before the advertisement was placed, Jean-Baptiste escaped a plantation owned by M. Lejeune in Plaisance, a parish near Limbé, and was reported as a “thief” and a macandal.³⁸ In contrast to Eustache, the 1766 absconder who deliberately took the surname “Makandal,” Lejeune described Jean-Baptiste as a macandal to indicate the more general crime of poisoning. Perhaps Jean-Baptiste had killed or attempted to kill someone on the Lejeune plantation, then escaped to avoid inevitable punishment. The advertisement details could have indicated the beginning of a real conspiracy, because two enslaved people on Lejeune’s property allegedly killed his nephew later in 1783.³⁹ The advertisement also implies a long-standing paranoia about poison on the Lejeune property. Jean-Baptiste likely escaped from the same coffee plantation that became the center of controversy in March 1788, when the plantation owner’s son, Nicolas Lejeune, nearly tortured to death two enslaved women named Zabeth and Marie Rose and executed four others. Lejeune accused the victims of poisoning nearly 500 bondspeople on the Plaisance plantation over the course of 25 years. Lejeune so brutally tortured the two women that 14 other enslaved Africans strategically used provisions of the 1784 Code Noir to file charges against him in Le Cap.⁴⁰ Laws to prevent assemblies and to keep black people from possessing medicinal and other ritual items were an ineffective means of repression against poisonings, however the torture of Zabeth and Marie Rose may have signaled to ritualists that poison as an individualized act of resistance was no longer an effective repertoire tactic. Enslaved and maroon ritualists continued to utilize sacred technologies for individual usage, but they also relied on organizing networks to inspire broader forms of insurgency.

Communities of Rebellion

In addition to Mackandal, rebels like Pierre “Dom Pedro,” Télémaque, and Jérôme dit Pôteau communicated to their followers the injustice of enslavement and promoted ideas about freedom and independence. Ritual participants and leaders, suspected poisoners, and midwives escaped enslavement and used marronnage to organize other enslaved people. They preached liberation to audiences on plantation outskirts to address the unethical conventions of enslavement in Saint-Domingue, especially since West Central Africans and those who took part in their ritual technologies were keenly averse to exploitative, abusive practices, which they would have viewed as witchcraft. Seditious speech to incite or inspire rebellion against Saint-Domingue’s racial conditions occurred within free spaces and served as a discourse of contention. It raised oppositional consciousness – which arises from a group’s experiences with systems of domination, overlapping institutions, values, and ideas that support the exploitation and powerless of one group in favor of another – and enhanced critical comprehension about the social conditions enslaved people faced in order to develop the tools to combat those conditions while taking part in free space activities (Morris 1992; Morris and Braine 2001). As several cases will show, ritual rebels expressed sedition by encouraging other slaves to resist, challenging white authority, and even threatening whites – all verbal acts that disrupted the prevailing social interaction order that demanded black subservience (Tyler 2018) and that would have been met with dire punishments.

“Dom Pedro”

The contemporary petwo pantheon of spirits in Haitian Vodou is typically attributed to the petro dances observed by Moreau de Saint-Méry, who distinguished the petro from the vaudoux ritual dance, stating that the former was more dangerous, powerful, and had the potential to foment rebellion among the enslaved population. Nearly two centuries later, Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars (1938) witnessed a petwo ceremony and linked it to the Lemba society of West Central Africa. Recently uncovered archival material about Pierre “Dom Pedro,” the originator of the petro dance, seem to support Price-Mars’ thesis that Dom Pedro and members of this spiritual sect were connected to the Lemba of the eighteenth century. The Lemba society was a closed but vast network of initiates and family members who regulated local markets in the region and practiced healing rituals to counterbalance the negative effects that the slave trade inflicted upon West Central African communities. The Lemba emphasized fairness and justice, and imposed harsh punishments on those who violated their peacekeeping code of ethics. As the transAtlantic slave trade weakened the power of coastal kingdoms and their justice systems, public nkisi shrines became increasingly “concerned with adjudicatory and retaliatory functions” to mediate societal imbalances.⁴¹ In Saint-Domingue’s colonial period, the petro sect was associated with thievery and other malevolent acts, which may have been the result of deported Lemba affiliates attempting to rectify the extreme level of exploitation and injustice they experienced as enslaved people.

Pierre “Dom Pedro” emerged as a leader among enslaved blacks living in and around Petit-Goâve by introducing them to a new dance, one that was similar to the established vaudoux dance but adhered to a faster and more intense drumbeat. Participants added crushed gunpowder to their rum to induce a highly intoxicated, frenzied state that was said to have killed some who drank it. As Chapter 1 indicated, items like rum and gunpowder were traded for African captives on the coasts of the continent and were assumed to hold the essence of slave trade victims, thus enhancing spiritual power of ritualists in Saint-Domingue. Pedro’s followers quickly gained the reputation of being the most powerful and dangerous ritual community in the colony; members had the ability to see beyond the physical realm and used herbalism, poison, and secrecy to exact revenge on whites, uninitiated blacks, and animals. An account from an initiate describes a series of tests he had to undergo to prove loyalty to the group. Of importance was his ability to demonstrate strength under torture, discretion in keeping secrets, and willingness to do such oppositional acts as lying, stealing, or inflicting harm on humans or animals.⁴² Another member was asked to hold a piece of hot coal in his hand, seemingly to test if his spirit was capable of absorbing rage, symbolized by the heat, until an appropriate time for it to be released was reached.⁴³ These acts required of initiates might also be seen as examples of Lemba ritual purifications to alleviate symptoms of the human-inflicted evils of slavery.⁴⁴ Authorities arrested 42 people, including some mulâtres and women, in connection with the Dom Pedro campaign. By 1773, several of them were still imprisoned in the jails of Petit Goâve, although it is possible that some escaped after an earthquake on June 3, 1770 destroyed much of the town and Port-au-Prince. In his wake, Dom Pedro became a title applied to any person who was known as a ritual leader who used sorcery to inflict harm and often carried a large stick and a whip.⁴⁵

It was previously believed that Pierre had taken the name Don Pedro, suggesting he was a runaway from Spanish Santo Domingo, but recently discovered documents name him as Dom Pedro, a more common name from the Portuguese-influenced Kongo Kingdom. Between 1768 and 1769, Judge Joseph Ferrand de Beaudiere investigated Dom Pedro for traveling to several plantations in Petit Goâve, Jacmel, and Léogâne and spreading messages of freedom, rebellion, and independence from slave owners. Pedro’s campaign for liberation would have amounted to sedition according to the high courts, and seems aligned with Lemba ethics that deemed slavery and the slave trade as a societal ill. Pedro’s ritual performances, thought of as crude tricks by investigators, would have denoted spiritual efficacy that contributed to his growing following. De Beaudiere’s notes indicate a small uprising of sorts, wherein Pedro subverted plantation power structures by assuring the enslaved that they would soon be free and encouraging them to turn the whip on commandeurs who attempted to uphold plantation violence. He then instructed the commandeurs to stop using the whip on the other enslaved people under their supervision and assured them that there would be no punishment from their owners. In advocating the use of the whip against commandeurs as retribution for their treatment of the enslaved, Pedro promoted a sense of reciprocal or “horizontal” justice and the exercise of force – these were hallmark principles of Lemba society. This type of contestation against existing power relations openly vocalized a sense of discontentment with the violent punishments associated with slavery that bondspeople typically could only have shared in private spaces. In exchange for spiritual and physical protection from slavers’ retribution, Pedro imposed financial charges on his initiates. Similarly, clients customarily paid fees to Lemba priests for their ritual services of initiation, healing, or spiritual consecration.⁴⁶

Pierre Dom Pedro, and his followers, would have understood enslavement in Saint-Domingue within the realm of greed, evil, and witchcraft – issues that needed to be rectified with both spiritual and material actions.⁴⁷ His Kongolese understanding of slavery could not abide the unjust practices that were so regular in Saint-Domingue. Dom Pedro’s seditious resistance to the whip was both a literal repudiation of the non-ethical use of violence in slavery and served as symbol to instigate bondspeople’s reclamation of power from those who sought to maintain slavery. Further, Pierre Dom Pedro’s declarations of himself as “free” were probably not just in relation to slavery in Saint-Domingue; he may have been a freeborn Lemba priest or market trader who, in keeping with local custom, should have been protected from the slave trade. Indeed, in Portuguese Angola the honorific title “Dom” was usually reserved for the political elite, but was also used for freeborn commoners to indicate their status.⁴⁸ Pierre Dom Pedro’s stance against slavery may indicate an association with longstanding Kongolese efforts to protect the local population from the encroaching transAtlantic slave trade and balanced practices related to enslaved laborers. These contributions were important antecedents to the early Haitian Revolution negotiations, when rebels sought more humane work conditions such as the abolition of the whip and modified work schedules.⁴⁹

The Dom Pedro sect arrived in Saint-Domingue not long after the King of Kongo, Pedro V, failed to seize power from Alvaro XI, whose allegiance with local leaders who had large slave armies helps to explain the likely enslavement of Pedro V’s supporters.⁵⁰ Though there is not yet clarity on Pedro V’s relationship with the Lemba network, or his political and philosophical stances on the slave trade, further evidence from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean might shed light on the political implications of Pedro V’s short reign. The actions of Pierre Dom Pedro and his followers critiqued the nature of enslavement and advocated for others to overturn the power imbalances embedded in everyday colonial life. Although these enslaved rebels could no longer alter social, economic, or political realities in their homelands, they attempted to affect change in Saint-Domingue by enacting their own brand of justice against the French colonial plantocracy through poisonings, theft, spiritual prophecy of impending revolt, and retributive violence. The Dom Pedro campaign may be a small window into the nature of the Kongo civil wars, as well as a new way to understand how African events and consciousness shaped anti-slavery positions and activities in the Atlantic world.

In December 1781, three months after Pedro V’s remaining allies were driven out of São Salvador and the slave trade from West Central Africa increased, another “Dom Pedro” surfaced in Saint-Domingue and gained the attention of local authorities; this man was referred to as Sim dit Dompete.⁵¹ Sim’s name may indicate association with the Kongolese simbi nature spirits that controlled rain, and fertility, and that are recognized contemporarily as part of the Haitian petwo rite. In West Central Africa, the simbi spirits protected rocks, rivers, pools, and waterfalls, and were ruled by the mother spirit, Bunzi. The Bunzi priest had the critical responsibility for the spiritual installation of the King of Loango.⁵² Sim Dompete was a runaway from Cayes and an alleged animal poisoner, perhaps using his ritual knowledge to enact poison ordeals. He was so well known in Nippes, southwest of Port-au-Prince, that members of the maréchaussée targeted him for capture as they were eager to demonstrate their disdain for Africans and African-based culture. During the expedition, the freemen hid in the woods for days until they saw Sim pass by carrying a sword, a white hat under his arm, and a macoute. Along the Loango coastlands, the makute was made of a piece of palm raffia cloth about the size of a large handkerchief; it was traded as currency and often used for ritual healing purposes.⁵³ As Sim appeared, the hunters attacked and they all fought for hours while Sim attempted to reach into the macoute to open its contents. The hunters believed he had a gun, and eventually shot and beheaded Sim then took his sword and bag. The macoute contained several small packets covered with red, blue, and white cloth and animal skin, with feathers, bones, and glass sticking from the bags. There were also black tree seeds and a small piece of white wax.⁵⁴ These contents match the description of the garde-corps, or “bodyguards” that Mackandal and ritualists in Marmelade created and distributed.⁵⁵ During the Haitian Revolution, Colonel Charles Malenfant also reported discovering macoute bags on the bodies of the few rebels he killed. The sacks contained writings in Arabic, which were probably Qur’anic prayers used in protective gris-gris amulets.⁵⁶

West and West Central African ritualists like Mackandal, Dom Pedro, and Sim Dompete used their status as spiritual authorities to exercise political power among Saint-Domingue’s enslaved communities and utilized a range of sacred practices, including poison, to bring about change in their immediate social world. Enslaved blacks and maroons produced and exchanged ritual artifacts clandestinely while people performed their work-related tasks – such as the female domestic laborers who delivered macandals – as well as in free spaces to arm and empower themselves against the everyday forms of violence embedded in the slave society. Gris-gris, macandals, ouangas, which were charms categorically close to nkisis, and macoutes were all small sacks containing varying materials that were prayed over and charged with comporting the spirits of non-human entities to grant the user’s requests. These requests usually sought to alter slave owners’ behavior – most commonly to prevent punishment for marronnage and for owners to grant emancipation after death from poison. Pouches of poison and other spiritual assemblages aided enslaved people, no matter their ethnicity of origin, in redressing power differentials in their everyday lives.

Not only did ritual leaders leverage sacred objects for individual usage, they also used marronnage to organize calendas, which were simultaneously spiritual and militaristic gatherings, and to propagate notions of liberation. Mayombo sticks empowered carriers, mostly men, to fight with enhanced spiritual power. Higher-ranking calenda fighters and organizers held more sacred power and were most associated with insubordination. The sacred packets, fighting sticks, and garde-corps were “popular” culture artifacts that represented the “raw materials” for free space ritual performances. Used by most enslaved people in the colony, sacred artifacts and those who produced them derived meaning from their African origins to shape individuals’ responses to the colonial situation and guide social actions (Harris 2001; Johnston 2009).⁵⁷ Songs such as those sung by François Mackandal “ouaïe, ouaïe, Mayangangué” and the KiKongo “Eh! Eh! Bomba, hen! hen!” chant were other forms of cultural artifacts that operated as discourses of contention, or ways of communicating collective understandings and visions for social transformation through dialogue (Hall 1990; Steinberg 1999; Kane 2000; Pettinger 2012). The ritual songs and chants helped build solidarity by encoding information about the power of spirits to end slavery and, later, were part of the unfolding of the revolutionary process itself (Sewell 1996b; Johnston 2009).

Calendas

Enslaved Africans’ collective and oppositional consciousness was already shaped and politicized by their experiences of war, capture, and commodification in Africa and during the Middle Passage. Rebels leveraged free spaces, such as calenda dances, designated for cultural and political practices as organizational structures to enhance the meanings enslaved people assigned to their conditions in a racially organized society and further develop insurgent potential. Maroons were central figures in cultivating these spaces and in recruiting participants from various plantations. Ritual gatherings were among the only social spaces under the control of enslaved people, making them what social movement scholars call indigenous organizational resources that draw on collective consciousness and do the micromobilization work of insurgency (McAdam [1982] 1999; Morris 1984; Morris and Mueller 1992). These free spaces were appropriated and politicized not merely due to the overlap of religion and politics in various African societies, but because of the powerful symbols invoked by connecting sacred understandings to wider issues (Harris 2001). Moments of acute social, economic, or political crisis, for example the Kongo civil wars in the case of Dom Pedro, can influence those affected and transform existing structures, cultural and religious practices, and identities into vehicles for change (Fantasia and Hirsch 1995). Saint-Domingue’s black cultural “toolkit” included ritual objects, spirit embodiment, song, dance, and martial arts that were both sacred and political, and animated mobilization (Pattillo-McCoy 1998).

Calenda ritual gatherings held in the 1760s and 1780s were likely the product of an influx in the number of West Central Africans brought to Saint-Domingue’s ports, which nearly doubled between 1781 and 1790 (Table 1.2) due to resumed fighting in the Kongo Kingdom between Pedro V, who attempted a coup in the early 1760s, and forces supporting his opponent Alvaro XI. Prisoners of war were sold through the Loango ports that were most used by the French. Former soldiers would have been trained in the sacred martial art tradition using mayombo sticks that Moreau de Saint-Méry described and which were seen in Cap Français in 1785. Kongolese fighters often preferred these types of personal weapons to larger bayonets for closer combat, which stood in contrast to European fighting styles. Calendas might then be considered training grounds that reinforced spiritual and military organizational knowledge that former Kongo civil war soldiers brought with them to Saint-Domingue.⁵⁸ Participants in the calendas imbued material culture artifacts with spiritual power to enhance their effectiveness as self-protective armaments. Further, training in combat combined with declarations of liberation and the power of Africans and African descendants indicated their anticipation of and preparation for events that would eventually lead to the dismantling of the enslavement system.

Sacred Martial Arts

In northern Saint-Domingue and other French Caribbean colonies, kalendas, or calendas, were not just ritual dances of enslaved people, they also included African martial art-styled stick fighting practices similar to West Central African kilundus or kilombos.⁵⁹ Stick and machete fighting traditions existed in the Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa, and the Bight of Benin, and they were used as mechanisms for warfare training, rites of passage, and, in the case of Dahomey, to train “Amazon” women fighters.⁶⁰ Enslaved women were not known to have participated in stick fighting, but T. J. Desch-Obi claims that “unarmed pugilism and head butts … were gendered female in Saint-Domingue.”⁶¹ African kings and high-ranking soldiers commanded kilombos, militaristic communities that spread throughout West Central Africa in the seventeenth century, particularly in preparation for warfare. These fighters relied on hand-to-hand combat, and constantly performed mock battles, drills and other training exercises, and war dances to prepare for impending conflict. The war dances, as well as the movements associated with fighting styles during non-combative ritualistic gatherings, invoked spiritual meanings and reflected West Central African sacred understandings of the cosmos. Ancient ritual specialists performed specific movements like inverted kicks to invoke the power of ancestors who resided on the opposite side of the kalunga, the body of water that separated the worlds of the living and the dead.⁶² With sacred power imbued in physical movements, the martial arts could be used to heal the living as well as “helping bondsmen’s souls make return journeys across the kalunga.” For example, the Mounsoundi (Musundi or Mousombe) of Kongo were noted for their association with stick fighting, as well as the belief in Africans’ ability to fly away from enslavement back to their homeland.⁶³ A song that likely originates from the revolutionary era indicates the legacy of militaristic cultures of this West Central African ethnic group in Saint-Domingue:

Mounsoundi, we will make war!

Eya, eya, eya!

We are war nations.

Don’t you hear the cannons fire?⁶⁴

Overlap between sacred knowledge and military skills continued across the Atlantic via the collective memory of slave trade captives and resulted in similar practices emerging in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue.

Moreau de Saint-Méry described calenda stick fighting as serious conflicts, usually occurring over jealousy or an offense to one’s sense of honor, self-image, or self-worth. It was not uncommon for combatants to strike each other with forceful head blows that drew blood. The fights began with a salute and an oath, wherein both participants wet their fingers with saliva then touched the ground, bringing their fingers back to their mouths, then pounding their chests while looking toward the skies. Saint-Méry was both impressed and entertained by the dexterity with which fighters handled their “murderous sticks,” likening the fighting contest to fencing. Each delivered their blows quickly, using their sticks to defend against the other’s and to issue offensive strikes. Possession of a fighting stick was a symbol of honor among participants, and the more decorated sticks were highly valued because of their spiritual power. The fighting sticks, called mayombo, were filled with a limestone-based powder, maman-bila, and were sold along with red and black seeds called poto. Nails inserted into the blunt end of the stick for additional force indicated one’s position of leadership within the closed network of fighters. These materials match the description of elements used in West Central African nkisi bags and they were used to imbue the sticks with sacred power that would protect users against opponents who were not similarly armed.⁶⁵ In addition to mayombo sticks, other weapons, such as machetes and blunt metal-headed clubs, were used during the calenda gatherings. While Moreau de Saint-Méry described armed conflicts at calenda events as legitimate fights, he simultaneously dismissed them as a form of play associated with slave dances, void of any necessary training or potential usefulness in military combat.⁶⁶ The assemblies were not merely ritual performance activities; the sacred influence on expertise in hand-to-hand combat and non-firearm weapons gleaned from calendas was a significant contribution to success during the early phases of the Haitian Revolution uprisings.⁶⁷

Figure 3.1. “Négres Jouant au Bâton, Archive Nationales d’Outre-Mer”

Police rulings prohibited assemblies of enslaved people during the day or night, and drum playing and singing were forbidden in the wake of the Mackandal affair, but calendas were continually held in the north especially around the dates of Catholic celebrations.⁶⁸ On August 5, 1758, a plantation manager in Bois l’Anse, a section of Limonade, was fined 300 livres for allowing a calenda to take place at Habitation Carbon on July 23.⁶⁹ This calenda was held three days before the Catholic recognition of Sainte Anne and Saint James the Greater on July 25–26 in Limonade. These dates correspond to a contemporary popular pilgrimage for Sèn Jak (Saint James), the Haitian Vodou-Catholic manifestation of Ogou Feray, in Plaine du Nord just east of Limonade.⁷⁰ While Ogou (or Ogun) is the Yoruba god of war and iron, Saint James was the de facto patron saint of the Kongo Kingdom. Saint James celebrations in sixteenth-century Kongo included offerings and petitions to the saints, dancing and spirit embodiment, and decoration of the pilgrimage space. Ritual martial art performances were also witnessed in eighteenth-century Central Africa, and were often held to initiate newcomers on the Saint James feast day or prior to war.⁷¹ We might then presume that activities at the 1758 calenda were militaristic in nature, revering spirits that presided over war – Ogou and Saint James – and creating solidarity among the participants by combining the spirits of the Nagô/Yorubas and the Kongolese.

A 1785 report from the Chamber of Agriculture described the calenda and mayombo sticks as a pervasive problem that encouraged the growing hostility among the enslaved population. Cap Français was deemed to be a troublesome environment where blacks openly displayed acts of insubordination and outright animosity toward whites:

many negroes in Le Cap never go out without a large stick, and on holidays you find 2,000 of them gathered at La Providence, La Fossette, and Petit Carénage all armed with sticks, drinking rum, and doing the kalinda. The police do nothing to prevent these parties and they never end without quarrels and fighting.⁷²

That same source made several claims of acts of aggression – a group of blacks blocked a white couple from the sidewalk along Rue Espagnole, telling them “Motherfucker, if it was one hour later, you wouldn’t dare say anything. You’d step aside yourself.” Another man chastised a group of blacks for making too much noise in front of his home and was met with the response that “the streets belonged to the king” accompanied by a large rock being thrown at him, barely missing his face.⁷³ This verbal and potential physical assault against a white person was a clear violation of colonial codes and could have resulted in the execution of the agitator. Based on these reports and what is known about the nature of calendas, we can speculate that the calendas reinforced an awareness among enslaved people that they had the capability – politically, spiritually, and militarily – to overturn Saint-Domingue’s racialized power dynamics at will. This account indicates that the open contempt toward whites from enslaved blacks in Le Cap stemmed from a sense that the city belonged to them given the population imbalance between blacks and whites, and especially at night and on the weekends when enslaved people from throughout the northern plain descended there for celebrations and to trade food at the weekly market. The diverse population of Le Cap, including the growing community of well-to-do affranchis, gens du couleur, as well as runaways from other parishes, may have signified to the enslaved that freedom, status, and power were fluid categories that could and did change quickly. The ability to congregate among themselves somewhat freely provided space to enhance oppositional consciousness and act on that consciousness in ways that countered common mores, behavioral expectations, and power structures. The ethos of these calenda gatherings involved sacred understandings of fighting and weaponry, which connected enslaved people to a range of African cultural symbols and emboldened them to disrupt the colonial order that rendered them powerless.

Maroons Mobilizing the Calenda

While most calenda participants were enslaved people, several were runaway maroons. Fugitive slaves could move about with more latitude than most enslaved laborers, which allowed them to visit different plantations or parishes and effectively recruit and mobilize participants for ritual gatherings. In 1765, a special division of the rural police was established with specific orders to eradicate marronnage and calendas, indicating authorities had some sense that the two forms of enslaved Africans’ agency were interrelated, yet the implementation of this structural constraint on ritual life did not stymie their activities.⁷⁴ Several calenda attendees, dancers, and musicians appeared in Les Affiches américaines (LAA) runaway advertisements, exemplifying an intersection between ritualism and efforts to self-liberate. In April 1766, a 25-year-old mulâtre who claimed to be free, but was owned by the Pailleterie plantation, was witnessed going from plantation to plantation in Trou under the pretense of being invited to (or inviting people to) a calenda.⁷⁵ Though the advertisement does not provide enough information about the specific conversations and actions taken by this escapee during his eight days of marronnage, it is likely that he was engaging in some form of seditious speech against slavery given his proclamations of freedom and the political, spiritual, and militaristic nature of the calendas. While most of Saint-Domingue’s mixed-race population were part of the landed gens du couleur, some were indeed enslaved, but used skin color to attempt to elevate their status in society. Conversely, this runaway used his skin color to pass as free, not to advance the political and economic interests of the gens du couleur, but to attempt to organize the bondspeople in his immediate vicinity. On September 16, 1767, an advertisement appeared for a 20–22-year-old Nagô male named Auguste with the branding “Lebon.” Auguste was described as a merchant from Le Cap who enjoyed calendas, and who used his ability to travel as a merchant to his advantage in escaping.⁷⁶ Nagôs originated from the Bight of Benin region, so this example further counters accounts by early writers that African ethnic groups intentionally segregated themselves and antagonized each other. A Kongo man named Jolicoeur was described in a June 1768 advertisement after escaping Cassaigne Lanusse’s plantation in Limbé. He was described as a good enough drummer, possibly meaning he was a key musician in ritual gatherings.⁷⁷ Another musician, named Pompée, who played the banza very well, escaped in November 1772 from Fort Dauphin and was seen near Ouanaminthe claiming to be free.⁷⁸

In April 1782, an unnamed commandeur was accused of holding night-time assemblies and spreading superstition, for which he was condemned to a public whipping before being returned to his owner:

Declaration of the Council of Le Cap, confirming a Sentence of the Criminal Judge of the same Town, declaring a Negro, Commander, duly accomplished and convicted of having held nocturnal assemblies, and of having used superstitions and prestige to abuse the credulity of the other negroes, and to try to draw from them money; For the reparation of which he would have been condemned to the whip on the Place du Marche of Clugny; Then handed over to his master.

Commandeurs were responsible for maintaining productivity and order among the atelier work gangs. They also, at times, had to bear the weight of executing punishments for transgressions, which put them in a position of authority above the enslaved laborers. The announcement described the meetings as indulgent of the superstitions of the blacks, and as providing a way for this commandeur to use his position to swindle money from believers.⁷⁹ However, this is just one of several examples of commandeurs and other relatively privileged slaves operating in collusion with the field workers. Commandeurs like the one above had two faces, one for whites and one for blacks, and likely used their relative privilege among enslaved workers to invite people from different plantations and to organize rebellious activities.

In December 1784, an advertisement was published for an escaped coachman, who may have been a calenda organizer:

Cahouet, Mesurade, coachman, age 24 to 26 years, height of 5 feet 1 inch, fat face, stocky and hunched, great player of the bansa, singer, and coaxer of the blacks, always at each of the dances on the plantations belonging to M. Roquefort. Those who have knowledge give notice to M. Linas of Le Cap, to whom [the runaway] belongs, or to M. Phillippe. There is one portugaise for compensation.⁸⁰

Like the unnamed commandeur who held night-time gatherings in 1782, Cahouet used his relative privilege within the slave community, and his role as a coachman, to contact people on several plantations and disseminate the word about the calendas. Cahouet’s rank in the labor hierarchy may not have protected him from the typical ravages of slavery, meaning he may have sought freedom for the same reasons as other absconders. Alternatively, perhaps he felt he could be a more effective organizer if he were “underground” or off the plantation. Being of the Mesurade nation did not preclude Cahouet from taking part and having a leadership role in calendas. The evidence of ritual calenda gatherings persisted despite the May 1772 judgment banning free people of color from holding calendas, and the reiteration of this ordinance in March 1785.⁸¹ A Kongolese cook named Zamore, who escaped in July 1789, was described as a full-time drummer for the dances since he was last seen in Port-de-Paix.⁸² Jean-Pierre, a mulâtre drummer, was also a shoemaker in Le Cap used his French skills to pass as a free person of color in May 1790.⁸³

These examples demonstrate that African descendants of varying statuses (free or enslaved), race (mulâtre or black creole), occupations within the slave hierarchy (merchants, commandeurs, cooks, and coachmen), and African ethnicities (Nagô/Yoruba, Mesurade, Kongo, Mondongue) participated in what were labeled as calendas. Calenda participants, and often the leaders of those gatherings, embodied a liberation ethos by liberating themselves from enslavement. Ritual work within spaces like calenda dance gatherings built racial solidarity through identification with several African symbols that were expressions of several cultural identities. Combined with the racial boundaries of colonial structures, Africa-inspired ritual participation, and other forms of collective action like marronnage, a collective racial identity began to emerge. Runaway advertisements indicate that calendas and other Africa-inspired ritual gatherings were a constant presence in the colony and provide piecemeal data that demonstrate ritualists were among the many who escaped enslavement and acted as micromobilizers, linking enslaved people from various plantations to free space ritual gatherings. We do not have a fully accurate account of how many calendas took place in Saint-Domingue, their exact locations, exactly how many people participated, or their identities. However, accounts of calendas in the few years leading to the Haitian Revolution might be a window through which we can understand ritual gatherings as politicized free spaces.

Ritual Rebels

Maroon-organized calenda ritual gatherings spread oppositional consciousness, through the invocation of orishas, saints, and the ancestral dead; the propagation of liberatory ideas; physical preparation for armed combat; and the inclusion of various enslaved people of varying ethnic groups and rank within the plantation regime. Colonists’ fears that antagonistic sentiments among blacks would spread from cities like Le Cap into the rural areas came to fruition in 1786. On June 3, the Superior Council of Cap Français banned blacks and free people of color from participating in “mesmerism,” a pseudo-scientific trend that had taken hold in Saint-Domingue. This ban was in response to several reports of calendas occurring in banana groves at the Tremais plantation in Marmelade, a northern district dominated by enslaved Kongolese Africans on newly formed coffee plantations. Four men: Jérôme dit, or “the so-called,” Pôteau and Télémaque from M. Bellier’s plantation at l’Ilet-à-Corne near Marmelade; Jean Lodot of Sieur Mollié’s Souffriere plantation in Marmelade; and Julien, a Kongolese of the Lalanne plantation also in Marmelade, were charged with orchestrating secret assemblies that frequently drew as many as 200 participants. In addition to facing charges for organizing the outlawed gatherings, several witness testimonies asserted that the men were known for selling nkisis and performing other sacred rituals at meetings insiders called mayombo or bila.⁸⁴

Jean Lodot was known as a runaway who frequented the Souffriere plantation work gangs in Marmelade, carrying a small sack containing a crucifix, pepper, garlic, gunpowder, and pebbles. Witnesses saw him leading at least two ceremonies, including one when an overseer saw him in his hut among a small gathering kneeling in front of a table covered with a cloth and holding two candles. Jean held up “fetishes,” or unspecified ritual objects, in front of the table, which was an altar. Two machetes, crossed over each other, were laid on the ground in front of Jean. In a second meeting, participants drank a rum concoction containing pepper and garlic, which induced a sedative state from which Jean would raise them with the flat end of a machete, symbolizing participants’ death and rebirth, and connecting machetes to Africans and African descendants’ sacred world. Finally, a third witness, an enslaved man named Scipion, stated that Jean and his followers covered themselves with cane liquor, put gunpowder in their hands and lit themselves aflame.⁸⁵

Witnesses testified that Jérôme and Jean were close associates who hosted these gatherings together. On several occasions, Jean disappeared from Molliers’ plantation and sometimes he stayed on the land of Belier, who had enslaved Jérôme. Jean and Jérôme Pôteau, a man of mixed racial descent, were responsible for selling the mayombo sticks containing the maman-bila and the poto seeds – the possible source from where he assumed his surname, Pôteau. Jérôme performed demonstrations for audiences, and sold sacred objects based on demand. In his small sacks, he carried little stones, rum, a horn full of gunpowder, pieces of iron, and pieces of paper. Like Pierre Dom Pedro, Jérôme added gunpowder to the rum to stimulate participants and induce a state of excitement. For healing purposes, pepper and a white powder were combined with the rum to treat people with fevers. The red and black poto seeds helped to identify macandal poisoners and thieves.

Jérôme and Télémaque were also close associates; they had been in bondage on the same plantation from which they both eventually escaped. Belier’s neighbor, Deplas, testified that numerous assemblies occurred on this property – one of which caused such alarm that Deplas went to disrupt the meeting. He stated that Télémaque was leading the ritual assembly and upon dispersal of that gathering, Télémaque threatened Deplas’ servant saying, “you think you’re still in Gonaïves, but you will soon know the negroes of l’Ilet-à-Corne!” Deplas claimed that the servant mysteriously died the next day from a violent colic, insinuating that Télémaque’s supernatural abilities caused the death. Télémaque and Jérôme were also accused of preaching liberation and independence at the gatherings, attempting to instigate rebellion among the enslaved. A mass revolt would indeed occur five years later, but without any known contribution from the four men. In November, Jean was charged with disturbing the public and having been armed, during his marronnage, with a hunting knife, an iron stick, and a false passport so he could pass for free. His execution took place at the public market of Marmelade; the executioner strangled Jean until death ensued and exposed his body for 24 hours, then planted a small tree in the place where the body had lain. Julien was forced to attend and assist with Jean’s execution, since the two had been arrested together in October; after this, he was returned to his owner. Télémaque and Jérôme were never captured but were ultimately hung in effigy.⁸⁶

Women and Midwifery

Though there are few accounts detailing women’s roles in ritual activities, it is highly improbable that they were not present and centrally engaged as significant contributors to enslaved people’s sacred practices – especially given women’s indispensability in West and West Central African religious systems. Similar to the queen mothers of Dahomey or West Central African women like Queen Njinga and Dona Beatriz, enslaved African and African-descendant women translated cultural and religious knowledge and practices into political power “to facilitate liberation from various forces of oppression” even as they experienced marginalization in patriarchal and racialized societies (Kuumba 2006: 120). Black midwives and hospitalières, or the lead medical practitioners among the enslaved population, deployed their sacred ritual skills and deeply embedded knowledge pools for medicinal purposes in ways that subverted plantation power structures. Men generally constituted the majority of the enslaved population, but women were increasingly targeted as slave trade captives in the years leading to the Haitian Revolution: West Central African men were 65.9 percent of French slave ship captives to Saint-Domingue in 1789, down from 74.9 percent in 1775.⁸⁷ Compared to creoles, and compared to men, Africa-born women were more likely to work in field gangs and did not have many opportunities for upward mobility. Mixed-race women were generally favored for domestic labor and other specialized positions.⁸⁸ However, women who were hospitalières relied on expertise in African and European healing methods to treat illnesses, injuries, and provide care for new mothers. As such, it is likely that Africa-born women with knowledge of healing methods practiced on the continent were primed for such a role. Hospitalières played a significant role on plantations that employed them; they were considered “trusted” slaves who had privilege and power.⁸⁹ Despite or perhaps due to these conditions, an Africa-born woman, Marie Catherine dit Kingué, came to be revered and feared as a powerful, dangerous threat in Saint-Domingue’s northern department.

The case of Marie Catherine Kingué is found in the papers of François Neufchâteau, the attorney general of Cap Français in the late 1780s.⁹⁰ Kingué was likely a hospitalière who performed the duties of a midwife, healer, diviner, herbalist, and supposedly a vaudoux queen. Records identify her as being 36–40 years of age and as Kongolese, having two to three marks of her homeland on her cheek below her eye. She was known to claim to be free, and this was also signified by her use of an African name, suggesting that she renounced the forced naming practice that was part of the enslavement process. Her assumed name, Kingué, might indicate that she was from Kinguélé, the seat of the KaKongo Kingdom 35–40 miles inland from the Malemba port.⁹¹ This renaming represented a self-fashioning of identity and a reclamation of personal power in a society where most African women were relegated to the lowest status; it also made her African origins – and the spirits with whom she was associated – recognizable to those who would become part of her following.⁹² Inhabitants of the area north of the Congo River were not Christianized as scholars have previously believed, so it is possible that Kingué was a victim of judicial enslavement that targeted witchcraft or “fetisheurs.”⁹³ When in Saint-Domingue, it is also possible that Marie Catherine attempted escape once; a December 1774 advertisement was placed in Le Cap for a woman named “Keingue” and a “nouveau” African man bearing a Maltese cross tattoo on his stomach and a tattoo of his country, Moinsa.⁹⁴ We do not yet have concrete evidence linking the runaway Keingue with the midwife Marie Catherine, but the possibility is compelling.

Nevertheless, by 1785 Marie Catherine Kingué was enslaved on a plantation owned by Sieur Caillon Belhumeur in Port Margot, near Le Cap, and she was known throughout Limbé and Plaisance for selling garde-corps, or nkisis. Kingue had a live-in partner and lieutenant named Polidor, also Kongolese, from the Labauche plantation in Pilate, Plaisance. Her following amassed quickly and to the extent that whites, including Belhumeur himself, were part of her clientele. Local planters sharply disparaged her in racialized and sexualized terms, describing her as a monster and a “hussy,” and those who followed her as “weak-minded imbeciles.” Several planters in Plaisance, writing to Neufchâteau in 1785, complained to Belhumeur about Marie’s activities, even going to the high courts at Le Cap. They requested a special brigade to seize her, stating that the maréchaussée – the militia of free men of color responsible for chasing runaways in the colony – and whites could not be trusted because of their reverence toward her. Named in the letter were the Chailleaus; Mr. Marsan; Mr. Vazou; Saumice; Jean and Bernard Cherisse and Pironneau – three mulâtre planters of Plaisance; a surgeon named Pudemaine; as well as trusted enslaved commandeurs who all expressed concern about her “vagrancy, superstition, charlatanism, and other criminal and dangerous acts.” Belhumeur promised to reprimand her, but planters bemoaned “il n’en a rien fait” – he did nothing. Apparently, he was paying her a monthly fee for her services.⁹⁵

From as early as 1784, Marie Catherine established a reputation for her ability to identify and cure the effects of macandal poisonings, a valuable skill for any planter worried about his or her unpaid workforce dying from poison. Accounts from his neighbors claimed that Belhumeur had overworked his slaves, causing a few of them to die. Rather than accept overwork as the cause of death, he consulted Kingué to find out if the slaves had been poisoned and to locate the perpetrators. She “did a certain sleight of hand,” or performed a ritual in front of Belhumeur and told him of an alleged conspiracy in his house. Documents also allege that Belhumeur proceeded to torture and kill the accused poisoners without a trial.⁹⁶ In another instance, Kingué was called to assist a pregnant woman who was sick and who had possibly had been poisoned; upon birthing, a dead snake emerged instead of a baby.⁹⁷ Other letters indicated that performances such as delivering a dead snake inspired Africans to revere Kingué as a god who had the power to kill and resurrect, and to heal all kinds of diseases. In addition to earning money by selling garde-corps or nkisis for 10 to 12 gourdes, Kingué amassed spiritual power and notoriety in the neighborhoods of Plaisance. One letter expressed anxiety that, “everyone wanted to consult her experience … the fanaticism … became to a point that the greatest disorder would arise in the work gangs.”⁹⁸ A fourth anonymous letter, dated October 7, 1785, seems to suggest that Marie gathered one hundred men from a work gang and incited them to prepare to revolt against their owner. Marie Catherine also used her power to silence her detractors. When she performed rituals on the Marsan plantation, her former initiates Jean, Bernand Cherice, and Pironneau were threatened from testifying against her. Another woman who was witness to Kingué was alledgedly tormented before she could speak out. On the Chailleau plantation, she had accused the first commandeur of being a poisoner.⁹⁹

Though Marie’s actions of helping Belhumeur to identify poisoners may have served to help maintain the workforce on plantations, her spiritual assistance to enslaved people aimed to provide them with health and care. Ultimately, Marie Kingué dealt directly with matters of life and death: childbirth, healing the afflicted from poison, and, if the accounts of her position as a vaudoux queen were true, summoning sacred power from the non-physical world. Her abilities and reputation raised her profile among the enslaved communities – and whites – of Port Margot, Limbé, and Plaisance. Planters felt that any such form of power exhibited by an enslaved person, especially a woman, would override white male authority and potentially lead to a revolt against the hierarchical nature of society. Despite enslavers’ gender biases about black women’s power, the enslaved people whom she served would have recognized Kingué’s sacred authority as normative. Marie Kingué seems to have been either a Kongolese nganga, a kitomi of the Mbumba tradition, or part of the Mpemba midwifery movement originated by a woman with special techniques and powers.¹⁰⁰ One wonders what larger spiritual significance the snake would have for Kingué’s Kongolese followers, since the snake spirit Mbumba was associated with Jesus Christ and “decentralized and democratized power.”¹⁰¹ The symbolism of these events hints at why Kingué was seen as a god who facilitated the birth of a Christ-like spirit which, to her followers, may have represented the coming of a new polity.

Women like Brigitte Mackandal and Marie Catherine Kingué demonstrated the “radical implications of black women’s spiritual politics” by embracing acts of “woman-centered preservation,” such as poison, healing, and midwifery, that fundamentally opposed racial capitalist exploitation of black women’s bodies (Sweeney 2021: 56, 68). Midwives such as Kingué were seen as necessary evils that were required to help enslaved women reach their fullest reproductive capabilities in order to grow the enslaved population. They had some flexibility in the slave hierarchy, but were often demonized and accused of infanticide by using herbs to spread mal de mâchoire, a tetanus-like disease that locked a child’s jaw and affected their ability to ingest food.¹⁰² The hysteria may or may not have been valid, given that infanticide was a gendered form of resistance throughout the Americas – some women preferred not to see another child brought into the horrors of enslavement and therefore took matters into their own hands.¹⁰³ A midwife named Arada on the Fleuriau plantation in Cul-de-Sac, where poisonings occurred in 1776, was put in a rope collar with 70 knots representing the number of children she had been accused of killing. In 1786, a midwife owned by Madame Dumoranay was suspected to have been the source of high infant mortality, yet no concrete evidence against her was presented.¹⁰⁴

Whether the midwives deliberately caused mal de mâchoire as a way of protesting forced breeding, or the disease was an unintentional result of unsanitary conditions, the women undoubtedly relied on African-based technologies and often gave counsel to European doctors.¹⁰⁵ Midwives’ role in the plantation hierarchy made them valuable and privileged, but racial and gendered oppression (undoubtedly including sexual exploitation) made them a target. Several midwives escaped enslavement altogether, including a 55-year-old creole midwife named Zabeth who escaped from the Duconge plantation in Port-de-Paix. Zabeth fled on January 10, 1786 after being accused of killing over 30 infants and 11 other children who all suffered from the same disease.¹⁰⁶ In October 1778, a mulâtresse named Manon was announced to have escaped six weeks before. It was suspected that she left a Limonade plantation for the house of Dame Couttin in Le Cap where she trained in midwifery.¹⁰⁷ A Kongolese woman named Lise was the midwife for her plantation owner in Le Cap and escaped in 1784.¹⁰⁸ Though not a midwife, another Kongolese woman escaped from Saint Marc. In the colony, she was known as Diane, but her African name was Ougan-daga, which may be connected to the ouangas that were discovered in the Mackandal trial and became outlawed in post-revolution Saint-Domingue, suggesting that Diane was proficient in Kongolese ritual technologies.¹⁰⁹ As the gender imbalance came to parity approaching the Haitian Revolution, we begin to see women more prominently in gendered roles such as midwives and ritualists. The case of Marie Catherine Kingué and other maroon midwives establishes a precedent for understanding women like Cécile Fatiman – the vaudoux queen who presided over the Bwa Kayman ceremony just days before the Haitian Revolution uprising – and, more broadly, the ways black women leveraged their cultural and religious practices to advance liberation struggles.

Conclusion

Enslaved Africans and African descendants re-fashioned their spiritual spaces to cultivate their sacred understandings of their environment, oppositional consciousness, and social interactions and solidarities. Ritual free spaces in Saint-Domingue encouraged participants to empower themselves with sacred technologies, to seek retribution against enslavers using poison, and to rebel against slavery through marronnage and militaristic performances. These free spaces also allowed the enslaved to access and consult black women’s sacred, cultural, and political power, which was essential within African and African descendants’ worldviews but repressed by colonial society. African-inspired ritual technologies and practices; notions of freedom, slavery, rebellion, and militarism; and women’s power were part of a counterhegemonic body politic that thrived within enslaved people’s free spaces. Regardless of context, counterhegemonic ideas, practices that help to generate dissent, and free spaces are critical for organizing, planning, and orchestrating that dissent. Mobilizers can and do identify or create free spaces, even in the most repressive societies (Polletta and Kretschmer 2013), as evinced by the ritual rebels of colonial Saint-Domingue.

4 Mobilizing Marronnage: Race, Collective Identity, and Solidarity

Samson, Congo, about 25 years old, a height of five feet two inches, having red skin, very large and red eyes, very thick lips and filed teeth, stamped JOUSSAN, the said negro was a cart driver at Le Cap, where he has familiarity, there will be four portugaises to compensate for his capture; Sans-Souci, Mondongue, about 22 years old, a height of five feet, well constituted and marked from smallpox, stamped RAAR, having very black skin; Julien, creole, aged 16 years old, slender, having very black skin and scars on his legs, stamped RAAR; Kepel, creole, brother of Julien, age 12 years old, without a stamp, marked from smallpox, having very black skin and feet a little inside [pigeon-toed]; Ulysse, Mondongue, about 18 years old, of small height, stamped RAAR; Blaise, Arada, age 18 years old, of small height, having marks of his country on his cheeks, stamped RAAR; Mercis, Arada, about 20 years old, height of five feet three inches, reddish skin, pretty looking, having a scar on one leg from an old sickness, stamped RAAR; Nanette, of the nation Monbal, about 45 years old, of small height, without a stamp, a little marked from smallpox, having arched [bowed] legs; Marie, creole, daughter of Nanette, 18 years old, reddish skin, a little marked from smallpox, without a stamp, having arched [bowed] legs, she has given birth about a month ago to a girl, who she brought with her; Marinette, of the nation Moncamba, about 20 years old, of small height, having very black skin, her teeth filed and marks of her country on her face, stamped RAAR; Rose, of the nation Arada, about 20 years old, having very red skin and mark of her country on her face, stamped RAAR. The seven negroes and four nègressses coming from the divisions of Mrs. Raar and L’arouille, planters at Boucan Champagne of Borne, where the negroes have said, on the plantation of M. Millot, of Bas-Borgne and Corail, where they stayed for three months, have fled as maroons from the plantation of M. Jean Cochon at Riviere Laporte, quarter of Plaisance, since the 23^rd of last month, with their booty, those who have knowledge are asked to give notice to M. Jean Cochon, owner of the said place, to whom the negroes and nègresses belong, or to Mrs. Milly and Cagnon, merchants at Le Cap. There will be compensation.¹

Runaway slave advertisements such as the one transcribed above contain valuable information as well as critical silences about maroons and their intentions. The advertisements are a snapshot of a moment in time and reveal little about the maroons’ past or future beyond the date of publication. This particular advertisement does not indicate what tasks most of the 12 bondspeople performed on the Raar plantation in Borne. It is unclear how and why they migrated to the Millot plantation, or how and why they ended up on the Cochon plantation in Plaisance, from where they left as maroons. Besides brothers Julien and Kepel, and Nanette, her daughter Marie, and Marie’s one-month-old baby girl, the nature of relationships between the absconders is obscure. We do not know how and when they decided to escape together, nor can we elucidate more of their biographical details, such as for how long they had been enslaved in the colony or if they all spoke Kreyol. We cannot know their innermost thoughts, fears, or ambitions. It is not presently possible to find out what happened after their November 23 escape or what happened after the advertisement appeared in Les Affiches américaines on December 15, 1790. They may have been captured, jailed, and returned to Jean Cochon, or they could have remained at large and relocated to another existing maroon community.

Though we do not know for certain the circumstances of Raar plantation runaways’ immediate past and future, the contents of this and similar advertisements reveal insights that help us speculate about enslaved people’s racial and ethnic identities, their inner social world, and their inter-personal relationships. This unlikely group of 12 enslaved people escaped together on November 23, 1790, seemingly after having been sold or leased to a new owner, M. Jean Cochon. Most were branded RAAR, the name of their first owner. There were five women and girls, including Marie’s baby, but most of the fugitives in this case – and those who took part in marronnage overall – were men. One was Kongolese and two were Mondongues of West Central Africa, three were Aradas from the Bight of Benin, four were creoles born in Saint-Domingue, and two were of lesser-known African origins, Monbal and Moncamba. There were two groups of biologically connected individuals. Some were survivors of smallpox and bore scars from other illnesses or injuries; others bore the distinctive cultural markings of their nations. Some were darker skinned, while others had a “reddish” complexion. One was described as having a specialized position, that of a cart driver, and was familiar with Le Cap, where he often worked. Yet, the differences between these bondspeople did not overshadow their shared social conditions and collective decision to engage in marronnage, despite the deadly obstacles they inevitably faced.

How can we understand this small but diverse maroon group as a type of network engaged in collective action? Maroons’ identities and social network ties are lenses through which we can examine “the interaction mechanisms by which individual and sociocultural levels are brought together (Gamson 1992: 71)” during the act of escaping slavery. This chapter relies on protest event content analysis (Koopmans and Rucht 2002; Hutter 2014) of thousands of runaway slave advertisements placed in Les Affiches américaines and other colonial-era newspapers and focuses on two major aspects of how maroons’ socio-cultural realities both shaped and were shaped by their social interactions. I argue in two parts that: (1) racially or ethnically homogenous group escapes reflected and maintained pre-existing collective identities, while racially or ethnically heterogeneous group escapes indicated and helped forge a sense of racial solidarity; and (2) wider networks of resistance were built from runaways’ forms of human capital and their pre-existing social network ties to enslaved people, maroons, and free people of color. These patterns of interaction around identity and solidarity helped shape mobilizing structures during the Haitian Revolution. Moreover, they informed post-independence era modes of identity at the micro- and macro-levels: the formerly enslaved masses organized themselves socially, economically, and religiously around kinship and African ethnicity, while the Haitian state characterized citizenship in racial terms. The formation of these identity- and state-making processes can be traced to the colonial period as enslaved people navigated the boundaries of bondage using their social and human capital.

Micromobilization processes draw on aspects of individuals’ identities and the social network ties that existed prior to mobilization, particularly during exceptionally high-risk collective actions such as marronnage. Network ties can influence multiple aspects of the social construction of mobilization, including an individual’s decision to engage in collective action or not, their assessment of the nature and extent of that participation, their awareness of opportunities to participate, and critical comprehension of the reasons for mobilization (Fantasia 1988; McAdam 1988; Gamson 1992; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Hunt and Benford 2004; Ward 2015, 2016). Chapter 3 explored ritualist networks that, in enhancing collective consciousness about the unjust nature of racial slavery in Saint-Domingue, used sacred technologies to rectify those imbalances. In addition to ritual spaces, linkages between enslaved people from various birth origins – Saint-Domingue, the Bight of Benin, or West Central Africa for example – were cultivated as people interacted with each other and learned to communicate in the Kreyol language within spheres of labor such as plantation work gangs, in housing quarters and family units, and at weekend markets. These settings foregrounded patterns of interaction in maroon groups by allowing enslaved people to safely query, discuss, plan, and strategize the dynamics of their efforts to self-liberate.

Marronnage was a dangerous endeavor – runaways rarely had access to food or clothing, were chased by hunting dogs and the maréchaussée fugitive slave police, and had to navigate the colony’s complex terrain oftentimes alone. Those who were caught faced punishments such as having limbs cut off, whippings, or being chained or executed. Therefore, taking part in marronnage was not an easy decision, and choosing to do so with others in some ways only heightened the risk of capture. Enslaved people with knowledge of who had escaped, when, why, or where maroons were located could be tortured for that information, or they could be incentivized with money, their freedom, or other material goods to turn in maroons. Trust was of paramount importance when a runaway involved other people in their escape, and their sense of collective identities helped facilitate a “cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution” (Polletta and Jasper 2001: 285). Collective identity in mobilization processes were especially complex in Saint-Domingue. Most of the enslaved population were Africa-born, so the most sensible option for strategizing escape within a group was to turn to one’s “countrymen” who shared linguistic, religious, and cultural identities and affinities. The runaway advertisements’ descriptions of African ethnicities are not much more precise than the labels that derive from slave trading records regarding the specific ethnonyms that Africans would have used, the exact geographic location of their birth, or even the correct port from which they embarked. Still, the ethnonyms in the advertisements give a sense that runaways who were described in similar terms were at most countrywomen and men who may have lived in close proximity or had real connections prior to capture. At a minimum, they were regional neighbors who shared linguistic, religious, or political commonalities, making it likely that these groups mobilized alongside members of their regional background. Findings from content analysis of the Les Affiches advertisements prove most runaway groups were racially or ethnically homogeneous, which further supports the salience of pre-existing collective identities among people of the same racial or ethnic designation in the practice of resistance to “New World” slavery (Thornton 1991; Reis 1993; Barcia 2014; Rucker 2015).

While ethnic identification can be an important organizing principle, racial formations can similarly play a role in African Diaspora collective actions (Butler 1998). Through geographic proximity, commercial networks, language, and other factors, the conditions of capture and enslavement explicated a “latent potential of ethnicity … even among those who were not consciously so disposed prior to their capture” (Gomez 1998: 7), adding a secondary layer of solidarity building that was at work through heterogeneous group escapes. Constructing a collective identity around Africanness may have been a primary step toward developing a broader sense of blackness. This chapter also aims to make sense of heterogeneous group escapes such as the Raar plantation maroons who were described as Kongo, Mondongue, Monbal, Moncamba, Arada, and Saint-Domingue creole, and explains the broader implications of these types of network formations. New identities and social network ties can form during, and because of, mobilizations like marronnage as disparately identified insurgents developed a sense of solidarity, or shared identification with and loyalty toward each other and a common fate or destiny (Melucci 1989; Gamson 1992; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Diani 1997; Kuumba and Ajanaku 1998; Hunt and Benford 2004). The transAtlantic slave trade, the Code Noir policy on French Caribbean slavery, and colonial plantation regimes forcefully imposed a “flattened” black identity onto the masses of enslaved Africans (Robinson 1983: 99–100; Bennett 2018). However, I argue that maroons and their enslaved or free co-conspirators autonomously socially constructed racial consciousness and racial solidarity through mobilization.

For example, Senegambians and Kongolese captives probably never would have come into contact on the African continent because of the distance between the two regions, thus their only commonalities were their shared survival of the Middle Passage and the status of being enslaved in a foreign environment. As these groups endured colonial structures in the Americas that categorized and exploited people because of their blackness rather than their ethnic, religious, or political origins, inter-ethnic solidarity between enslaved Africans and African descendants became increasingly important (Gomez 1998; Borucki 2015). Moreover, given the sheer size of the Africa-born population in the colony – two-thirds of the enslaved – it is fair to assume that most creoles and mixed-race individuals had direct parentage or other kinship ties to an African, despite claims from early sources that Africans and colony-born creoles were socially distant from each other. There were instances where it was more advantageous for runaways to compose groups that were racially and ethnically heterogenous – such as the Raar maroons. The racial and ethnic groups represented by the Raar maroons might have been able to marshal a wide range of knowledge pools, techniques, and tactics to better strategize escape. But to overcome the boundaries of their birth origins, cultures, religions, and languages, heterogeneous groups of absconders had to develop a certain level of depth in their relationships to establish trust and solidarity. They would have had to cultivate some understanding of their shared positionality of experiencing enslavement based on their blackness, rather than their respective heritages or other aspects of fragmentation among the enslaved population, making racialized experiences the basis for their marronnage.

The colonial newspapers Les Affiches américaines, Gazette de Saint Domingue, and the Courrier Nationale de Saint Domingue published the runaway slave advertisements. Les Affiches (hereafter LAA) was published in Cap Français (Le Cap) and Port-au-Prince beginning in 1766, three years after widespread printing operations were introduced to Saint-Domingue, until 1791, the year the Haitian Revolution uprisings began.² In the weekly papers, planters advertised sales or rentals of their goods, land, animals, as well as enslaved women and men. Separate listings of advertisements were placed for runaways who escaped enslavement, some for as short as three days, others for over ten years. Planters’ sole intention for placing runaway advertisements was to locate and re-capture fugitives to restore the economic losses of the enslaved people – who as chattel slaves were one of the colony’s foremost forms of capital – and the value of their labor productivity. It was not in planters’ immediate financial interest to provide full narrative accounts of fugitive escapes, since the advertisements themselves cost money to publish; nor was it within the realm of their ontological reality to consider runaways as strategic thinkers who planned their escape. The advertisements contain the implicit and explicit biases of slave owners who viewed enslaved people’s agency as an impossibility, and therefore inscribed into the advertisement texts the impossibility of accessing the full scope of the runaways’ lives. Despite the omissions, deliberate silences, violence, and virulently racist language that are embedded in the texts, there are also elements of enslaved people’s lived reality that can help expand our understanding of their inter-personal relationship dynamics and collective intentionality. To identify and relocate slaves and recoup their lost funds, planters had to provide some modicum of accurate information – however speculative – when placing the advertisements, making them a strong source for demographic representations of the escapee population.

The advertisements present general information including the escapee’s name, age, gender, and birth origin. It was also important for the planter, or plantation lawyer or manager, to identify themselves and provide contact information for where they could be reached and the bounty they were willing to pay as a reward for capture. Typically, the advertisements also included distinctive characteristics such as bodily scarring, the owner’s brand and other physical traits, personality disposition, or the person’s labor skills as a means of locating the escapee. Frequently, the advertisements contain an indication of the duration of time the self-liberated person had been missing, the area from which they had escaped and with whom they fled, and where or with whom they were suspected of hiding. These and other characteristics, such as the maroons’ linguistic skills, are helpful for studying the role of race and ethnicity, gender, and social ties in marronnage. The following section revisits the question of stratification among the enslaved and maroon populations with discussion of the demographics of the 12,857 runaways described in the Les Affiches advertisements.

Fragmentation: race, ethnicity, and gender

Gender

One of the widest imbalances among the maroon population was that of gender. Men over the age of 16 were the majority of runaways, accounting for nearly 80 percent of the 12,857 individuals described in the newspaper advertisements as shown in Table 4.1. Men were the largest proportion of the early transAtlantic slave trade captives and the enslaved population of the French colonies, but sex ratios were almost even leading up to the Haitian Revolution.³ Still, men were slightly over-represented in the distribution of the enslaved population, accounting for their high proportion among runaways. Men were also more likely to occupy artisanal labor positions that allowed them a certain amount of latitude during the workday. As will be discussed below, coopers, carpenters, shoemakers, fishermen, and other artisans ran errands, apprenticed and were leased by their owner to other plantations, or hired themselves out to earn their own money. As such, men could take advantage of quotidian labor-related tasks to escape without immediate detection. African men probably adapted to acquiring these proto-industrial work skills since, in several African societies, particularly the Loango and Angola coast regions, women performed agricultural work. For example, male captives in Portuguese-controlled Angola rejected agriculture-based slavery – seeing it as demeaning to their masculinity – and fled in response.⁴ Therefore, it is possible that African men who were field workers in Saint-Domingue were more likely to escape as a masculinist rejection of “women’s work.”

Table 4.1. Frequency Distribution of Gender and Age (N = 12,857)

Gender	Frequency	Percent	Cumulative
Women	1,858	14.45%	14.45
Men	10,271	79.9%	94.35
Girls (16 and under)	216	1.68%	96.03
Boys (16 and under)	512	3.98%	100

Conversely, enslaved African women in Saint-Domingue were over-represented as field workers and performed the most physically taxing jobs. While creole and mixed-race enslaved women were likely to be artisanal laborers or were found in the domestic sphere, most Africa-born women were under strict surveillance throughout the workday and therefore did not have as much flexibility to travel beyond the plantation.⁵ There is a disproportionately low number of women reflected in the runaway advertisements, with women representing only 14.45 percent of the reported runaways. Some historians (Gautier 1985; Fick 1990; Moitt 2001; Thompson 2006; Blackburn 2011) postulate that women were more likely to commit petit marronnage, and though planters did not report these missing cases, women acted as bridges between plantations and communities of escaped people and helped to create the mobilization structures necessary for organizing the Haitian Revolution. Conventional ideas about women’s marronnage also suggest that child-rearing responsibilities precluded many of them from taking the risk involved with escape on a permanent basis. Additionally, creole women were more likely than their male counterparts to receive legal manumission, often resulting from bearing a child biologically connected to white slavers due to mostly involuntary sexual relations. But, when we explore women’s resistance and look at their escape strategies, we see that some women did commit marronnage and at times did so with their children in tow. Some women who took flight were accompanied by young children, and 30 women escaped while with child.

We do not know much about the experience of childhood in Saint-Domingue, however it is important to note that black children below the age of 16 were enslaved and escaped bondage, either with a parent or another adult but sometimes alone. Gender patterns in marronnage among children generally mirrored those of adults (Table 4.1). Male children escaped over twice as often as female children: 3.98 percent compared to 1.68 percent, respectively. Plantation inventories show that boys tended to begin work around age eight, tending animals, working as domestics, or working in the field. Girls worked as nurses, domestics, and field hands.⁶ But Moreau de Saint-Méry observed that creole girls tended to have children at an early age, as young as 11 or 13, which temporarily delayed their entry into the workforce until after their first child was born.⁷ Adult women were slightly more likely than men to run away in a heterogeneous maroon group – 16.5 percent compared to 14.7 percent respectively – (Table 4.3) and this is probably because of those who escaped with their children such as the case of Nanette, a Monbal woman, her creole daughter Marie, and one-month old grand-daughter from the Raar plantation.

Thinking about women and children, and the ways in which enslaved women’s reproductive capabilities birthed hereditary racial slavery and hierarchies of racial capitalism (Morgan 2018) can give us an indication of the familial ties that existed between Africans and creoles, including bi-racial mulâtres. When African women’s children fathered by African or creole men were born in the colony, the children were called creole nègres, or blacks, which automatically inserted racial difference between mothers and children where there may have otherwise been a previously existing ethnic similarity. Creole women’s children were similarly black, but when an African or creole woman’s child was a product of coerced sexual encounters with white men, the children were born bi-racial mulâtres. If a creole black woman had a child with a mulâtre, then the child was a two-thirds black griffe. Less common were quarterons, those who were one-quarter black. Therefore, when enslaved women reproduced, their children usually were described as being of a different race. For example, Genevieve, a mulâtresse, who escaped with her daughter Bonne, a quarteronne in March 1786, were categorized differently based on phenotype and parentage.⁸ Different ethnic or racial identifiers did not inherently signify separation between enslaved people, who were likely related to an African person, given their overwhelming representation among bondspeople. Though women and girls were not highly represented as maroons, their rates of social network ties to family, a plantation-based relationship, or contact with other runaways or free people of color during marronnage were slightly higher than their male counterparts. Thus, enslaved women were indeed deeply connected within the landscape of the enslaved, marooned, and freed people of African descent (Table 4.11). Analysis of marronnage, as this chapter will show, is a way to highlight the nature of those interactions that can begin to complicate the ways we understand how race, ethnicity, and solidarity functioned at the micro-level in a colonial society that was stratified and fragmented by race, gender, occupation, and status, then became an independent nation where blackness was the primary qualifier for citizenship.

Race and Ethnicity

A significant intervention that this chapter, and this book, seeks to make is to disrupt not only the idea that enslaved people were “socially dead” without meaningful interpersonal relationships among other things, but the notion that differentiation and contention characterized and overdetermined the relationships that indeed existed among people of African descent. Early observers and subsequent scholarship regard maroons, slaves, Africans, creoles, mixed-race people, and free people of color as disparate categories of actors who were singularly self-interested and self-segregated. They also describe an internal hierarchy in which creoles occupied a higher status and carried an attitude of superiority toward recently arrived Africans, even though many creoles and mixed-race people shared kinship with older Africans. Moreau de Saint-Méry’s accounts, as well as those from the priest Jean-Baptiste Labat in the early eighteenth century, describe the enslaved population as a group divided by labor tasks and according to skin color, ethnicity, language, and religion. Indeed, the runaway advertisements themselves attest to the vast diversity of the enslaved population, over half of which were adults born in Africa representing over 100 “ethnicities.”⁹ These ethnic delineations were usually specified in the advertisements, but may not have been entirely historically accurate due to the imprecise nature of European–American slave trading documents. Some African captives were labeled based on the port from which they were shipped like the Capelaous (Cape Lahou), while others were based on broad coastal regions like the “Congos.”¹⁰ However inaccurate these labels might be, they represent the closest identifiers presently available to help us understand African origins.

There were 3,122 black creole runaways in the advertisements, so they comprised 24.3 percent of the runaway population (Table 4.2). This is a slight under-representation with respect to their number among enslaved people, which was closer to 33 percent (one-third), likely due to the possibility of gaining freedom through other means. Though a relatively rare occurrence, enslaved creoles could purchase manumission with their labor, and men could join the military and maréchaussée fugitive slave police. Duty in the armed forces was a way for colonial authorities to co-opt marronnage, creating an option for legal emancipation. Similarly, mixed-race people described as mulâtres, griffes, and quarterons were few in number among runaways, since as a group they were more likely to be gens du couleur libres rather than enslaved. However, these findings nuance understandings of Saint-Domingue’s free population of color by demonstrating that not all mixed-race people were privileged by their white fathers’ wealth. The sample was comprised of 4.2 percent mulâtres, 1.1 percent griffes, and 0.3 percent quarterons, meaning over 5 percent of runaways had some degree of white admixture in their lineage. Several advertisements do not describe the runaway’s race or ethnicity at all, but only include the person’s name and the name of the planter. Though we can assume that the runaway was a person of African descent, it is not entirely possible to accurately gauge the person’s racial category – or their geographic origins in Africa – without this information.

Table 4.2. Frequency Distribution of Saint-Domingue-born “Creoles” (N = 12,857)

Racial Category	Total	Percent
Nègre	3,122	24.3%
Mulâtre	540	4.2%
Griffe	136	1.1%
Quarteron	43	0.3%
Indien/indigenous	53	0.4%
Total	3,894	30.3%

Continent-born Africans comprised approximately 62 percent of the runaway population and well over half of these were West Central Africans, which corroborates other historical data that indicate they were the majority regional group in late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue. The most numerous of these were generally labelled as “Congo” (hereafter Kongo) without further specification.¹¹ Most French slave trading in this region was at the ports of Malemba and Cabinda on the Loango Coast, while Kongolese captives from Angola, where the Portuguese had long-standing relations and control, were filtered north by the Vili traders.¹² But, since the region was comprised of several independently operating kingdoms, such as Loango and KaKongo, there are yet unanswered questions as to the true origins of those described as “Congo” in Saint-Domingue. Despite the mislabeling of most Kongos, there were also significant numbers of West Central Africans like the Mondongues, Mayombés, and Mossoundis from the Loango Coast interior. Only eight ‘Angoles’ and sixteen Congo-Francs were listed, both groups that originated from Angola, providing evidence, albeit thin, of the small presence of Kongo Kingdom captives.¹³

Although they were the ethnic majority of the enslaved population in the early eighteenth century, by mid-century Bight of Benin natives were a distant second-place African group in Saint-Domingue, comprising 8.9 percent of runaways. Both Nagôs and Aradas were groups conquered by the Dahomey Kingdom, which actively captured and traded slaves along what was referred to as the “Slave Coast.” Though some members of the Dahomey Kingdom did become enslaved due to warfare, only three runaways were described with terminology specifically referencing the kingdom – Dahomet or Dahomey. Nagôs, also referred to as Yorubas in other parts of the Atlantic world, were the largest number of Bight of Benin Africans, with 432 people in the sample. Aradas were the next largest Bight of Benin group, accounting for 372 runaway persons; they were also called by their linguistic grouping of “Fon,” but only 27 Fon absconders appear in the advertisements. There were more Tiambas/Chambas than Fon – 119 – making them an important but less considered component of the Slave Coast population.¹⁴ Natives of the Senegambian/Upper Guinea region were the third largest regional group, totalling 5.2 percent of reported runaways. The Mandingues were the highest number of Senegambians, with 212 runaways, followed by 179 Bambaras and 143 Wolofs. Biafrans comprised 3.1 percent of the sample, and most of these were Igbos. The much smaller numbers of Bibi and Moco were Bantu-language speakers who were exported from Biafran ports.¹⁵ Most southeastern Africans were from Mozambique, where the French had begun trading in the 1770s.¹⁶

Africans from the Gold Coast, Windward Coast, and Sierra Leone were the least represented among runaways – even fewer than southeastern Africans from Madagascar and Mozambique, who numbered 1.3 percent of reported runaways. There were 153 Minas in the sample, making them the largest group of Gold Coast Africans. One hundred and two Cangas were in the sample, making them half of the number of Windward Coast natives. Sierra Leoneans, from a neighboring region to Senegambia, included Sosos, Mendes, and Timbous. Together, Sierra Leoneans made up 0.5 percent of the sample, the smallest number of runaways. Newly imported Africans, whose ethnicity was not yet logged, routinely escaped from ports or plantations before they underwent “seasoning.” Since they were not fully integrated into the plantation system, these runaways were simply referred to as nouveau in the advertisements. Nouveau fugitives would have been conspicuous, having just disembarked a slave ship – perhaps without clothing but with chains binding their necks, feet, and wrists. Still, they made up 3.1 percent of the runaway population, the same as the number of Biafrans represented in the sample.

Saint-Domingue’s enslaved population was diverse according to the ways slave traders and colonial social norms categorized individuals in terms of race, ethnicity, and birthplace. However, these markers of identity were not discrete categories that separated people from one another – for example, one could simultaneously be a mixed-race person or creole born in the Americas to an Africa-born woman. The categories that whites imposed were often unstable and an imprecise reflection of captives’ self-defined identities or their interpersonal relationships. The claims of writers like Moreau de Saint-Méry and Jean-Baptiste Labat, that enslaved creoles segregated themselves from Africans, harken to the false distinctions that late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Spanish colonists made between ladinos and bozales to attempt to predict and control one group’s propensity to escape and rebel over the other. These efforts to reify the differences between enslaved creoles and Africans were not based on actual cultural, linguistic, regional, political, or religious differences, but were mechanisms of obfuscating the conditions of enslavement and bondspeople’s inherent opposition to it. As the Spanish colonists found, and as the analysis of runaway advertisements below demonstrates, colony-born bondspeople were not significantly more or less likely to rebel than were Africans of various backgrounds, and in many cases they did so in concert.

Individual and Group Escapes

Most escapees ran away by themselves, accounting for 60.5 percent of runaways, while a total of nearly 40 percent escaped in a group of two or more people (Table 4.3 and Figure 4.1). Though most fugitives escaped alone, focusing on group escapes helps us understand how oppositional consciousness was operationalized beyond one person’s pursuit of freedom and extended to small-scale groups and bands. Not only were they family units, runaway groups were comprised of shipmates bound together by chains and regional origin, artisanal laborers and members of the same work gangs who fled together, and even strangers with a shared goal of freedom in mind. Homogeneous group escapes, meaning each runaway in the advertisement was described in the same racial or ethnic terms, indicated that a collective identity existed among the cohort; and heterogeneous group escapes, or escapes among runaways from different racial or ethnic backgrounds, demonstrated some sense of racial solidarity between individuals. Cultural and linguistic similarities made it easier for people of similar African heritage to collaborate and escape together, thus homogeneous group escape accounts for 24.4 percent of the sample. It was more difficult for groups comprised of different races and ethnicities to escape together because of cultural and linguistic differences. This can help account for why heterogeneous group escapes were less common, at 15.2 percent.

Table 4.3. Frequency of group escapes (N = 12,857)

	Total	Percent
Individual escape	7,773	60.5%
Homogeneous racial/ethnic group escape	3,132	24.4%
Heterogeneous racial/ethnic group escape	1,952	15.2%
Total group escapes	5,084	39.6%
Total	12,857	100%

Figure 4.1. Rates of group and individual escapes over time (N = 12,857)

At a rate of 74.6 percent individual escapes, boys were more likely than girls and adults of both sexes to flee by themselves (Table 4.4). Girls, on the other hand, ran away by themselves less often than anyone else at a 48.6 percent rate of individual escapes; therefore, they fled in groups at the highest rate. More specifically, girls escaped in a homogeneous group 6 percent more often than boys and 3 percent more often than adult women. Girls fled in a heterogeneous group 33 percent of the time, which was more often than anyone else. Since African girls were the minority group in the slave trade and the colony, they would have had a harder time finding someone of a similar background to join in absconding. For example, an eight or nine year old Arada girl named Félicité seems to have fled from Le Cap without an adult in 1768.¹⁷ Men were more likely than women or children to escape in homogeneous groups, suggesting men had an easier time identifying and forging relationships with men of a similar background. This is probably because men were the majority in both the slave trade and the colony; indeed, adult women escaped by themselves more than adult men (Table 4.4).

Table 4.4. Chi-square test, group escapes by gender (N = 12,857)

	Individual escape	Homogeneous group escape	Heterogeneous group escape	Total
Men	6,013 (58.5%)	2,751 (26.8%)	1,507 (14.7%)	10,271 (100%)
Women	1,273 (68.5%)	279 (15.0%)	306 (16.5%)	1,858 (100%)
Boys	382 (74.6%)	63 (12.3%)	67 (13.1%)	512 (100%)
Girls	105 (48.6%)	39 (18.1%)	72 (33.3%)	216 (100%)
Total	7,773 (60.5%)	3,132 (24.4%)	1,952 (15.2%)	12,857 (100%)

Note: p = 0.000.

Saint-Domingue-born and other Atlantic creoles were more likely to escape individually, averaging 78.8 percent and 81.98 percent respectively, while Africans overall had higher levels of group escapes (see Tables 4.4 and 4.9). Few African ethnic groups escaped individually at the same rates as creoles – only “Miserables” (which was possibly an aspersion cast either by their neighbors or French traders),¹⁸ Taquas, Capelaous, Cramenties, and Mesurades escaped by themselves over 75 percent of the time (Table 4.6). I have argued elsewhere that Africans were more likely to collaborate in marronnage because they needed to work together to navigate an unfamiliar landspace during their escapes.¹⁹ When people did escape in groups, they were more likely to do so with a cohort composed of a cohesive language, culture, race, or ethnicity. However, with time spent in the colony, acquisition of the Kreyol language, and participation in shared rituals, African and creole runaways could form alliances around their shared blackness and enslaved status.

Analysis of homogeneous and heterogeneous group escapes over time helps to reveal observable changes that might indicate growing solidarity among Africans and creoles of diverse backgrounds around a sense of racial identity or whether people clung to their disparate racial or ethnic identities of origin. Homogeneous groups were predominant over heterogeneous groups, reaching their height in 1768, representing 36.5 percent of all escapes then decreasing until the lowest point of 7.7 percent in 1781 and then increasing steadily until 1791 (Figure 4.2). Heterogeneous group escapes were less prevalent overall and were at their highest point in 1766 with 23.9 percent; however, they did outpace homogeneous escapes between the years 1779 and 1784. These years coincide with the decline of group marronnage overall (Figure 4.1), and the American independence-era British blockade on Saint-Domingue’s ports that prevented new slave ships from arriving. Therefore, enslaved people were forced to either escape alone or build new relationships with people of diverse backgrounds due to the lack of newly imported Africans. From 1784, heterogeneous group escapes increased steadily, albeit at a slower pace than homogenous group escapes, until 1791. While shared African ethnicity remained a significant aspect of group escapes, it was also becoming common for runaways to take flight in a group of people from diverse backgrounds. This indicates that a growing sense of racial solidarity was forming within rebellious activities during the pre-revolutionary period.

Figure 4.2. Homogeneous and heterogeneous group escape rates over time (N = 12,857)

Collective Identity: Homogeneous Group Escapes

Homogeneous group escapes among Africans were more common than not. Homogeneous escapes were significantly more common among West Central Africans, especially those labeled with the generic “Kongo” identity – at 31.87 percent – since they were the largest African ethnic group in the colony. Other ethnicities similarly escaped with their kith and kin, probably because they were freshly arrived from the slave ports and were most familiar with each other. Hausas escaped with each other at a high rate as well: 33.72 percent. Nearly 39 percent of Côte d’Or, or Gold Coast, Africans escaped together. Sosos also escaped together at a rate of 29.8 percent; and 27.45 percent of Cangas group escapes were homogenous. This type of identity cohesion may have contributed to developing effective means for escaping, such as: six Nagô men and three Nagô women who escaped in 1786; six “new” Aradas – Hillas, Alexandre, Antoine, Content, Colas, and Tu Me Quitteras – who fled on January 17, 1776; eight “new” Mondongues, who were reported missing for several months in October 1769; the seven Soso (Sierra Leone) runaways in 1787; or the five Igbo absconders in 1788.²⁰

The label of “new” was also used in cases where the runaways’ ethnicity was not yet known because the captives had not yet been fully integrated into the plantation system. The two women and six men described as “new” who escaped the Defontaine plantation at Gonaïves were not assigned names nor were their ethnicities detailed, but we can assume that they were from the same background.²¹ Runaways whose ethnic identity was unknown because they were new to the colony were most likely to escape together, since they escaped immediately after arrival. Sixty-seven per cent of group escapes among nouveau Africans were with other nouveaus, further demonstrating that shipmate relationships were sustained beyond the ports.

Black creoles had the easiest time finding other creoles to escape with, since 21 percent of creoles’ group escapes were homogeneous. In September 1775, a group of three creole women, Judith, Marie-Jeanne, and Nannette, and six creole men, Apollon, Jerome, Tony, Hercule, Achille, and Polydor, escaped the Fillion plantation at Boucan-Richard in Gros Morne.²² Sully, Thelemaque, Jean-Pierre, Manuel, and Therese were all creoles who left Haut du Cap in February 1786.²³ Among Saint-Domingue-born enslaved people, black creole runaways were most numerous, and thus took advantage of those numbers and their cultural dexterity (if they were born to African parents) to escape with other creoles, Africans, or mixed-race individuals (see Tables 4.5 and 4.6).

Table 4.5. Chi-square test, group escapes among Saint-Domingue-born “Creoles” (N = 12,857)

	Individual escape	Homogeneous group escape	Heterogeneous group escape	Total
Nègres	1,989 (63.7%)	656 (21.0%)	477 (15.3%)	3,122 (100%)
Mulâtre	441 (81.7%)	21 (3.9%)	78 (14.4%)	540 (100%)
Griffe	110 (80.8%)	9 (6.6%)	17 (12.5%)	136 (100%)
Quarteron	34 (79.1%)	5 (11.6%)	4 (9.3%)	43 (100%)
Indien/Indigenous	47 (88.7%)	2 (3.8%)	4 (7.5%)	53 (100%)
Total	2,621 (20.4%)	693 (5.4%)	580 (4.5%)	3,894 (30.3%)

Note: p = 0.000.

Table 4.6. Chi-square test, group escapes among continent-born Africans (N = 12,857)

Broad African region	Ethnic label	Individual escape	Homo-geneous	Hetero-geneous
West Central Africa & St. Helena	Congo, Kongo	2,236 (55.5%)	1,283 (31.87%)	507 (12.59)
	Mondongue, Mondongo	507 (51.49%)	110 (25.29%)	101 (23.22%)
	Baliba, Bariba	5 (71.43%)	2 (28.57%)	0 (0)
	Massangi, Mazangui	2 (20%)	7 (70%)	1 (10%)
	Moussondy, Mousombe	7 (63.64%)	2 (18.18%)	2 (18.18%)
	Missi-Congo	1 (50%)	0	1 (50%)
	Congo-Monteque	2 (100%)	0	0
	Congo-Franc	10 (62.5%)	5 (31.25%)	1 (6.25%)
	Mayombé, Mayembau	9 (60%)	5 (33.33%)	1 (6.67%)
	Mazonga-Congo	1 (100%)	0	0
	Gabonne	1 (100%)	0	0
	Angole	1 (12.5%)	7 (87.5%)	0
	Baassa, Abaffa	2 (25%)	6 (75%)	0
Senegambia	Bambara, Barba	99 (55.31%)	32 (17.88%)	48 (26.82%)
	Senegalaise, Wolof, Yolof	98 (68.53%)	13 (9.09%)	32 (22.38%)
	Malez, Mâle	2 (18.18%)	9 (81.82%)	0
	Poulard, Fulbe, Foule, Poule	23 (60.53%)	2 (5.26%)	13 (34.21%)
	Mandingue, Mandingo	132 (62.26%)	49 (23.11%)	31 (14.62%)
	Hausa, Aoussa, Haoussa,	38 (44.19%)	29 (33.72%)	19 (22.09%)
Bight of Benin	Mina, Mine, Amina, Amine	101 (66.01%)	9 (5.88%)	43 (28.10%)
	Arada, Aja, Adja, Juda, Adia	233 (62.63%)	80 (21.51%)	59 (15.86%)
	Nagô	245 (56.71%)	103 (23.84%)	84 (19.44%)
	Fon, Fond	19 (70.37%)	0	8 (29.63%)
	Tiamba, Thiamba, Chamba, Quiamba	84 (70.59%)	4 (3.36%)	31 (26.05%)
	Taqua, Attapa, Tapa, Taquoua, Tapaye	24 (77.42%)	1 (3.23%)	6 (19.35%)
	Cotocoli, Cotocoly,	31 (68.89)	6 (13.33)	8 (17.78)
	Aguia, Yaguia	12 (50%)	2 (8.33%)	10 (41.67%)
	Damba, Lamba	1 (100%)	0	0
	Gambery, Gamberi	4 (80%)	0	1 (20%)
	Guinee	1 (7.14%)	11 (78.57%)	2 (14.29%)
	Daomet, Dahomey	3 (100%)	0	0
	Miserable	34 (79.07%)	2 (4.65%)	7 (16.28%)
Bight of Biafra	Ibo, Igbo	243 (62.63%)	80 (21.51%)	65 (18.31%)
	Bibi	21 (53.85%)	8 (20.51%)	10 (25.64%)
	Moco	3 (75%)	0	1 (25%)
	Gimba	1 (100%)	0	0
Gold Coast	Cramenty, Caramenty	19 (82.61%)	0	4 (17.39%)
	Bandia, Banguia	2 (40%)	0	3 (60%)
	Cote d’Or	24 (42.11%)	22 (38.6%)	11 (19.3%)
	Quincy, Kissi, Quissi, Quicy	4 (33.33%)	2 (16.67%)	6 (50%)
Windward Coast	Canga, Kanga	54 (52.94%)	28 (27.45%)	20 (19.61%)
	Mesurade	40 (76.92)	3 (5.77)	9 (17.31)
	Capelaou	33 (75)	6 (13.64)	5 (11.36)
Sierra Leone	Soso, Sosso, Zozeau, Sofo	25 (43.86)	17 (29.82)	15 (26.32)
	Timbou, Thimbou, Thimbo	7 (70%)	2 (20%)	1 (10%)
	Mende	0	0	1 (100%)
Southeast Africa & Indian Ocean	Madagascar	3 (60%)	2 (40%)	0
	Mozambique, Mozamby	66 (40.24%)	82 (50%)	16 (9.76%)
“Nouveau”		106 (26.57%)	270 (67.67%)	23 (5.76%)
Total		4,619 (36%)	2,301 (17.9%)	1,206 (9.4%)

Note: p = 0.000.

Racial Solidarity: Heterogeneous Group Escapes

One of the largest group escapes was a heterogeneous band of 22 Africans who escaped the Duquesné plantation at Borgne in October 1789. Three of the 22 were Mondongues: Rampour, Barraquette, and Pantin; eight were Kongos: Abraham, Midi, Nicolas, Theodore, Emeron, Telemaque, and two women named Printemps and Catherine; three were Minas: Pyrame and two women Thisbe and Henriette; five were Igbos: Alexandre, Victor, Hipolite, Agenor, and Luron; one was a Senegambian woman named Agathe; one was a Bambara man named La Garde; and one was a creole woman named Poussiniere.²⁴ Another large group of 19 Africans fled Petite Anse in 1773. Their group included three Kongolese people: Tobie, Lubin, and a woman named Barbe; four Aradas: Blaise, Jean-Baptiste, Timba, and a woman named Grand-Agnes; a Nagô man named Toussaint; and eleven creoles: three women named Louison, Fanchette, and Catherine, and eight men named Foelician, Laurent, Christophe, Jean-Jacques, Joseph, Hubert, Baptiste and Louis.²⁵ These types of heterogeneous group escape were particularly diverse, considering that they were composed of people from vastly different regions. African runaways usually formed groups based on shared regional background, language, or religion. For example, Kongos and Mondongues seem to have been a common combination since they both were KiKongo speakers; as were Nagôs and Aradas, who shared religious commonalities and a common enemy, the Dahomeans. Similarly, Bambaras and “Senegalais” (Senegambians) were a common pairing, such as the group of a group of two Bambaras and two Senegambians who escaped together in December 1783, since they originated from a similar region in Africa and perhaps also shared the Islamic faith.²⁶

Overall, heterogeneous group escapes were more frequent among Africans than African descendant creoles. Bambaras’ heterogeneous escape rate was 26.82 percent, for Poulards (Fulbe or Fulani) it was 34.21 percent, Minas had heterogeneous group escapes 28.1 percent of the time, Thiambas escaped 26.05 percent of the time with others, and Aguias had the highest rates of heterogeneous escapes with 41.67 percent (Table 4.6). None of these groups had substantial numbers, and therefore may have collaborated with others out of necessity, since comrades from the same ethnicity were not readily available. But, black creoles absconded in heterogeneous groups more than other Saint-Domingue-born people at 15.3 percent (Table 4.5). An example of an heterogeneous group escape of Saint-Domingue-born runaways comprised three mulâtre men – François, Baptiste, and Catherine – and six creole counterparts: Haphie, Zabeth, and Cecile, all women, and three men Codio, Gracia, Hypolite.²⁷ In a separate case, three young women, Marguerite, aged 17, Barbe, aged 15, and Marie-Jeanne, aged 16 were all creoles who brought a four-month-old griffe baby with them during their escape from Gros-Morne.²⁸ Another group was composed of two mulâtresses named Marinette and Labonne, two creole women, Marie-Noel and Lalue, and a creole man, S. Pierre, who escaped the Piis property in Dondon in November 1785.²⁹ A fourth example in 1789 shows that a group of 16 absconders was composed of creole women, men, and children, and one Nagô woman.³⁰ Mulâtres had the second-lowest homogeneous group escape rate, at 3.9 percent, and the second-highest heterogeneous group escape, at 14.4 percent. This is likely because mulâtre children were taken with their Africa-born or colony-born creole mothers, or other family members. Similarly, griffes probably had immediate family members of a different race, making their group escapes inherently multi-racial at a rate of 12.5 percent. Quarterons were not very numerous as enslaved people or as runaways, resulting in them escaping by themselves 79.1 percent of the time and in either heterogeneous or homogeneous groups less frequently. “West” and “East” Indians had the highest level of individual escape, at 88.7 percent, and the lowest group escape rates, 11.3 percent altogether, due to their low population numbers.

Intra-American Slave Trade Captives in Saint-Domingue

When discussing the notion of an emerging racial solidarity, it is also important to consider the presence of African descendants who were enslaved on other islands within the circum-Caribbean and then re-sold to Saint-Domingue. Julius Scott’s (2018) renowned The Common Wind: Afro-American Communication in the Age of the Haitian Revolution brings attention to the intricate interconnectedness of the Caribbean by way of trade and communication networks. Enslaved and free African descendants who worked as sailors, soldiers, and traders traveled the high seas and transported with them news of events from across the islands. Similar to figures like Olaudah Equiano and Denmark Vesey, exposure to and experience with different imperial structures, plantation regimes, and African ethnic groups helped to cultivate a sense that blackness, not ethnicity, was the basis for enslavement across the Americas. The vast experiences of these “Atlantic creoles” and their observations of black people’s shared circumstances across the Caribbean gave them leadership qualities that could bring together masses from disparate groups. Henry Christophe, who had been part of the siege of Savannah during the American War of Independence and who later became King of northern Haiti in the post-independence era, is said to have been born in either Grenada or Saint Christopher; and “Zamba” Boukman Dutty was brought from Jamaica on an illegal ship in the years before the Revolution. Indeed, English-speakers from Jamaica seem to be the largest enslaved Caribbean group brought to Saint-Domingue. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has recently included findings from the intra-American trade, displayed in Table 4.7.

Table 4.7. Disembarkations of enslaved people to Saint-Domingue from the circum-Caribbean, all years³¹

Year Range	Dutch Caribbean	Dominica	Jamaica	Totals
1701–1725	102	0	0	102
1726–1750	224	0	0	224
1751–1775	18	0	0	18
1776–1800	41	396	10,176	10,613
Totals	385	396	10,176	10,957

The French royal government banned most of these intra-American trades, so there is an incomplete picture of the full population of enslaved people from across the Caribbean. However, the runaway slave advertisements help to fill in those gaps and demonstrate that captives arrived not only from Jamaica, Dominica, or the Dutch Caribbean, there were also many from Spanish colonies, other French colonies, and North America. Enslaved people brought to Saint-Domingue through the circum-Caribbean trade had experiential knowledge and consciousness that they brought from their perspective locations. They spoke several languages, most commonly English, Spanish, Dutch (and the Dutch creole Papiamento), and French, and some were reading and writing proficiently in those languages. These “creoles” had exposure to information that circulated the Atlantic world via news reporting and interactions at major ports. Not only would they have known of events related to European-Americans, they also would have known about enslaved people’s rebellions that occurred throughout the Caribbean. The largest number of Atlantic-zone runaways were those brought from other French colonies, especially Martinique and Guadeloupe. This is closely followed by the 1.7 percent of escapees who were formerly enslaved in colonies under English rule, mostly Jamaica and including some from Mississippi. At 1.1 percent, the third largest group of Caribbean-born runaways were from Dutch-speaking locations, mainly Curaçao, and a smaller number from Surinam (Table 4.8).

Table 4.8. Frequency distribution of “Atlantic Creoles” (N = 12,857)

Colony of origin	Total	Percent
Anglais/English (Jamaica, Mississippi)	219	1.7%
Espagnol/Spanish (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo)	41	0.3%
Hollandais/Dutch (Curaçao, Surinam)	139	1.1%
Portugais/Portuguese	26	0.2%
Other French colony (Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Christopher)	274	2.1%
Total	699	5.4%

There also were AmerIndians and East Indians enslaved in Saint-Domingue, making it additionally difficult to ascribe identity in instances of missing data, which accounts for 5 percent of the sample. Fifty-three runaways were described as indigenous Caraïbes or Indiens. These included Joseph, a Caraïbe with “black, straight hair, the face elongated, a fierce look,” who escaped in December 1788; or Jean-Louis, a Caraïbe who escaped with two Nagôs, Jean dit Grand Gozier and Venus, in July 1769.³² An Indien named Andre, a 30-year-old cook who spoke many languages, escaped Le Cap in July 1778; and another named Zephyr, aged 16–17, escaped the same area in late August or early September of 1780.³³ Caraïbes were native to the Lesser Antilles and perhaps were captured and enslaved in Saint-Domingue as part of the inter-Caribbean trade.³⁴ The origin of other Indiens, however, is less straightforward. Scholars generally believe that the Taíno population had completely disappeared by the eighteenth century, but this may not be entirely true. Recent developments indicate the Spanish underestimated sixteenth-century census data due to the numbers of Taíno who escaped, oftentimes with Africans, and those who were of mixed heritage.³⁵ Moreau de Saint-Méry witnessed indigenous people’s ritual ceremonies and saw their remains and artistic artifacts throughout the north. However, he used “Indiens Occidentaux” to describe Caraïbes and other indigenous peoples brought from Canada, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Other Indiens were black or dark-skinned sub-continental Asian Indians, or what he called “Indiens Orientaux.”³⁶ For example, there was Zamor, a “nègre indien … creole of Bengale … having freshly cut hair,” who at age 25 escaped the Aubergiste plantation in Mirebalais in August 1783.³⁷ Moreau de Saint-Méry distinguished two types of East Indians: one he perceived as similar to Europeans, with straighter hair and narrow noses. The other he likened to Africans, stating they had shorter, curlier hair and were closer in relation to blacks in Saint-Domingue. Further research is needed on the enslavement of non-Africans in the French colonies, and the possible connections to the African presence in India and the Middle East.³⁸

Spanish-speaking runaways escaped by themselves most often; this is perhaps an indication of their small numbers in the colony and lack of contact with others from their language group (Table 4.9). The fugitive migration trail typically tended to go from west to east, so very few escaped from the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo into Saint-Domingue. Yet, in October 1789, the commandant of St. Raphael in Santo Domingo Montenegro reported nine Kongolese men and four women missing.³⁹ Several other “Espagnols” listed in the advertisements were fugitives who were brought from Puerto Rico and Cuba. Small numbers and language barriers did not necessarily preclude non-Saint Dominguans from escaping with others. “Portuguese” (probably Brazilian) captives escaped in heterogeneous groups more often than in homogeneous groups, as did fugitives from Dutch, French, and English colonies. At a rate of 12.2 percent for heterogeneous group escapes, Dutch-speakers were much more likely to run away in a diverse group than a homogenous one. In 1770, a group of six escaped the island in a boat – they were Basile, a mulâtre from Curaçao; Tam, a Kongolese who spoke the Curaçaoan patois “Papimento”; Louis, a creole from Guadeloupe; François from Curaçao; Jean-Baptiste dit Manuel from Curaçao, and Baptiste from Curaçao.⁴⁰ English colony-born absconders had the highest rate of heterogeneous group escape. On the other hand, English-speaking runaways also escaped with each other the most. French colony runaways escaped alone at the second-highest rate, 89.4 percent, even though they had the linguistic benefit of being able to escape with Saint-Domingue-born runaways. Their French- language skills may also have been to their advantage in passing as free or cultivating relationships with free people of color.

Table 4.9. Chi-square test, group escapes among “Atlantic Creoles” (N = 12,857)

	Individual escape	Homogeneous group escape	Heterogeneous group escape	Total
English	150 (68.5%)	32 (14.6%)	37 (16.9%)	219 (100%)
Spanish	37 (90.2%)	0	4 (9.76%)	41 (100%)
Dutch	118 (84.9%)	4 (2.88%)	17 (12.2%)	139 (100%)
Portuguese	20 (76.9%)	2 (7.7%)	4 (15.4%)	26 (100%)
French	245 (89.4%)	7 (2.55%)	22 (8.0%)	274 (100%)
Total	570 (4.4%)	45 (.35%)	84 (.65%)	699 (5.4%)

Note: p = 0.000.

Social Network Ties and Destinations

Alberto Melucci’s Nomads of the Present (1989) clarifies tensions that exist between individuals and groups as they contend with one another, everyday life, and the processes of identity-making within submerged networks. He defines a “submerged network” as a system of small groups, where information and people circulate freely within the network. These networks operate in public view and are transitory, as members may have multiple memberships with limited or temporary involvement. Like ritual free spaces, submerged networks bring to light the importance of shielding these social spaces and relationships from dominating forces within society in order to maneuver with flexibility. The web of maroons, enslaved people, and free people of color that made up submerged networks created new understandings of social circumstances and circulated ideas, resources, as well as strategies and tactics for collective action. An important part of the knowledge shared among the submerged networks of runaways was where one could hide once leaving the plantation. Sunday markets in the major towns like Cap Français were opportunities for blacks – free, enslaved, and runaways alike – to converge and interact, buying and selling food, exchanging services, and sharing information about issues pertinent to their lives, such as achieving freedom. Planters’ advertisements often speculated about where the runaway was going, based on the enslaved person’s known familial ties or the places they were known to frequent to give further alert to other whites in the areas where a runaway might be hiding. These types of location-based relationship ties from formal and informal social spheres like neighborhoods, work, or family are an influential factor in cultivating collective action participation (McAdam 1986; Gould 1995; Diani 2003). The current section analyzes five types of social ties and destinations that maroons deployed in their freedom journeys (Table 4.10).

Table 4.10. Frequency distribution of social ties and destinations (N = 12,857)

Social ties and destinations	Total	Percent
Family tie	130	1.0%
Labor-/skill-related	1,632	12.7%
Plantation/area of birth	153	1.2%
Spanish territory	80	0.62%
Other runaways and free people	80	0.62%
Total	2,075	16.1%

Besides running away in small-to-large groups, fugitives used their human and social capital to flee from bondage. When possible, enslaved people attempted to connect with family members or other known associates on various plantations. Over time, the enslaved cultivated and established relationships – biological or chosen – with other enslaved people or free people of color. I coded familial ties if the advertisement specifically describes the runaway as having a family member in another location. A second common destination for runaways who were sold and taken elsewhere, but who sought to re-connect with social familiars, was the plantation or parish of their birth. Artisanal labor skills were also an important avenue for escape. Most enslaved Africans and African descendants performed hard labor in the fields of sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations – tilling land, cutting cane, tending to animals, etc. However, larger-scale operations, especially sugar plantations, had a wider array of specialized tasks and positions that men mostly occupied, allowing them more daily flexibility than field hands. Sometimes, owners leased these artisanal laborers to other planters, or the artisans leased themselves out to earn money or their freedom. In these instances, quotidian work patterns of unmonitored travel from one plantation to another, or even between different buildings on the same plantation, would have provided narrow but existing windows of opportunity to slip away without immediate detection. I coded labor- and skill-related destinations if the runaway had access to individuals or spaces beyond the location of their captivity because of their specialized occupation. Another common destination that emerged from the advertisements was the sparsely populated Spanish territory, Santo Domingo, to the east of Saint-Domingue. The imaginary border was the cause of friction between the two colonies, which runaways exploited to their benefit. The ongoing tension over the border will be discussed further in Chapter 6. Finally, I coded free communities to include other maroons and free people of color. In Chapters 6 through 8, I discuss in more depth the small-scale communities of runaways interspersed throughout Saint-Domingue’s numerous mountain chains in hard-to-reach areas, living quietly but at times raiding nearby plantations for provisions. Enslaved people knew of these communities – and sometimes neighborhoods designated for free people of color – and were attracted to these spaces, seeking safe haven.

Gender and Birth Origin

Compared to Africans, Saint-Domingue-born African descendants were more than 10 percent likely to use family ties, and more than three times as likely to seek old plantation connections to aid their escape (Table 4.11). Creoles were born and socialized in the colony, had more familial relationships, and had more knowledge of the colony’s landscape. Conventional notions that labor hierarchies followed the logic of the colony’s racial stratum leads many to believe that Saint-Domingue-born creoles were preferred over Africans for artisanal labor positions. However, Africans and Atlantic creoles were more likely to have an artisanal trade than Saint-Dominguans; were more than twice as likely to flee to Santo Domingo; and were more than twice as likely to have been harbored by other maroons or free people of color. Perhaps constant movement and migration were normalized among those who were foreign to Saint-Domingue, having been brought from either Africa or other parts of the Caribbean.

Table 4.11. Social ties and destinations by birth origin (1,978 observations)

Birth origin	Family tie	Labor/skill	Plantation/area of birth	Spanish territory	Runaways/free people	Total
Saint-Domingue	103 (12.7%)	599 (70.8%)	103 (12.2%)	19 (2.3%)	22 (2.6%)	846 (100%)
Africans & Atlantic creoles	21 (1.86%)	956 (84.5%)	42 (3.7%)	57 (5.0%)	56 (4.95%)	1,132 (100%)

Note: p = 0.000

The relationship between gender and social network ties does not prove that women escaped in all-female groups as has been suggested;⁴¹ however, it does demonstrate that social networks and mutual aid more generally were an important aspect in women’s patterns of escape (Table 4.12). For example, an Ibo woman named Dauphine escaped as a maroon, taking with her a 13-year-old bi-racial girl named Gabrielle in order to return the child to her mother and siblings.⁴² When adult women runaways who had some sort of destination in mind stole away from plantations, they were more likely than men to have either a family relationship, a plantation-based relationship, or contact with other runaways or free people of color. Twenty-three year old Reine escaped Port-au-Prince, possibly heading to Grande-Rivière where she had a sister who was free.⁴³ Women fugitives were slightly less likely than men to escape to Santo Domingo, since women relied more on their social capital and relationships to abscond.⁴⁴ In keeping with plantations’ gendered divisions of labor, men were more likely to use their artisanal labor as an exit strategy, exploiting travel for errands, market days, or going to other plantations as leased labor as a window of opportunity for escape.

Table 4.12. Chi-square test, social ties and destinations by gender and age (2,075 observations)

Gender	Family tie	Labor/skill	Plantation/area of birth	Spanish territory	Runaways/ free people	Total
Men	99 (5.66%)	1,423 (81.4%)	96 (5.5%)	68 (3.9%)	62 (3.6%)	1,748 (100%)
Women	24 (9.6%)	158 (63.5%)	46 (18.5%)	8 (3.2 %)	13 (5.2%)	249 (100%)
Boys	5 (7.6%)	43 (65.2%)	10 (15.2%)	4 (6.1%)	4 (6.1%)	66 (100%)
Girls	2 (16.7%)	8 (66.7%)	1 (8.33%)	0	1 (8.33%)	12 (100%)
Total	130 (6.3%)	1,632 (78.7%)	153 (7.4%)	80 (3.9%)	80 (3.9%)	2,075 (100%)

Note: p = 0.000.

Labor

Enslaved people performed a variety of tasks associated with the sugar, coffee, and indigo plantation regimes, and they experienced varying levels of physical exertion, punishment, position, and privilege. The vast majority were field hands, but a select few were artisanal trade laborers or otherwise domestic workers who performed tasks that were specialized, which often allowed them to travel beyond their immediate plantation to run errands, or at times even learn to read and/or write a European language. These differentials within the enslaved labor pool might indicate a stratification by occupation that would preclude cooperation between field hands and artisanal laborers or incentivize enslaved artisans from escaping at all. However, over 1,600 maroons, or 12.7 percent of the sample (Table 4.9), were described as having a labor-related skill, and according to the Marronnage dans le Monde Atlantique database, 683 distinct métiers or jobs are found in the advertisements. Seamstresses, midwives, fishermen, hairdressers, shoemakers, carpenters, valets, coopers, sugar boilers, coaches, and commandeurs were just a few of occupations that were considered to have a higher rank in the enslaved labor force. These people would have had relative flexibility in their everyday lives compared to bondspeople, whose labor was confined to the plantation fields (Table 4.9). Though they were still enslaved, artisanal bondspeople in more populated urban areas had contact with people of varying walks of life and saw parts of the colony they may not have otherwise seen. Women tended to be seamstresses, hairdressers, and vendors. Merancienne, a creole woman from Martinique, was a seamstress and laundress who fled Le Cap in September of 1767, and was last seen selling eggs and poultry.⁴⁵ Another female vendor was 18-year-old Isidore of Kongo, who sold herbs and flowers on the streets of Le Cap and escaped repeatedly in 1770 and 1772.⁴⁶ Baptiste, a creole man, was both a hairdresser and a violin player who wore a blue vest and black culottes, signifying his relative privilege.⁴⁷ Even commandeurs, members of the enslaved labor force responsible for maintaining order among the work gangs, escaped their bondage. Scipion, an Arada bondsman, also served as a mason for his owner and ran away for the second time in the fall of 1779.⁴⁸

Literacy in European languages dominant in the Atlantic world was another skill and form of human capital that facilitated escape. Reading and writing capabilities would have allowed fugitives to legibly forge free papers. Spoken fluency could allow runaways to present themselves to others as free persons of color whose native home was either Saint-Domingue or another colony. For example, runaways speaking Dutch or English could potentially head to a nearby port to board a ship. Thom, a quarteron from Saint Christopher, escaped in July 1788 and was believed to have “liaisons with the English.”⁴⁹ Marie-Rose, a 14- to 16-year-old girl, spoke very good Dutch and was suspected of hiding out at the coast of Le Cap with a cook who used various alias names.⁵⁰ An unnamed mulâtre from Guadeloupe spoke French very well and used this knowledge to pass for free in Léogâne.⁵¹ Simon, a creole, spoke both French and Spanish, indicating that he may have passed for free in Saint-Domingue or crossed the border into Santo Domingo.⁵² Besides artisanal labor positions, linguistic skills were one of the only forms of human capital afforded to enslaved people, since most did not have access to formal education or other tools that could be translated to economic or political power. Therefore, runaways made use of the resources most readily available to them in the colonial context, including language and their social relationships.

Family and Plantation Ties

Altogether, runaways who sought out known family ties and old plantations comprised 2.2 percent of the sample (Table 4.9). It was not uncommon for enslaved people to have immediate family members who offered them refuge. Though some women attained manumission through their owners, children of these relationships were not always freed. For example, a mixed-race woman named Magdelaine sought out her free mother, Suzanne, in Cap Français.⁵³ Jean-Baptiste was a creole runaway who had escaped for 15 months, possibly reaching his family of free people of color living in Port-de-Paix, where he was born.⁵⁴ Other instances show that family members who were still enslaved also provided shelter, even if only for a temporary visit, for their kin. The parents of Phaëton were based on a plantation in Trou when he absconded to find them; and Venus was suspected to have found her mother, who lived in Port-Margot.⁵⁵ Plantations, especially larger ones with several housing units, could be places of refuge for runaways who were either temporary absentees or lying in wait for a fellow absconder. Père Labat claimed there was a sense of loyalty and cooperation between enslaved people and runaways, detailing the double closets slaves constructed in their cabins to conceal a friend or to hide stolen goods.⁵⁶ Desirée, a Mondongue, belonged to the Charron plantation in Acul, yet it was suspected that for some time she had been staying at the Caignet plantation, also in Acul.⁵⁷ Jean-Baptiste, a dark-skinned creole “having traits of a white” had escaped for more than 15 months, and the advertisement states he was born in Port-de-Paix, where nearly all of his family was free.⁵⁸

Chosen kin ties were also strong, perhaps forged during the Middle Passage, and prompted people to seek out comrades from whom they had been separated. Isidore, a 22-year-old Kongolese stamped T. MILLET and G. ANSE, representing Sieur Millet of the Grand Anse region in the south, stole a canoe that was later found in Petite-Anse in the north. Millet had sold several slaves to the Balan plantation and it was suspected that Isidore was trying to rejoin them.⁵⁹ For some, being sold to an especially punitive planter could be reason enough to seek out a previous owner who was relatively benevolent. Such “master exchanges” existed in the Loango Coast areas, when mistreated enslaved people offered themselves to new owners.⁶⁰ As James Sweet has pointed out, a 16- or 17-year-old Kongolese boy named Cupidon had been missing from his owner for six months, and it was believed he was in his old master’s neighborhood; another 17-year-old boy from the Kongo, Julien, escaped heading to Fort Dauphin, hoping to be reclaimed by his first owner.⁶¹ Godparentage was another example of fictive kin relationships that supported marronnage, such as the case of Marie-Louise, also called Marie-Magdeleine, who left Eaux de Boynes and may have reached Le Cap where her godmother lived at the women’s religious house.⁶² Enslaved people used their family relationships to facilitate marronnage; conversely it also stands to reason that they used marronnage to sustain their familial relationships. Despite the practice of slaveowners selling bondspeople to plantations across the colony and away from their familiars, enslaved people and maroons risked their lives to actively nurture their kin relationships and to aid each other in their attempts to self-liberate. Another potential advantage for escapees was having a connection to free people of color or an established maroon community, since these groups could offer protection, housing, and resources like food, clothing, or arms.

Santo Domingo and Free Communities

Interestingly, escaping to Spanish Santo Domingo and seeking out other communities of runaways or free people of color were the least common destinations – each accounting for only 0.62 percent of the sample observations (Table 4.9). The low reporting of runaways fleeing to Santo Domingo and to self-liberated encampments contrasts with several complaints from planters and accounts by former maréchaussée leaders that attest to the presence of absconders both in Saint-Domingue and across the eastern border. Military sources also indicated that Saint-Dominguan runaways settled in Santo Domingo and married locals.⁶³ This could have been the case with Cupidon and Bernard, both Kongolese men who had disappeared ten years before 1787; Jacques, a Mondongue, who was missing for five years; and l’Eveille, an Igbo man missing for two years. The advertisement speculates that they were in Santo Domingo because the four men had not been seen at all since they escaped.⁶⁴ Others traversed into Santo Domingo to trade with or work for the Spanish, such as Gillot, who was considered very dangerous because he stole horses and mules, then sold them to the Spanish.⁶⁵ A Mondongue woman named Franchette had been at large for three years and was known for her business dealings with the Spanish.⁶⁶ French planters’ concerns about runaways to Santo Domingo will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 6.

Free people of color provided refuge to runaways as well, although they risked losing their freedom for doing so, such as Hercule who was sold to the king of France in March 1768.⁶⁷ The neighborhood of Petit Guinée in Cap Français was a regular destination for runaways to find housing, lease themselves out for pay, and blend in with the growing population of free people of color. While many free people of color were wealthy slave owners themselves, manumitted slaves of the affranchi class maintained biological and social ties to enslaved people and at times offered them shelter, food, clothing, or work. In June 1786, an absconder named Toussaint, along with a group of slaves and free blacks, was accused of theft. Toussaint was flogged and hanged in the public square of Le Cap, and the others were whipped and sentenced to the chain gang for forging free passes and taking up rental rooms for a freeman named Larose.⁶⁸ Marie-Jeanne, a creole woman who disguised herself as a man, escaped from Petit Saint-Louis on March 5, 1788 and was presumed to have been sheltered by free people of color; and in 1771, eight men and two women from the Fessard plantation in the Black mountains were suspected of hiding with free people of color.⁶⁹ Four runaways of the Nagô nation – a man named Jean and three women named Rosalie, Jeanneton, and Marie – fled a Petite-Anse plantation with their work tools and other essential items and were suspected of being concealed by other slaves or free people of color.⁷⁰ A Kongo woman named Zaire was suspected of escaping with a woman from another plantation, as they had escaped around the same time. Zaïre was believed to have been staying in either Limonade, Trou, or Terrier Rouge, where free people of color may have been hiding her.⁷¹ These examples not only indicate the existence of collaboration between enslaved people and maroons, they also highlight the role of some free people of color in aiding efforts for liberation – even at the expense of their own interests.

Conclusion

Group escape was one vehicle through which runaways exhibited or cultivated relationships and trust – people decided to escape with familiars from slave ships, living quarters, or work gangs, individuals who were willing to take a life-threatening risk, or were otherwise in their immediate proximity. Over time, group escapes did become more frequent, although not as frequent as individual escapes, and the average group size slightly increased each year. Generally, it was easiest to build ties for marronnage with members of the same ethnic, religious, linguistic, or regional background. This explains why homogeneity remained a prevalent characteristic of most group escapes. These racially/ethnically cohesive mobilization network patterns mirrored those that appeared among rebel bands that were organized by nation during the early years of the Haitian Revolution, such as the Nagô, Gold Coast, Moco (Igbo), or the Kongolese fighters led by Macaya.⁷²

However, by recruiting and mobilizing people of a different racial or ethnic backgrounds, runaways exhibited the growing importance of racial solidarity. Heterogeneous group marronnage increased slowly after 1784, and though the rate was still less than homogeneous group escapes, it was closely associated with longer lengths of escape, which I discuss in Chapter 5. Moreover, longer lengths of escape were reported before the Revolution. Therefore, heterogeneous marronnage has interesting implications for understanding the importance of “weak ties” in successful marronnage leading to the Haitian Revolution. Although previously existing relationships have long been acknowledged as important resources in building one’s social capital, there is also value in transient, “weak” relationships with those outside the scope of one’s immediate trust networks. While homogeneity in a personal network can help foster confidence, trustworthiness, and a sense of cohesion, heterogeneity exposes people to new knowledge, information, resources, and opportunities (Granovetter 1973). Social ties can lead to participation in mobilization (McAdam 1988), but heterogeneity in those collective action networks also contributes to shared affinity with a cause and the production of a singular identity over time (Melucci 1985, 1989; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Diani 1997). Diversity of skills and knowledge was beneficial for a dangerous venture such as marronnage, because a mistake or gap in timing, resources, or information could be life-threatening. Though it required a considerable amount of trust among participants, a diverse composition of marronnage groups was a successful strategy for escape.

It is true that colony-born creoles were more likely to escape alone or in homogeneous groups, while Africans escaped in groups more often than did creoles. Also, overall, creoles did not have more social ties and destinations than Africans, except for plantation- and kin-based connections. Women especially used their relationships with family, plantation-based connections, other runaways, and free people of color to facilitate escape. This sheds empirical light on previous speculations that personal networks shaped women’s marronnage. Conversely, Africans were more likely to head to Santo Domingo, to other runaways, and used their labor skills to escape. Chapter 5 will demonstrate that while conventional wisdom suggests that creoles were more “successful” at marronnage because of the social capital afforded by previously existing connections, this may not have been completely true because refuge in Santo Domingo and inter-ethnic group escapes were two of the most effective means of achieving longer lengths of self-liberation. Saint-Dominguan creoles were more likely to pass for free, which was another effective way of staying free. Still, it seems that in marronnage, building weaker ties through reaching out to people from other backgrounds and seeking unfamiliar lands to the east had more pay-off in terms of duration of escape.

Micromobilization theory suggests that temporal stages of participation are important when considering who joins collective action efforts, why they join and when, and what their participation qualitatively looks like (Ward 2015, 2016). At times, it may not necessarily look like participation at all, particularly if the overall movement is in abeyance. However, awareness of and sympathies for a cause can indirectly or directly contribute to action, given the right timing and circumstances, available resources, and linkages to people who are already involved. Runaways and slaves were not necessarily discrete categories of social actors, they represented different stages of human activity that may or may not have transformed into collective action. We will see repeat absconders discussed in Chapter 5, and in Chapter 8, enslaved people who escaped, were re-captured or returned voluntarily, then escaped again only to bring along others or to become part of a wider uprising. The linkages created or exemplified by runaway groups, and their ongoing contact with plantations – via raids, hideouts, recruiting, or kidnapping – fostered an oppositional consciousness that may not necessarily have manifested itself in an immediate sense, but unfolded over time. Chapter 7 will further engage micro-level and aggregate patterns of marronnage within the historical context to identify factors that contributed to, or hindered, escapes.

5 Marronnage as Reclamation

Marronnage, in many ways, was about enslaved people reclaiming possession of themselves and other intangible and tangible resources that enslavers stole from them. Colonial society aimed to nullify enslaved Africans’ identities and sever ties to their cultural heritages. Enslavers commodified enslaved people, extracted their labor power for no compensation, dominated enslaved people’s time, and denied them access to any form of capital. Maroons upended these conditions through various acts to reclaim themselves, their time, and their resources, representing a “dialectical response to the capitalist plantation system whose imperative was to reduce them to units of labor power – to dehumanize them,” as Sylvia Wynter has argued (n.d.: 73–74). Maroons’ actions reflected their oppositional consciousness, which is defined as a “set of insurgent ideas and beliefs constructed and developed by an oppressed group for the purpose of guiding its struggle to undermine, reform, or overthrow a system of domination” (Morris 1992: 363). In reversing the conditions of dispossession, maroons’ acts of reclamation at the micro-level were foundational for revolutionary tactics and eventually expanded to the larger project of socio-political reclamation of the nation Ayiti/Haiti (Roberts 2015). The current chapter attempts to detect an oppositional consciousness among enslaved African descendants and maroons in the years before the Haitian Revolution. Social scientists do not often consider the Haitian Revolution, and its antecedent forms of resistance, to be part of the revolutionary processes that constituted the making of the modern era (Bhambra 2016). However, through their oppositional actions during marronnage, runaways embodied their own social, economic, and political projects by reclaiming personal sovereignty, asserting themselves as free and equal citizens, and building solidarity through their social networks. While colonists’ definitions of freedom and liberty meant having the right to engage in the “free trade” and enslaving of human flesh, maroons enacted opposing forms of modernity, giving meaning to the revolutionary slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité” well before the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man.

In Saint-Domingue and other French colonies, the Code Noir outlined royal dictates for enslaved people’s behavior and the status of their condition. The Code Noir articulated the economic, social, and political apparatuses that bolstered the subjugation and enslavement of African people while justifying the brute force violence of the colonial plantation enterprise. Though the Code Noir was in part written with the intention to “protect” the enslaved with guidelines for punishments, enslavers in Saint-Domingue generally disregarded top-down policies from the French crown and exerted physical punishments that exceeded regulations issued by the king. The Code Noir implemented strict rules that were designed to constrain black people’s everyday behaviors and movements, with the assumption that access to freedom of movement, time, material resources and forms of capital, political power, and the ability to bear arms would contribute to rebellion. The Code Noir barred enslaved people from congregating with others from different plantations for any purpose without the written permission of their owner, riding horses, or walking on the roads after dark; it prohibited them from carrying weapons in public, and in the aftermath of the Mackandal case, any enslaved person carrying a sword or a machete could face three months in prison. According to Articles XVIII, XIX, and XXIV of the Code Noir, the enslaved could not sell any sugarcane under any circumstances, could not profit from the sale of commodities or foodstuffs at markets without the slave owner’s permission, and were not allowed to earn income for the trade of subsistence food on their days off. Particularly in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue was an increasingly repressive society where philosophies and scientific ideologies of white supremacy took root and further shaped constrictions on the enslaved and even free people of color. For example, black people were not allowed to bear the names of their white patrons, or even wear clothing items or hairstyles that might convey similarity to French culture; free people of color were banned from practicing medicine and eventually were banned from mainland France altogether.¹

Plantation owners and members of the management class benefitted from the power dynamics created by the Code Noir, which authorized them to exert control and surveillance upon all areas of enslaved people’s lives. Drawing on the likes of Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon, John Gaventa has argued that such stark imbalances rely on three dimensions of power: brute force tactics; social, economic, and political apparatuses that preclude the subordinated from seeking or obtaining power; and, most notably found in colonial situations, the hegemonic “shaping of wants, values, roles, and beliefs of the colonized (Gaventa 1980: 32).” This combination of tripartite power dynamics, when they are fully exercised, can make rebellion even more difficult to observe. In such extreme conditions of structural powerlessness — accompanied by hegemonic cultures and ideologies that legitimate social, economic, and political disparities — some might assume that the lack of major enslaved people’s rebellions in Saint-Domingue, such as those that occurred in places like Jamaica and Brazil, would point to a general quiescence to domination and injustice. Enslavers often assumed that bondspeople accepted their status and desired to mimic the behaviors of whites, such as adopting styles of dress or dance movements from France, for instance. It was not uncommon for plantation owners to incentivize docility and deference with trinkets or money. For example, Fort Dauphin planter Louis Tousard incorrectly thought it wise to pacify a rebellious enslaved commandeur named Pierre Loulou with a new coat.² However, Tousard’s attempt was a response to the “onstage” face that enslaved people like Pierre Loulou had to present in order to avoid violent punishments and to prevent suspicion of their “offstage” actions, or behaviors that occurred beyond the immediate sight or understanding of power-holders and opposed control of the dominant class (Scott 1990).

It is the contention of this book that the enslaved of Saint-Domingue never fully internalized the logic of their subordination into their collective consciousness, evinced by the perpetuation of African-based rituals and militaristic ideas, and the island’s longue-durée tradition of marronnage. Individual and collective actions that violated either parts or entire systems of oppression and the hegemonic ideologies or cultures of ruling classes are a window through which to see oppositional consciousness. The enslaved regularly transgressed colonial restrictions; for example, enslaved people bought and sold goods, or leased themselves out as laborers at the nègre marche in Port-au-Prince and Le Cap. However, other actions – especially those undertaken by maroons when they fled – not only speak to enslaved people’s desires for economic autonomy, but point toward conceptions of themselves as ‘free’ with the right and liberty to define their identities, to self-protect, and to determine the course of their own lives. When enslaved people escaped, they knew that they were risking their own death, and that of loved ones, and needed protection and resources to enhance the probability of a successful escape. To do this, they had to violate the colony’s policies and assume certain specific oppositional actions to ensure their survival.

This chapter brings attention to how maroons reclaimed their humanity by reimagining their status and identity, taking possession of forms of capital and raw materials that upheld and sustained plantations’ divisions of labor, adopting tactics of self-arming and militancy, and reclaiming their time. The fugitive advertisements placed in Les Affiches américaines give some insight into the minds of runaways by speculating on the actions they took in the minutes or days before or after they fled. Rather than interpret these actions through the lens of enslavers’ foreshadowing of maroons’ movements for the purposes of surveillance and re-enslavement, this chapter employs subaltern analysis of maroon actions as they are linked to a broader sense of collective consciousness regarding freedom and liberation. Subversive reading of the advertisements highlights maroons’ hidden transcripts, their oppositional actions, gestures, and practices that “confirm, contradict, or inflect” the narratives that plantation personnel sought to convey within the public transcript – the very same advertisement deployed to re-establish and reaffirm control over the enslaved (Scott 1990: 2–5). While Chapter 7 will bring attention to macro-level economic, political, and environmental changes that affected trends of marronnage as a repertoire of contention, the current chapter narrows down to the micro-level actions that were influenced by shared consciousness and that constituted the tactics of marronnage. Repertoire tactics can include a wide range of activities such as civil disobedience, confrontations with police, consciousness raising, strikes, bodily assault and murder, throwing objects, looting, singing, arson, and many other actions (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004). Macro-historical contexts shape the types of tactics that can be used within a particular setting; enslaved people’s “toolkit” of resistance tactics was generally narrow, including mostly individualized and embodied resistance actions such as suicide, work tool sabotage, or feigning illness, as well as other actions that were most immediately feasible.

Verta Taylor and Nella Van Dyke identify three characteristics of repertoire tactics, “contestation, intentionality, and the construction of collective identity (2004: 268),” that can make claims-making during marronnage more easily identifiable. Maroons’ repertoire tactics relied on embodied acts of contestation to pursue changes in structural power relations (see Tables 5.1–5.3), and to help develop oppositional consciousness and collective identity. One way runaways reimagined their status and identity was by passing as free. Before retreating from plantations, some runaways who could read or write in French or other European languages – a form of human capital that was valued in the Americas – replicated documents to declare themselves free. Others found “fancy” clothing or otherwise disguised themselves to be considered as part of the population of free people of color. Maroons also enacted intentionality through strategic decision-making and conscious intentions to create lasting change for themselves. They appropriated material goods and technologies through looting horses, mules, or canoes to reach their chosen hideout quickly, or they took money, clothing, or food to consume or to exchange at a market. They empowered themselves with militant actions by bearing arms such as guns, sabers, sickles, and other work tools as they prepared to endure the high-risk action of living in marronnage. Finally, maroons reclaimed themselves and their time by repeatedly escaping or remaining at-large for longer periods of time. Those who escaped repeatedly faced increasingly violent repercussions with each return, yet fear of brutal punishment was not enough to dissuade the most resolute fugitives. By fleeing, maroons denied the plantocracy access to their knowledge pools they had garnered as enslaved laborers and marshalled those resources toward the creation of self-freed social networks and independent living zones. The time that maroons appropriated not only allowed them to live on self-defined terms, it also facilitated the space to recruit others into marronnage. The diffusion of oppositional ideas and tactics, through the repertoire tactic of marronnage, helped to spread collective consciousness and solidarity as the Haitian Revolution approached.

Table 5.1. Frequency distribution of oppositional actions, (N = 12,857)

Oppositional actions	Total	Percent
Passing as free	576	4.5%
Appropriation of goods	410	3.2%
Bearing arms	64	0.5%
Repeat escape	58	0.45%
Total	1,108	8.6%

Reimagining status and identity

Passing as Free

Though the Code Noir allowed unmarried slave owners to marry bondswomen and manumit them and their resulting children, most enslaved people in Saint-Domingue had few options for formal emancipation from slavery – even when the law was on their side. For example, a group of six mulâtres were scheduled for manumission by their owner, and soon after his death they parted from the plantation. Unbeknownst to them, he had not actually freed them and they were still considered fugitives. Four of the men were returned, but one woman and her children remained at large. She won her freedom in court, but it was later revoked and the women were re-enslaved.³ For many, freedom dreams could only be fulfilled through marronnage – even though Saint-Domingue’s intendent declared in 1767 that maroons would never be formally recognized as free – maroons embodied liberated identities regardless of legal recognition.⁴ Henriette, a Kongolese woman around 30 years old, escaped her owner in Le Cap during the night in mid-November 1771. Henriette was described as a thin woman with an elongated chin and was noted for her work as a good seamstress, laundress, and ironer. The advertisement placed for her return could not definitively state whether she left as a maroon on the 14th or 15th, meaning that Henriette had effectively slipped away without her absence being detected for at least two days. However, by the time the advertisement was published in Les Affiches américaines two weeks later on November 30, the contact person on the advertisement – Sieur Trutou, a hat maker from Le Cap – had begun to speculate that Henriette was presenting herself as a free woman of color.⁵ Given her expertise in sewing and cleaning clothes, Henriette indeed may have been able to create outfits to adorn herself in a similar style to Saint-Domingue’s free women of color, who were famed for their fashion sense, and to blend into that group as she set out as a self-liberated woman.

The repertoire tactics of marronnage were actions that people knew how use and were feasible given the confines of the context in which they lived. Enslaved people’s awareness of the free population, and its political, economic, and social influence in Saint-Domingue, was part of the societal context within which maroons inserted themselves as liberated people. The most common way fugitives embodied oppositional consciousness and countered colonial era codes was to blend into the population of free people of color, at times by replicating documents or verbally attesting to their non-slave status. Of the total runaway population, 576 people, nearly 5 percent of runaways, either replicated or took free papers, disguised themselves as a free person of color, or took extended liberties with their billets or “tickets,” which were written slips that allowed an individual enslaved person to travel with their enslaver’s permission (Table 5.1). Many advertisements used the phrase “se disant libre” – calls themselves free – to indicate that fugitives were self-presenting or telling people that they were a free person of color. Any enslaved person who pretended to be free but could not produce an eyewitness to verify their emancipation could be fined 3,000 livres and punished by a sentence of three months in prison; and anyone caught in public after eleven o’clock at night would receive 15 whip lashes.⁶ Yet these punishments did not deter maroons from reimagining their status in order to reinforce a sense of dignity, self-respect, and liberation.

Enslaved women like Henriette were much more likely than men to choose attempting to pass as free as a marronnage tactic (Table 5.2). David Geggus attributes the differences in gender and birth origin in passing for free as linked to free people of color and the notion that lighter-skinned women had an easier time blending with free women. Creole women, especially those who were domestic laborers, may have had better access to writing materials and the plantation owners’ files to replicate or take tickets or passes. For example, a creole woman named Rosette had already been missing for three months when an advertisement for her disappearance was published on November 23, 1771. Rosette had lived in France with her owner for ten years and, upon returning to Saint-Domingue, decided to free herself and to articulate her status as such.⁷ The economic power of free women of color in Le Cap and Port-au-Prince would have been an attractive and attainable achievement for a woman like Rosette, whose long-term residence in France would have deepened her cultural competency and language skills, which would have allowed her to become a member, on her own terms, of the gens du couleur. On the other hand, Africanity bore its own relation to freedom pursuits. Clarice, a 45-year-old Arada woman, took her ten-year-old creole daughter as she fled their owner in Port-au-Prince during the winter of 1790. The advertisement announcing their marronnage specified that Clarice had “the marks of her country,” or cultural scarifications, and that her unnamed daughter also had a scar on her upper eyelids. Neither of them had been stamped by their owner in Saint-Domingue, but Clarice did bear the stamp of the ship that transported her from the Bight of Benin to the Caribbean.⁸ The advertisement’s composer highlighted Clarice and her daughter’s scars not just to identify them, but to differentiate them as African, which presumably put them at a disadvantage in the French colony. However, we might consider Clarice’s scars as part of a Fon-based cultural heritage that would have informed her self-declared freedom. If Clarice was born around 1745, the Dahomean-Oyo conflicts were likely part of the context of her adulthood and increasingly shaped her worldview as she and others faced the instability of freedom at the Bight of Benin.

Table 5.2. Chi-square test, oppositional actions by gender and age (N = 12,857)

Gender	Passing as free	Appropriation of goods	Bearing arms	Repeat escape	Total
Men	429 (48.6%)	350 (39.7%)	58 (6.6%)	45 (5.1%)	882 (100%)
Women	129 (72.9%)	34 (19.2%)	2 (1.1%)	12 (6.7%)	177 (100%)
Boys	11 (31.4%)	19 (54.3%)	4 (11.4%)	1 (2.86%)	35 (100%)
Girls	7 (50%)	7 (50%)	0	0	14 (100%)
Total	576 (52%)	410 (37%)	64 (5.8%)	58 (5.2%)	1,108 (%100)

Note: p = 0.000.

The gendered dimension of passing for free in marronnage, combined with the fact that enslaved women were more likely to be manumitted by their owners than enslaved men, means that even as enslaved women reclaimed their freedom, they in some ways conceptualized freedom within the boundaries of the colony’s legal frameworks. The constrained possibilities for freedom shaped the imagination of what could be actualized. However, enslaved men were also structurally privy to avenues to emancipation through service to the maréchaussée – the police force primarily composed of freemen of color tasked with chasing fugitive runaways – and through self-purchase using funds saved from artisanal trade work. Despite the prominence of free women of color in the port cities, for women passing as free at times meant traversing gender identity and assuming masculinity. For example, a creole woman named Helene from the Paterson plantation called herself free and was described as “disguising herself often as a man,” as did a Kongo woman named Esther who fled disguised as a man.⁹ Similarly, an advertisement posted on August 15, 1789 announced the escape of a creole woman named Victoire, who fled as a maroon from a Grande-Riviere de Jacmel plantation three years earlier and was often seen frequenting the areas between Jacmel and Léogâne. Victoire was described as a beautiful 40-year-old – which may be part of the reason she chose to belie her attractiveness by disguising herself as a man and wearing the uniform of the maréchaussée.¹⁰ For Victoire, the audaciousness of marronnage not only meant assuming the appearance of a member of the free people of color class; it also entailed performing militarized maleness, which was seemingly effective since she was able to avoid capture for three years.

Saint-Domingue-born creoles were more likely (though not considerably so) than Africans and other Atlantic creoles to pass as free (Table 5.3). This is probably because enslaved people from Saint-Domingue were likely to have had closer proximity to the necessary tools to accomplish this aim – such as European language literacy, a trade, or household wares like clothing and writing materials. However, though other Atlantic creoles may not have been fully accustomed to the French language and Saint-Domingue’s landscape, several Caribbean-born runaways seem to have had the advantage of speaking, reading, or writing the dominant languages of the Atlantic world and they used these capabilities to move fluidly from enslavement to self-fashioned freedom. Marc, a bi-racial creole man from Martinique, was a cook who escaped wearing a blue frock coat and his hair in a ponytail. The advertisement stated that Marc was very “clever” and was perhaps carrying a fake ticket to attest to his freedom.¹¹ Emmanuel was a maroon described as a “creole of the Spanish islands,” who had a slim figure, was missing two of his front teeth, and wore a short beard. Emmanuel had escaped his owner in Le Cap on more than one occasion. The first time, he was arrested with several others from the same plantation and they were placed in the jail at Saint Marc. The second time Emmanuel escaped, between the end of October and the first of November 1779, seems to have been the last time he was officially seen: he took his clothes and was passing as free near Fort Dauphin. Emmanuel was also described as speaking English, Dutch, and Spanish, which would have allowed him to traverse into Santo Domingo undetected as a free black man. Language seems to have facilitated his passage into freedom – two years after the first advertisement was published, he had still not been found.¹²

Table 5.3. Chi-square test, oppositional actions by birth origin (1,068 observations)

Birth origins	Passing as free	Appropriation of goods	Bearing arms	Repeat escape	Total
Saint-Domingue	301 (58.9%)	168 (32.88%)	22 (4.31%)	20 (3.91%)	511 (100%)
Africans & Atlantic creoles	259 (46.5%)	223 (40.04%)	40 (7.18%)	35 (6.28%)	557 (100%)

Note: p = 0.000.

Other cases problematize the question of who had access to self-fashioned freedom that was legible in Saint-Domingue; those born in the Caribbean were not the only ones who were exposed to a wide array of cultural, religious, and linguistic practices. Catherine was a laundress born in the Kongo, who may have experienced relations with Portuguese colonists, traders, and enslavers while in her homeland. When she escaped her owner in Dondon, she set out “calling herself Portuguese, or sometimes Swedish, knowing how to speak Spanish.”¹³ We do not know the nature of Catherine’s familiarity with the Portuguese and the Spanish – it is possible that she was transported to the Caribbean on ships owned by either country – but what is clear is that she used her experiences from the Middle Passage to her advantage. Similarly, Jean, a wigmaker by trade who also was born in the Kongo, was described as calling himself creole since his good French and little Spanish made him “able to play the role of a free negro by his intelligence.” His owners also suspected that Jean had taken several pieces of gold with him as he escaped.¹⁴

Appropriating Material Goods and Technologies

Not only was enslaved labor exploited for no compensation, enslaved people were prohibited from financially benefitting from other types of economic activity such as trading food, sugarcane, or other commodities. To counter being dispossessed of any economic autonomy, maroons gravitated to cities and town markets to participate in “market marronnage” (Sweeney 2019). Enslaved people in the areas surrounding Cap Français were exposed to many of the luxuries available in the city, which attracted people from all walks of life, especially during the weekend markets. Urban slaves, African, and mixed-race individuals alike purchased their own freedom and in some instances went on to own businesses and real estate. The Petit Guinée (“Little Africa”) neighborhood was composed of gens du couleur and affranchis and was a magnet for runaways, enabling them to socialize and rent rooms as they re-fashioned their lives as free people. During a search of Petit Guinée in the early 1780s, police found over 200 runaways.¹⁵ Le Cap was a rowdy city of 20,000, patrolled by fewer than 20 police officers – leading to the 1785 Chamber of Agriculture report about calendas and other gatherings of slaves (see Chapter 3).¹⁶ In June 1786, colonial authorities flogged and hanged a group of maroons, enslaved people, and free blacks accused of theft in the public square of Le Cap; they whipped and sentenced others to the chain gang for forging free passes and renting rooms from a freeman named Larose.¹⁷ On the night of January 15, 1785, the group had entered the room of a free mulâtress named Catherine and stole furniture and other effects. Included in the court statement were François, an enslaved man who belonged to a free woman named Jeannette; Colas, a slave; Bijou; Alexandre; Jean-Louis, an enslaved Kongolese; Versailles; Jean Louis, an enslaved Mondongue; Anne; Sieur Masse; Hypolite; Cesar, an enslaved mattress maker; Toussaint, a maroon who formerly was enslaved by the free widow Jupiter; and Jean-Louis, a creole wigmaker.¹⁸

The complex strata of race, color, status, and class in Le Cap made these kinds of informal economic activities possible. The population density of the city and the ongoing interactions between enslaved people, free people of color, and runaways facilitated connections between them to circumvent colonial structures through rebellions, conspiracies, and other forms of resistance. Both enslaved people and maroons took part in informal trading of wares and illicit expropriation of resources to bolster a sense of economic independence and freedom. People of African descent attempted to demonstrate economic autonomy and accumulate various amounts of capital, even when it cost them their lives to do so. In January 1775, three men in Le Cap – Joseph Lacroix, who worked as clerk for Sieur Foäche, and two enslaved men named Jolicœur and David – were arrested for breaking into Foäche’s safe and stealing 70,000 livres. While Jolicœur and David were returned to their enslavers, Lacroix received a harsher sentence, death by hanging in the marketplace, since he used his key to enter Foäche’s house.¹⁹ Mardy, a Kongo man, was convicted in 1784 of burglarizing and assassinating his enslaver, for which he was disemboweled on the breaking wheel torture device and decapitated. The authorities exposed his head on a pike at Fossette, outside Le Cap, where enslaved people typically performed their burial rites.²⁰ Two enslaved men and one woman sawed a hole in a white man’s home in Limbé and stole merchandise, an offense for which they were executed in 1786.²¹ A creole man named Cezar, owned by a Capuchin priest, was accused of trafficking enslaved women and men from Gonaïves and attempting to make money from the sales, which was a violation of the 1758 Le Cap ruling. After the discovery of Cezar’s plan, he was condemned to death by hanging; also prosecuted were the proprietor who rented him a room and the free people of color who replicated Cezar’s free papers.²²

Maroons also appropriated resources that could be considered forms of capital that could allow them to participate in the market for trade, or enable them to use materials for subsistence farming and consumption within self-liberated communities. Although many enslaved people attempted to escape spontaneously when they viewed an immediate window of opportunity, others planned their journey as carefully as possible. Careful deliberation was necessary to avoid capture and to reach a chosen destination. Food, money, clothing, or horses – which the enslaved were prohibited from riding – were necessary for survival or to expedite the escape, and over 400 runaways appropriated such items during marronnage. Africans and other Atlantic creoles were over 7 percent more likely to steal items and provisions in order to escape than those born in Saint-Domingue (Table 5.3). In addition to taking flight in boats and canoes to navigate Saint-Domingue’s waterways, maroons also took horses as either a means of transportation or to sell as livestock. Marie-Louise, a ‘Sénégaloise woman,’ and Prince, a Bambara man, fled as maroons from Terrier-Rouge and stole a red horse from a plantation in Trou as they made their escape.²³ Another couple, an unnamed woman and man, escaped Le Cap on a horse as they headed to Jean Rabel.²⁴

A work gang commandeur named Petit-Jean fled a Port-à-Piment plantation on horseback after taking possession of three to four thousand livres worth of gold and clothing that allowed him to pass as free.²⁵ Twenty-five-year-old Azor of the Mondongue nation was a maroon suspected of conspiring with other blacks to steal a chest full of silver, jewelry, handkerchiefs and other articles, and a wallet containing various papers.²⁶ Some runaways seized opportunities to take items that were not necessarily directly needed for survival but may have served a purpose that was more significant – though difficult to discern. Free papers and replicated passes may not have been the only documents of interest to fugitives: for example, a creole man named Andre escaped with an unnamed woman who had been charged with fleeing the prison of Le Cap, taking with them papers belonging to the manager of the Damare plantation.²⁷ Many runaways embodied more than one oppositional action, appropriating plantation materials and arming themselves. For example, Pierre, a creole of Gros-Morne, left as a maroon with a horse, 600 livres, guns, a machete, and was wearing the jacket of his owner Adam Courier.²⁸ Several advertisements were published over the course of four years for a Mozambican runaway named Nérestan, who escaped more than once between 1786 and 1790 and was seen wielding a large machete and claiming to be free. Nérestan had taken refuge among enslaved people from several sugar plantations around Matheux, who brought him stolen goods in exchange for rum that he bought from local drink stands.²⁹

Militancy

Repertoire tactics that involve some level of militancy, such as violence, and other forms of public disruption are considered effective means of creating change because they require actors to assume an increased commitment to the actions, and because of the level of uncertainty such actions engender among power-holders (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004: 280). Planters rightly feared violent uprisings of the enslaved, as violence represented not only clear discontent with the conditions of enslavement but a direct reciprocation of the violence that planters inflicted on the enslaved. Enslavers used violence to extract labor power, conversely in some cases “to kill the owner of the slaves’ labor power was the only way in which to regain ownership of that labor power” (Wynter n.d.: 134). Even at the risk of sure execution mandated by the Code Noir as punishment for killing or even physically assaulting a white person, bondspeople’s arming of themselves and uprisings against their owners became more frequent as the enslaved population increased.

In August 1758, 13 men and two women armed with guns, machetes, and billhooks attacked Thomas Bouchet of the southern Nippes district.³⁰ In 1775, a runaway named Francisque killed a plantation accountant.³¹ The following year, a group of seven killed their owner named Poncet, a planter in Trou, who may have been some of the slaves’ father. Sannon, a quarteron, and Guillaume were sentenced to death and public exposure of their corpses. Several others were charged for their role in Poncet’s murder: a commandeur named Saintonge and a miller and coachman named Boussole were sentenced to death by being broken on the wheel; a quarteron woman named Sannite or Gogo was sentenced to death by strangulation after the birth of her child; and two “negres nouveaux,” Paul and Etienne, were sentenced to assist with the execution of the others and to serve in the chain gang in perpetuity.³² A black woman named Rosalie killed her owner, Gautarel, with a knife in 1779, for which she was sentenced to having her hands cut off, and to be hanged and burned.³³ Also in 1779, runaways from the plantation La Ferronaye at Grand Rivière du Nord set fire to the sugarcane and poisoned the plantation steward and the overseer.³⁴ In April 1784, an Igbo man named Saint-Eloy was sentenced to death by strangulation for just hitting a white man.³⁵ Lafortune killed his owner at Dondon in May 1786 by stabbing him in the chest and side, and he was sentenced to death at the breaking wheel.³⁶

Bearing Arms

Enslaved people were barred from carrying weapons in the colony but did so routinely, for instance, carrying mayombo fighting sticks at calenda ritual gatherings or when they were attempting to free themselves. They used work tools such as machetes and sickles, or stole pistols, hunting rifles, and swords as they faced the imminent danger of their journey. This type of hardware was familiar, or at least suitable, to Africans from regions where hand-to-hand combat was most common in warfare. Africans used swords, battleaxes, spears, firearms like muskets, and poison-laced arrows in their fighting styles and would have made effective use of available tools and weapons as maroons and rebels (Thornton 1999). Sixty-four absconders, mostly Africans and other Atlantic creoles, prepared themselves by illegally carrying some sort of weapon like a gun or a machete, and were considered armed and dangerous (Tables 5.1 and 5.3). La Fortune, an Arada commandeur, was believed to be armed with a machete when he escaped a Marmelade plantation in on July 1, 1790.³⁷ In May 1790, four African men from the “Maquoua” nation, Alerte, Adonis, Azor, and Polite, escaped the Mongirard plantation at l’Islet-a-Pierre-Joseph with guns, pistols, gunpowder, lead and other materials.³⁸ Two creoles, Cambray and Charlot, escaped carrying a sword and a machete.³⁹ Jannitte, a creole man, had escaped for two months in 1767 with a gun, a machete, and other effects.⁴⁰ Pierre Baillard escaped in January 1775 with a machete and two knives.⁴¹ In February 1773, an entire group of armed runaways escaped Quarter Morin in the north: four men, Joseph, Belair, l’Africain, Theodore, and three women, Catherine, Colette, and Leonore; they were all Aradas and each took with them their sickles and hatchets.⁴²

Reclamation of time

One of the more critical – or perhaps even the “ultimate resource for collective action” that runaways appropriated and could use for the purpose of organizing other maroons and potential rebels was time. Time is not abstract nor is it infinite, which limits certain social actors from feasibly performing certain tasks in the work of collective action (Oliver and Marwell 1992: 257). Enslaved people were structurally disadvantaged in organizing themselves for revolt because their time was almost entirely monopolized by the demands of rigorous plantation labor regimes. Labor was highly regimented and in between tasks, there was little time for rest, recreation, or social connectivity until nightfall or Sundays. Some sugar plantations were 24-hour operations where laborers were separated by shifts, getting as little as four hours of sleep per night. Commandeurs, other plantation personnel, and the maréchaussée closely monitored enslaved people’s time that was not spent directly on work to instill social control and prevent escape or any other type of resistance action. Time was socially constructed within a context of extreme inequality and relations of dominance and subordination to reinforce the economic, social, and political power of white slave owners.

Time was racialized and was a valuable form of capital; enslavers accumulated labor and financial capital through the extraction of enslaved people’s time (Mills 2014). Racial time – meaning the temporal inequality that emerged from unequal power relations between racially dominant and subaltern groups (Hanchard 1999) – was the very structure that maroons challenged as they struggled for autonomy by appropriating time, for shorter periods as petit maroons or for longer periods as grand maroons. Just as time was not innocuous for enslavers, we can assume maroons similarly used their appropriated time to advance their own personal, social, economic, and political interests. As Neil Roberts (2015) has argued, marronnage was not just an act of flight, it engendered liminal spaces of liberation where maroons could garner and use time and other resources at their discretion. In the years preceding the Haitian Revolution, marronnage was an increasingly common tactic to accumulate time (Figure 5.1) and to do the mobilizing labor of establishing and expanding connections with potential rebel recruits and making key decisions regarding the impending revolt.

Figure 5.1. Length of escape (in weeks) over time

There were several ways enslaved people appropriated or manipulated time to facilitate marronnage: by remaining at-large for longer periods of time; escaping repeatedly; and aligning their escape according to holidays and changes in season.

Long-Term Escapes

An important insight the advertisements provide is the approximate length of time the runaways had been missing, which allows us to determine runaways’ relative success at absconding. Out of the 12,857 runaways listed in Les Affiches, 9,888 of them were described as having evaded escape for a particular period of time, which I measured in weeks, without being captured and jailed then returned to the plantation (Table 5.4). The average escape length was nine weeks, or approximately two months. The median was only three weeks, meaning most advertisements were placed less than one month after a person’s disappearance; some advertisements were posted as soon as within the same week. Still, these figures help to distinguish petit marronnage – or temporary truancy from grand marronnage – the intent to permanently escape. The other half of runaways observed escaped for more than one month, which is longer than the few days of absenteeism typically associated with petit marronnage. Five percent of the observations, or 494 runaways, had been missing for 30 weeks, or over six months. Of these, 99 runaways had been missing for over two years. Genevieve, a 30-year-old creole woman, and her two griffe sons Françoise and Paule, had the longest reported escapes – 780 weeks or 15 years.⁴³ Longer lengths of escape clearly indicated a desire to live as a free person, however defined, away from plantation enslavement. Some of these escapees fled to Santo Domingo and intermarried, some found maroon communities in the mountains, and others passed for free in Saint-Domingue’s urban towns.

Table 5.4. Maroons’ length of escape in weeks (9,888 observations)

Mean	Median	75% Percentile	90% Percentile	95% Percentile	99% Percentile	Range	Standard deviation
9.03	3	8	17	30	104	780	28.7

In addition to openly assaulting their owners and taking their property, the enslaved increasingly sought permanent refuge from the plantation system altogether. The histogram in Figure 5.1 shows a gradual increase in escape lengths over time, proving an escalation of grand marronnage leading up to the Haitian Revolution. The rapid increase of the enslaved population after 1783 also signaled a steady increase of length of runaways’ escapes reported in Les Affiches américaines; more runaways were reported missing for months and sometimes years. People were becoming knowledgeable about how to escape and were applying that knowledge to their freedom treks. A limitation to our understanding of grand marronnage and runaways’ length of escapes is the issue of underreporting. Plantation managers often failed to mention issues of marronnage to planters who lived abroad, likely to avoid questions about mishandling of the enslaved workforce.⁴⁴ While private inventories and other records may indicate that plantations were missing laborers, these runaways do not always show up in Les Affiches advertisements.

For example, a 1775 inventory of the largest of the Galliffet sugar plantations, Grande Place, indicates there were seven people at large: François, a mulâtre missing since 1749; Augustin, age 57, Samuel, 60, and Andre Igbo, 53, all missing for “a very long time;” Mingo age 54; and Mathieu age 53 and Neptune dit Anga, 35, were both missing for four years. Eight years later, a 1783 inventory of the same plantation shows that Samuel, Andre, Mingo, François, Mathieu, and Neptune were still fugitives, or at most they may have been de facto affranchis who were colloquially referred to as libres de savanne. Others mentioned in this list had also committed grand marronnage: Paul, age 33, was missing since September 9, 1775 and Marie-Françoise, griffe, since 1749. The 1783 inventory for Habitation Desplantes, another Galliffet property, shows that Michel, a 45-year-old Kongolese man, had been “en marronnage” for a long time, as well as Alexandre, 26, who escaped in 1778. In the 1786 inventory for Grand Place, Blaise was added to the list of maroons. He was 32 and escaped on September 10, 1784, during a trip to the hospital. It seems that he was probably subsequently captured because, with the exception of Blaise, the original ten Grande Place and Desplantes runaways were still listed as maroons in January 1791.⁴⁵ This case serves as an example of the fact that some plantation managers and owners simply gave up looking for runaways with any real earnest, allowing fugitives to make out on their own for years at a time, potentially having children and reproducing, and forming self-contained maroon communities or passing for free in nearby towns.

Besides plantation managers’ negligence, other factors like group escapes, maroons’ destinations, and their oppositional actions contributed to the ability of individuals to successfully escape. The differences in average lengths of escape between individual maroons and homogeneous and heterogeneous group escapes were not that large (Table 5.5). However, heterogeneous group escapes yielded a slightly longer length of escape of 9.8 weeks. This shows that racial solidarity and the various skills and forms of knowledge runaways carried with them were important resources that contributed to a slightly above-average length of escape. When looking at the average length of escape between runaways using neighborhood ties or journeys to other destinations – family, labor sites, former plantations, Spanish territory, and other fugitives – there was only a statistically significant difference in escape durations between labor/skills and the Spanish territory in facilitating escape (Table 5.6). The difference between them was 21 weeks: labor/skills contributed to an average of 10.6 weeks of escape, whereas those who escaped to Santo Domingo had an average of 31.86 weeks of escape. Thus, on average, runaways who decided to flee Saint-Domingue altogether, though a rarity, were the most “successful” runaways. The second most successful plan was to be harbored at other plantations, runaways hiding at plantations in the living quarters of their comrades had an average of 15.68 weeks of escape. Having family connections and linkages to other runaways had similar success rates of contributing to an average of approximately 14.3 weeks of escape.

Table 5.5. Kwallis one-way tests of variance, groups’ average lengths of escape (in weeks)

	Mean	Standard deviation	Frequency
Individual escapes	9.19	24.81	6,154
Homogeneous group escape	8.18	37.01	2,432
Heterogeneous group escape	9.81	28.04	1,302
Total observations			9,888

Note: p = 0.0001.

Table 5.6. Kwallis one-way tests of variance, length of escape (in weeks) by social ties and destinations

	Mean	Standard deviation	Frequency
Family	14.28	31.43	105
Labor/skills	10.56	35.79	1,268
Former plantations	15.68	44.73	118
Spanish territory	31.86	95.47	65
Other maroons	14.26	25.24	65
Total observations			1,621

Note: p = 0.0498.

The duration of escape for runaways who were passing for free was well above the average for the entire sample, which was 9.03 weeks (Table 5.4), meaning that passing as free oppositional action that contributed to a longer length of escape – 22.8 weeks (Table 5.7). This is a testament to the existence of the modicum of social fluidity in Saint-Domingue that allowed a minority of enslaved people, particularly Saint-Domingue-born creoles, to change their social status from maroon to de facto free person of color. A distant second most influential oppositional action was repeated escape, which led to an average of 8.74 weeks of relative freedom. Though enslaved people who attempted to free themselves repeatedly probably learned new tactics with each unsuccessful escape, their durations of escape were still below average for the entire sample. Similarly, the appropriation of goods and bearing of arms – actions that Africans, Atlantic creoles, and young boys most commonly took – did not result in an above-average duration of escape, which suggests they were less than effective means of escape.

Table 5.7. Kwallis one-way tests of variance, length in escape (in weeks) by oppositional actions

	Mean	Standard deviation	Frequency
Passing as free	22.81	59.10	434
Appropriation of goods	3.1	4.63	320
Bearing arms	5.23	6.1	56
Repeat escape	8.74	16.36	42
Total observations			852

Note: p = 0.000.

While most runaways were reported within a short window of time, fugitives were slowly beginning to find ways to be more successful at escape. Increasingly, enslaved people were leaving plantations for months and years, rather than days or weeks, at a time. There was a steady increase in the number of outlier durations between the years 1783 and 1786, with advertisements for 416 and 572-week long escapes appearing. Additionally, heterogeneous group escapes were also becoming more frequent, showing that there was a slowly increasing sense of racial solidarity among the enslaved population. The skills, information, and experience shared by individuals from diverse backgrounds was valuable knowledge to add to their marronnage repertoire toolkit. The longest recorded length of maroon escape, 780 weeks or 15 years, was advertised in the year 1789, the same year that saw the largest group escape, composed of 22 runaways who were from widely different birth origins – Kongo, Igbo, Senegambian, Bambara, and creole. This supports the finding that heterogeneous group escapes contributed to a slightly above-average duration of escape (Table 5.5). Before the colonial situation, these groups probably would never have encountered each other on the African continent, but conditions in Saint-Domingue prompted them to interact in work arrangements, living quarters, familial units, and ritual gatherings, forging relationships across cultural, geographic, and linguistic boundaries. For example, Chapter 8 discusses another group of Kongolese, Mina, and creole maroons established an independent living zone on a coffee plantation in Cayes de Jacmel, hiding in plain sight for more than three years without detection.

Repeat Escapes

Fifty-eight runaways were noted to have escaped then were returned on more than one occasion – an offense that could have resulted in whipping, branding with the fleur-de-lys, mutilation of ears or other body parts, or execution. Advertisements were placed for perpetual maroons – people who were captured after an initial escape then ran away again. For example, A Kongolese man escaped in October of 1774 and was quickly captured by the maréchaussée, but then escaped again the following December.⁴⁶ Another Kongolese man named Chaudiere escaped, then was imprisoned for one month, then escaped again after being taken back to Jérémie.⁴⁷ Although repeat escapees constituted only 0.45 percent of the sample, women were more likely than men to be repeat runaways. Other examples of repeat runaways come from plantation records, including a creole woman named Zabeth, who in 1768, left a Léogâne sugar plantation manager exasperated at her constant escapes. Zabeth took every opportunity to sneak away – she feigned illness and promptly attempted to steal another woman’s clothes so she could run away. After being caught in the act, she promised not to take flight again, but did shortly thereafter. When it was realized that she was legitimately sick, Zabeth was sent to a plantation infirmary; yet she took off again once the manager sent her another change of clothes. She fled twice more, both times after having been chained up and and becoming ill nearly to the point of death.

In May 1774, the same planter who owned Zabeth, Madame du Fort, sent a group from a sugar plantation in Léogâne to her coffee plantation in Abricots. During the exchange, the coffee plantation manager wrote to her indicating that three people escaped – Jasmin Barbe-Blanche, his wife Nanette, and a younger man named Marquis. It was suspected that they went to Cayemittes and advertisements were placed for them at Jérémie and Tiburon. A month after their escape, all three were discovered to be in jail in Jérémie. Soon after being returned to du Fort’s manager, Jasmin ran away again. This time he did not make it far, due to starvation and sickness. Before Jasmin died in late September, he admitted that he was familiar with the Grande Anse area and planned to pay another black man with a silver cufflink to take him across a river. Despite the hardship Jasmin endured, Marquis still ventured to run away again in October. He had stolen chickens belonging to other blacks and used for subsistence, presumably to sell them for himself.⁴⁸

Some runaway advertisements were published multiple times and across different publications. The Gazette de Saint Domingue and Courrier Nationale de Saint Domingue carried a small number of the same notices that were placed in Les Affiches américaines. Repeated advertisements were not counted in the current dataset for quantitative analysis; however, their frequency has qualitative implications regarding the length of time runaways escaped, or those who were captured then escaped again after their return. For example, Jasmin, a 25- to 26-year-old Kongo man was reported as a runaway on January 18, 1783, one week later on January 25, then again four weeks later on February 22, suggesting that he avoided capture for at least one month.⁴⁹ Advertisements for Victoire, a creole woman, ran on July 15, 1789, July 22, and July 29.⁵⁰ Over time, Les Affiches runaway advertisements seem to have run repeatedly with increasing frequency, especially as the Haitian Revolution drew nearer. Out of 798 advertisements placed in the year 1790, over 300 of them had been repeats of previously published advertisements. On the other hand, there were only 11 repeated advertisements for the years 1766 through 1768 combined. It seems that reporting became more negligent because the number of repeated advertisements increased alongside the growing number of Africans imported to Saint-Domingue.

The Timing of Marronnage

Part of runaways’ strategy in escaping was to deliberately time their flight to align with windows of opportunity when there would be less attention paid to the goings on of the enslaved population. Weekends, holidays, and natural disasters created enough distractions for absconders to slip away without detection. Colonial planters allowed enslaved people to have leave from work to attend parties on Christmas, Easter, New Year, and other Catholic celebrations. Temporary absenteeism after these events was expected, either due to dalliances with romantic partners or a long weekend stay at a different plantation’s party. Planters kept track of who was missing at their end-of-year account books but were measured in giving out punishments for escapes during the holiday seasons. Analysis of the runaway advertisements shows that escapes were most frequent during high summer months and least frequent at the end of the year. Overall, the 25th, 29th, and 30th weeks of the year saw the highest numbers of reported runaways, overlapping with June 20–26, July 18–24, and July 25–July 31, respectively. Higher productivity on plantations may have contributed to an uptick in marronnage during the summer, since harsh weather made hard labor unbearable. Other Catholic festivities during those weeks were for Saint Jean-Baptiste in Trou and Jean-Rabel (June 24); Sainte Marguerite in Port-Margot (July 20); Saint James the Greater (July 25); Sainte Anne in l’Anse-a-Veau (July 26); Saint Pierre in Limbé (July 29); and Sainte Marthe in Marmelade (July 29). In addition to being moments of distraction for plantation personnel, these locally celebrated holidays would also have been gathering times for enslaved people to partake in their sacred rituals and, as I argued in Chapter 3, to enhance oppositional consciousness and influence marronnage through seditious speech about freedom and liberation.

Conclusion

Maroons’ micro-level repertoire actions reflected their politicized, oppositional consciousness that directly countered the dispossession and oppression of slavery. Maroons reimagined their status and identities, appropriated goods and technologies, exhibited militancy, and reclaimed their time – demonstrating their intentions to be free, and to assert ownership of themselves, their human capital, and other resources. The current and previous chapters have shown that maroons leveraged their cultural and ritual spaces, knowledge pools and labor skills, social networks, and other tangible and intangible resources within their immediate vicinity to facilitate their escape. The following chapter will examine maroons’ understanding of Saint-Domingue’s geography as part of their repertoire of knowledge and action. Examination of the locations from where maroons escaped and the destinations they had in mind can help us better understand the colony itself and the ways enslaved people and maroons carved out their own geographies of subversion, even in the shadows of slavery.

6 Geographies of Subversion: Maroons, Borders, and Empire

In 1725, an enslaved man named Capois of Gros Morne was searching the savannahs of northern Port-à-Piment for his owner’s missing cattle when his horse became stuck in the mud. After noticing the extreme heat of the water beneath his feet, Capois assessed that he had found a hot spring. He recalled hearing stories of bathhouses in France and decided to dig a six-by-four-foot hole and build a small hut on top. Capois found two fellow bondsmen who the springs could potentially heal, one suffering from extensive rheumatism and another in Jean Rabel whose ailment was thought to have been incurable. Both men were successfully cured. Within a few years, the spring gained a reputation for miraculous healing and became a site of pilgrimage as a shrine had been constructed around it, with old crutches and written testimonies decorating nearby trees. By the end of the century, what became known as Eaux de Boynes was instituted as a formal government-sponsored health spa. Capois was offered his own personal slave as reward for his discovery, an offer he declined.¹ He was not a maroon, but in being obligated to search for his owner’s missing property, he was able to explore the land beyond his plantation of origin. In so doing, not only had Capois identified a previously undiscovered natural resource, but he demonstrated an awareness of its inherent value and usefulness as a healing mechanism.

Enslaved people like Capois were, at times, at the front lines of exploring geographic spaces that European colonizers had not yet explored or exploited. Drawing on insights from historical and postcolonial geographies, this chapter is concerned with enslaved Africans’ geographic knowledge as part of their collective consciousness that aided the pursuit of freedom. The story of Capois and the Eaux de Boynes hot springs demonstrates that black people learned the land on an intimate level and figured out ways to generate life-sustaining elements and processes from it. Whether it was physically tending to the land on sugar, coffee, indigo, or cotton plantations, laboring on public works irrigation projects, cultivating crops on personal small land plots, locating specific plants and herbs to assemble ritual packets, discovering pathways and riverways to quicken escape routes across the plains or mountain ranges, or finding caverns or densely forested mountains to hide in as maroons – the colony’s environmental landscape was itself a form of cultural knowledge with which Africans and African descendants needed to become familiarized in order to survive. Armed with this knowledge, they found nooks and crannies within and external to the system, carving into and subverting social and geographic spaces intended for the financial benefit of the plantocracy, creating maroon spaces amid a wildly prosperous slave society. This chapter looks at the physical environment of Saint-Domingue and how maroons leveraged their knowledge of it in their freedom journeys. Les Affiches advertisements oftentimes indicate from where the maroon had escaped and, in at least 1,000 cases, speculate about where that person may have been trying to flee. This information, and data from other sources, helps to foreground the spatiality of marronnage, allowing us to read beyond what is present in texts or maps to find out the natural and topographical realities maroons faced and grappled with in reconstituting colonial landscapes as geographies of subversion.

As this chapter is concerned with viewing marronnage as a contestation of colonial geographic formations, it becomes important to highlight the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of power, plantation economies, and empire as well as the limitations of each. The first part of the chapter explores how maroons forged possibilities of freedom within immediate locales that were dominated by plantation slavery. Saint-Domingue’s diverse environment contained nearly 500,000 enslaved people and an untold number of maroon individuals and family units who hid both in plain sight and in areas previously believed to be uninhabitable. They constructed what Sylviane Diouf (2014: 8–9) calls a “maroon landscape” at the intersection of three worlds: maroon refuge, white-dominated spaces, and physical and social territories carved out by enslaved people. This maroon landscape constituted geographies of subversion, as maroons sought refuge and community, and built solidarities across Saint-Domingue, from its urban centers to its mountains and forests – the very landscape that French planters and authorities had exploited slave labor to in turn exploit and profit from – and beyond, into Santo Domingo. Maroons built huts in the mountains and forests using mud and leaves, and constructed booby-traps with the same flora and fauna. They lurked on the outskirts of large plantations, and drank from the rivers, and cultivated their own gardens. They retreated to urban centers where there were enough free people of color that the maréchaussée fugitive slave police would not be able to easily identify a maroon who was living as a free person. Or they defected to Santo Domingo, becoming a source of tension between the Spanish colony and Saint-Domingue and presenting a need for diplomacy between the two colonies around the issue of marronnage. The second part of the chapter examines the relationship between empire and marronnage, and how, for well over a century, enslaved Africans had knowledge of and exploited the geopolitical conflicts between the French and Spanish crowns by traversing the border between Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo and establishing liberated zones on their own terms.

By committing marronnage within and against the French colonial enterprise of Saint-Domingue, runaways forced authorities to reckon with questions of imperial reach and power. European imperialistic pursuits in the Caribbean can be described as an “act of geographical violence through which space was explored, reconstructed, re-named and controlled” (Crush 1994: 337). The island that Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo shared was the first location in the Americas to encounter Christopher Columbus and accompanying Spaniards’ violent imperial ventures. Initially called Ayiti by the Taíno-Arawak indigenous inhabitants, Columbus re-named the entire island La Española when he arrived and wrested control of the island’s southern areas. Upon the beginning of French rule over the western third of Española in 1697, they renamed the region Saint-Domingue and each city and town was given recognizably French names. This symbolic dominance over the landspace through naming processes was combined with the terroristic violence that Taínos and Africans encountered, and environmental violence against the land itself.

Included in the conquered physical spaces was “nature” itself, which was converted into “natural resources” that colonists extracted, processed, and imported into Europe, such as sugarcane, coffee, gold, and other minerals. (Mignolo 2011). French colonization of western Española, Saint-Domingue, spread much farther and faster than the attempts of Spanish predecessors, exploiting high-quality, moisture-rich lands and razing the forests to create space for hundreds of sugar plantations.² Colonial conquest therefore involved processes of deforestation and reforestation – the transfer of plants, trees, and crops from one space to another to construct a desired arboreal landscape and to attach new social and economic meanings to environmental formations (Sheller 2012: 187–188). As early as the 1690s, the French royal government recognized the detrimental effects of plantation expansion on Saint-Domingue’s woods and implemented legislation to protect and preserve vegetation and other natural resources. The Code Noir made it illegal to sell firewood, and the king banned the felling of the Gayac tree that was used for ship construction. These policies were ignored, leading to increased importation of wood for hospitals and shop building. In 1712, plantation owners were required to clear land plots within a year of purchase, a rule that inadvertently helped to further stimulate the slave trade, since planters relied on enslaved people to do the clearing. Plantation owners near Le Cap also forced slaves to steal wood from the hospital, where it would then be sold at the city’s market.³ Colonists’ destruction of Saint-Domingue’s physical environment made room for more plantations and thus more enslaved laborers, who were then coerced into performing geologically harmful labor.

Colonialism also spatialized slavery itself, in that the institution of racialized forced labor was intended to exist singularly in the colonies, not the French mainland. France was thought to have been an entirely free nation regardless of one’s racial identity. However, even this belief was challenged when in 1777 free people of color from the colonies were banned from entering the home country and claiming citizenship.⁴ Generally speaking, France was a geographical space meant for free whites, and Saint-Domingue was a space designated for enslaved blacks. By the end of the eighteenth century, the spread of sugar increasingly dominated Saint-Domingue’s landscape in the lowlands and valleys, and coffee plantations in the mountainous highlands. In 1789, there were nearly 800 sugar plantations, over 3,000 coffee plantations, over 3,000 indigo plantations, and nearly 800 cotton plantations.⁵ Sugar plantation sizes were quite large and could cover between 580 and over 900 acres of land.⁶ But while sugar was produced in the plains, and the plantation presence expanded horizontally, coffee plantations in the mountains added a vertical dimension to sites of oppression. The looming presence of these plantations and the maréchaussée fugitive slave police operated in a panopticon-like fashion where enslaved people were under seemingly constant surveillance. In France, punishment for serious crimes was increasingly peripheralized to prisons, but in Saint-Domingue, authorities centralized demonstrations of colonial punishment, executing known maroons and other rebels in town squares, thus creating a symbolic association between rebellion, death, and humiliation in public spaces (Foucault 1977).

The enterprise of European colonialism exerted power over the land to gain the surplus value of the agricultural products that enslaved Africans physically extracted; therefore, coercive authority extended to Saint-Domingue’s enslaved inhabitants, whose physical movements and actions were restricted to activities related to productivity – specifically for French profits. As Stephanie Camp (2004: 6) explained, “places, boundaries, and movement were central to how slavery was organized and to how it was resisted.” She argues that enslaved people lived within a “geography of containment,” where, through law and custom, plantation personnel patrolled slave grounds, determined and enforced work schedules, and required passes to account for slaves’ comings and goings. The Code Noir had several provisions that dictated the terms of how, when, and where black people could move and for what reasons, and the maréchaussée fugitive slave police were responsible for imposing the boundaries of the geography of containment. Slaves belonging to different owners could not congregate for any reason lest they face the whip as a minimum punishment or death at most, since frequent violations would constitute grand marronnage. Owners were prevented from allowing assemblies of slaves and would be fined if held in violation. The Code Noir’s limitations on enslaved people’s physical movement were also linked to disempowering them economically: slaves were not supposed hold marché de nègres or nègre markets and could not sell sugarcane, fruit, vegetables, firewood, herbs, or any other type of commodity. Their goods could be confiscated and returned to their owner unless they had a ticket from that owner. But given the overwhelming population of Africans and African descendants in Saint-Domingue, these rules were not always upheld or were outright ignored. For example, the marché de nègres were prominent features of city life in both Port-au-Prince and Cap Français. As discussed in Chapter 3, enslaved people were known to congregate in churches, at burial grounds, or on the outskirts of plantations to perform their sacred rituals and other cultural practices. Chapter 4 highlighted maroons’ social ties to other maroons, free and enslaved people, and how their skills and experience in selling goods at the markets allowed them to traverse the colony.

The connections constructed by enslaved people and maroons in living quarters, ritual spaces, markets, mountains, caves, and other unmonitored areas were part of a “rival geography,” which Camp (2004: 7) defined as an “alternative way of knowing and using space that conflicted with planters’ ideals and demands.” Maroons cultivated rival geographies beginning with the early Spanish colonial period. Late Haitian anthropologist Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique (2009) argued that petroglyphs and archaeological remains found in several cave systems indicated that the collaborations between Taínos and Africans during Cacique Enriquillo’s early sixteenth-century revolt against the Spanish and the rebels’ collective retreat to mountain chains – such as the Baoruco west of the city of Santo Domingo – facilitated the exchange of cosmological beliefs about the world and practical knowledge of the island’s topography, plant usage, and resistance tactics. Within West African and West Central African cosmologies, elements of the natural environment – bodies of water, flora and fauna, rocks, the wind, lightning, and thunder – were associated with the deities and other spirit entities. The sacrality of the land itself informed enslaved and marooned Africans’ ways of interacting with the environment, redefining space, and reclaiming power. For example, the Bwa Kayman ceremony that ushered in the August 1791 uprising occurred under the canopy of the sacred mapou silk cotton tree, which holds spiritual meanings and functions as a social space for ancestor reverence. The mapou marks important crossroads for public gatherings in contemporary Haitian Vodou and other African and indigenous-based cultures of the Caribbean like Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana (Sheller 2012: 137–139, 201–204). The existence of such modes of thinking suggests Africans not only held alternate conceptions of spatial orders, but they struggled in the material realm to create rival geographies – or geographies of subversion – by staking claim to “resources, land, and livelihood” in contest with the rapidly expanding plantation regime (ibid.: 190). Rival geographies are similar to, or can constitute, free spaces that accompany or foment collective resistance and other forms of prefigurative politics by providing safe, protected zones where actors can interact, freely communicate, express emotion and thought, and share information and other valuable resources. Networks of resistance actors, and the networks of physical spaces they occupy and frequent, are part of an ongoing process of building insurgent “scenes” (Creasap 2012) where enslaved people and maroons could have “reimagined their lives as free people within the very geography in which they were intended to be enslaved” (Miki 2012: 503).

Another example of maroons’ usage of rival geography included their contentious occupation of mountainous zones that sat along the Saint-Domingue–Santo Domingo border, and their entanglement in geopolitical fights between the French and Spanish. The second part of this chapter treats the imperial border as part of Saint-Domingue’s geographic landscape that had a critical relationship to marronnage. The Saint-Domingue–Santo Domingo border changed over time and proximity to it enticed runaways to attempt escape; moreover, the presence and value of black people as a form of capital, as potential laborers, and as rebels shaped the border itself as an ongoing political project. Though the island was the first in the Americas to receive European explorers and colonists, by the end of the seventeenth century it had become a backwater colony, effectively leaving the western lands open to settlement by maroons, pirates, and boucaneers. After several decades of fighting, the Spanish finally ceded Saint-Domingue to the French in 1697 with the Treaty of Ryswick and maintained rulership over the island’s eastern two-thirds – the colony of Santo Domingo. Yet the agreement did little to quell rivalry between the French and Spanish crowns, nor struggles over property ownership at the border itself. These localized spats were reflections of inter-imperial competition for control and dominance over the slave trade, the enslaved, sugar production, and territory. For over a century, beginning in the late 1600s, enslaved Africans and maroons leveraged the conflict between the French and the Spanish to their benefit, turning on one empire or the other until the boundary between Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo was finalized with the 1777 Treaty of Aranjuez.

Enslaved people perceived several incentives for pledging allegiance to the Spanish. Since Santo Domingo had not developed a plantation system at the same pace or depth as Saint-Domingue, and there was more geographic space in the east for runaways to inhabit, farm, and start a new life. The Spanish Empire based its policies on slavery on the medieval Siete Partidas, which affirmed the innate humanity of enslaved people. Spanish codes were widely considered to have been more amenable to sustaining human life – while the reverse was true of Saint-Domingue. Throughout the Spanish Empire, it was not uncommon for entire towns to be built for free people of color. Moreover, interactions and collaborative rebellion among Africans and indigenous Taínos began in the Baoruco mountains near the city of Santo Domingo, creating a long-lasting legacy of resistance and freedom that was known to even newly-arrived Africans, as generations of enslaved people made their way to the growing maroon settlement. Several formerly enslaved people of Saint-Domingue were aware of the geopolitical stakes and at times wagered on marronnage in Santo Domingo as an alternative route to freedom. As these fugitives disappeared behind the border, they implicitly denied French planters’ access to their labor value and therefore caused financial loss. Additionally, once on Spanish lands and having assurances of Spanish loyalty, some maroons took up arms against the French or raided nearby plantations. Besides the runaway advertisements, primary sources such as letters from planters and military officials help to highlight cases of runaways who fled Saint-Domingue for Santo Domingo and explore several instances of the Spanish co-opting African Saint-Dominguans by arming them and/or implicitly and explicitly promising freedom from enslavement or better treatment and a better quality of life.

The Spatiality of Marronnage

Information about the geographic dimensions of marronnage was a key component of Les Affiches américaines advertisements. Planters who placed advertisements for the public to help locate and recover a fugitive needed to identify themselves and the location of their plantations so that readers could associate the bondsperson with a particular parish or neighborhood. Planters often had to travel from rural areas to reach the major towns to publish the advertisements, but in cases where the slave owner’s location of origin was not specified, this information can be inferred from the name of the plantation owner, lawyer, or manager listed in the advertisements. Slave owners needed to include as many details as possible, however speculative, about where a runaway might have absconded. Geographic data gleaned from Les Affiches advertisements provides insights into how many advertisements were placed or distributed in the major urban centers, either Cap Français, Port-au-Prince, or Saint Marc, the location where the planter was based, and the runaways’ suspected whereabouts. Of the over 10,000 runaway advertisements, the majority – 6,874 – were placed in the newspaper that was circulated from Cap Français (Table 6.1). Based on the volume of advertisements placed at Le Cap, the city and its surrounding region experienced the highest volume of marronnage over time, since it was the colony’s oldest and most populated urban center, followed by Port-Prince and Saint Marc. Besides the three cities, plantations at Léogâne, Gonaïves, Arcahaye, Artibonite, and Dondon reported the highest numbers of maroons.

Table 6.1. Frequency of runaways’ locations

Newspaper publication location	Parishes	Location of runaways’ escape	Runaways’ suspected locations
North (Cap Français) – 6,874 runaways	Ouanaminthe	70 (0.69%)	22 (1.85%)
	Fort Dauphin	274 (2.71%)	52 (4.37%)
	Terrier Rouge	95 (0.94%)	36 (3.02%)
	Trou	191 (1.89%)	48 (4.03%)
	Valière	30 (0.30%)	2 (0.17%)
	Limonade	227 (2.25%)	40 (3.36%)
	Quartier Morin	134 (1.33%	22 (1.85%)
	Grande Rivière	278 (2.75%)	40 (3.36%)
	Dondon	348 (3.44%)	30 (2.52%)
	Marmelade	127 (1.26%)	11 (0.92%)
	Petite Anse	187 (1.85%)	22 (1.85%)
	Cap Français	1,287 (12.73%)	122 (10.24%
	Plaine du Nord	58 (0.57%)	27 (2.27%)
	Acul	158 (1.56%)	25 (2.1%)
	Limbé	263 (2.6%)	48 (4.03%)
	Port Margot	158 (1.56%)	31 (2.6%)
	Borgne	263 (2.6%)	24 (2.02%)
	Plaisance	270 (2.67%)	25 (2.1%)
	St. Louis du Nord	118 (1.17%)	9 (0.76%)
	Port-de-Paix	210 (2.08%)	24 (2.02%)
	Gros Morne	104 (1.03%)	32 (2.69%)
	Jean Rabel	102 (1.1%)	8 (0.67%)
	Môle Saint Nicolas	84 (0.83%)	7 (0.59%)
	Morne Rouge	108 (1.07%)	23 (1.93%)
West (Saint Marc) – 577 runaways	Saint Marc	500 (4.95%)	30 (2.52%)
	Gonaïves	384 (3.8%)	29 (2.43%)
	Artibonite	305 (3.02%)	59 (4.95%)
West-South (Port-au-Prince) – 4,402 runaways	Bombarde	2 (0.02%)	0
	Port-à-Piment	15 (0.15%)	4 (0.34%)
	Ile de la Tortue	6 (0.06%)	0
	Petite Riviere	15 (0.15%)	2 (0.17%)
	Verettes	28 (0.28%)	4 (0.34%)
	Mirebalais	169 (1.67%)	16 (1.34%)
	Arcahaye	346 (3.42%)	16 (1.34%)
	Croix-des-Bouquets	219 (2.17%)	27 (2.27%)
	Port-au-Prince	647 (6.4%)	45 (3.78%)
	Léogâne	427 (4.22%)	47 (3.95%)
	Grand Goâve	73 (0.72%)	7 (0.59%)
	Baynet	27 (0.27%)	0
	Jacmel	161 (1.59%)	15 (1.26%)
	Cayes de Jacmel	19 (0.9%)	1 (0.08%)
	Cul-de-Sac	212 (2.12%)	43 (3.61%)
	Isle Gonâve	5 (0.05%)	6 (0.5%)
	Petit Goâve	133 (1.32%)	25 (2.1%)
	Fond des Nègres	73 (0.72%)	6 (0.5%)
	Anse à Veau	217 (2.15%)	8 (0.67%)
	Petit Trou	74 (0.73%)	4 (0.34%)
	Jérémie	341 (3.37%)	13 (1.09%)
	Cap Dame Marie	37 (0.37%)	1 (0.08%)
	Cap Tiburon	26 (0.26%)	2 (0.17%)
	Coteaux	27 (0.27%)	2 (0.17%)
	Port Salut	56 (0.55%)	0
	Torbeck	7 (0.07%)	1 (0.08%)
	Cayes	237 (2.34%)	11 (0.92%)
	Cavaillon	61 (0.60%)	6 (0.5%)
	St. Louis du Sud	21 (0.21%)	1 (0.08%)
	Aquin	89 (0.88%)	14 (1.18%)
	Santo Domingo	24 (0.24%)	16 (1.34%)
Total observations		10,107	1,191

In over 1,000 cases, advertisements included speculative information about where the runaway(s) hid. As previous chapters have clarified, enslaved people were far from socially dead figures who lacked meaningful relationships to kith and kin. Planters were aware of bondspeople’s intimate relationships and used this information to surmise that some who embarked on marronnage were actively seeking to reconnect with friends and family members on other plantations, in different neighborhoods or different parishes of the colony. Other aspects of maroons’ identities that gave clues to their whereabouts included their labor-related skills or a reputation for past rebelliousness. Ultimately, only the individual who decided to become a maroon knew definitively the reasons behind their escape and the destination they had in mind as they escaped. As Saint-Domingue’s economic development escalated in the eighteenth century, plantations increasingly covered the rural landscape and cities grew, multiplying the enslaved population and leaving fewer unoccupied areas for maroons to claim and settle. Maroons left urban areas heading for the mountains or other desolate areas, others left rural regions for the cities, and still others lingered near familiar surroundings or were captured before they were able to venture afar (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2). The movement of maroons between plantations and between urban and rural areas meant that they subverted places dominated by plantation expansion and created autonomous spaces in the absence of slave-based economies.

Figure 6.1. Runaways’ locations of escape, map created by Reese Manceaux and Crystal Eddins

Figure 6.2. Runaways’ suspected destinations, map created by Reese Manceaux and Crystal Eddins

Hiding in Plain Sight

Many runaways were attracted to the bustling city of Cap Français, in part because the significant presence of free people of color created social spaces where formerly enslaved people could blend in and live as self-freed individuals. Neighborhoods like Haut-du-Cap, Providence, Petit-Carenage, and Petite-Guinée or “Little Guinea,” a section of town with a significant enslaved and free black population, appear frequently in the Les Affiches advertisements as suspected havens for runaways living in Le Cap. Le Cap attracted runaways in large numbers: between October 1790 and August 1791 alone, 122 runaways were suspected of hiding somewhere in Le Cap, and authorities captured over 500 runaways in the city and its surrounding areas.⁷ Escapees with an artisanal trade, or who were perceived as having a lighter skin complexion, had an advantage in self-fashioning their freedom. Though men escaped to Le Cap as well, the city was the singularly significant destination for maroon women.

Unlike enslaved men who traveled as valets, fishermen, or carpenters, women often did not venture beyond plantations for work-related tasks. Women were not as familiar with the colony’s landscape, in part accounting for their lower numbers as maroons. Instead, some women maroons fled into urban areas where they could participate in formal and informal commercial activities as “market maroons.” They bought and sold provisions, goods, and services, which allowed them economic autonomy and “their own insurgent geographies, fashioning an infrastructure of black freedom … where they took up public space, created networks, and forged community.” Free women of color were already known as entrepreneurs in Port-au-Prince and especially in Le Cap; that maroon women sought to assimilate into these social, geographic and economic spaces “was an open challenge to the racialized and gendered logics of slavery” that mandated enslaved women exclusively perform agricultural and reproductive labor.⁸ For example, Marianne, a 23-year-old mixed-race woman, was well known as a vendor at the Le Cap market selling fish, herbs, milk, and fruit.⁹ An unnamed Mina woman was often seen around the plantations of Haut-du-Cap selling bread.¹⁰ The Haut-du-Cap neighborhood also harbored an unnamed Arada woman who had been hiding there for nearly a month.¹¹ Rosie of the Aguia nation used her language skills in Dutch, English, and Spanish to pass as a free woman and possibly marketed herself as a broker or trader alongside other free women of color at Le Cap.¹²

Maroons also fled their enslavers from within Cap Français at a high rate, meaning there was a circulation of people to and from the city to the mountainous rural districts. Men especially gravitated to areas like Artibonite, Léogâne, and Fort Dauphin, less-populated areas that were connected to waterways, mountains, and caverns, and could facilitate escape and informal economic activity. Places like Fort Dauphin were especially considered dangerous and difficult to access; however, these characteristics would have made for the creation of insurgent geographies as maroons organized themselves and laid claim to lands and rights. Léogâne was the home base of the rebel ritualist Dom Pedro in the 1760s, Fort Dauphin saw several conflicts between armed maroons and the maréchaussée, and Artibonite was home to smaller, self-liberated communities. Where colonists saw inaccessibility, maroons saw geographies of freedom.

Reaching the Inaccessible

Through forced labor tasks or their self-initiated journeys, Saint-Domingue’s enslaved people and runaway fugitives traversed the colony and were exposed to its vastly diverse topography, including its several mountain chains. The Taíno moniker Ayiti, and the most literal interpretation of the well-known Haitian proverb “behind the mountains are more mountains,” derived from the fact that mountain ranges cover three-fourths of the 10,714 square miles of what became Saint-Domingue-Haiti. In addition to several smaller mountain ranges in the north, in the west there are the Cahos and Montagnes Noires, and the southern mountains of Pic la Selle, the Matheux, and the Baoruco – all of which were hiding places for maroons.¹³ Two of these mountain chains exceed heights of 1,000 meters above sea level, including one in the westward-jutting southern peninsula where maroons later established the Platons Kingdom during the Haitian Revolution. The other 1,000-plus-meter mountain range occupies the island’s south-central region, Pic la Selle, sitting southeast of Port-au-Prince.¹⁴ Semi-arid savannas, lush rainforests, sinkholes and deep cave systems also characterized Saint-Domingue’s landscape. The caves were locations for Taíno ritual practice, transculturation and exchange between Taínos and Africans, and served as protective zones for runaways in transit toward maroon communities.¹⁵ Some of these sites included what is now called the Voûte à Minguet of Dondon and Bassin Zim in Hinche, Central Plateau; the Bohoc/Colladère at Pignon and St. Francique at St. Michel de l’Attalaye, both in the Central Plateau; Dubedou near Gonaïves in Artibonite; the caves of Tortuga Island; Grotte Dufour in Marmelade; the Morne Deux-Têtes Meillac at Limbé; caves at Camp-Perrin; the Moreau Cave at Port-Salut; the Grotte aux Indes at Pestel; the Grande Grotte at Port-à-Piment; and the Grotte nan Baryè in Grand Anse.¹⁶

Among the identified destinations for runaways, areas in the northern department were the most common. Besides those who went to more populated towns like Le Cap or Port-au-Prince, many runaways were last seen in Fort Dauphin, Trou, Limbé, Limonade, and Grand Rivière. With its mountain ranges and savannahs, and immediate access to both the northern coast and two major roads leading to the interior of Santo Domingo, Fort Dauphin had been the second most important city in the north and was the first to receive influxes of inhabitants when the town was known as Bayaha under Spanish rule.¹⁷ But by the eighteenth century, the French found Fort Dauphin less than optimal for a viable naval base and it was sparsely populated, apart from five potteries, rendering it a “useless” port.¹⁸ Moreau de Saint-Méry similarly described Fort Dauphin in less than flattering terms: as a “pesthole” that was dangerous and difficult to access due to overflows of river water.¹⁹ However, it was a porous site of the Saint-Domingue–Santo Domingo border, operating as an entrepôt for illegal smuggling between Monte Cristo and Le Cap, especially during the Seven Years War.²⁰ The informal economic activities of French, Spanish, Dutch, and North American traders made Fort Dauphin an attractive place for some runaways to peddle items or sell their services and find some financial independence. For example, a creole man named Étienne had passed for free for ten years since 1756 – he was not branded, spoke strong French, and had pierced ears, though his legs were scarred. Étienne was known to frequent Maribaroux and Fort Dauphin, working as a pacotille, or a vendor of various wares.²¹ A 20-year-old Kongolese woman named Zaire was described as a trader and left her owner in Le Cap, a mûlatre woman named Zabeau, headed for Fort Dauphin.²²

In the early eighteenth century, the mountainous towns east of Le Cap were renowned for the threatening presence of armed maroon bands who were known to rob and kill whites and attack plantations. According to Moreau de Saint-Méry, places with names like Piton des Nègres, Piton des Flambeaux, Piton des Ténèbres, Tête des Nègres at Môle Saint Nicolas, and Crete à Congo signified the dominance of fugitives who had occupied inaccessible places. At Trou, just south of Fort Dauphin, the name of notorious maroon rebel Polydor evoked memories of his band, murders, and the intensive effort to capture him.²³ Later, a section of Trou called Écrevisses, along with Fort Dauphin, became a popular destination for runaways and was the place where Thélémaque Canga, Noël Barochin, and Bœuf pillaged plantations and fought the maréchaussée. The mountains of Morne à Mantegre, between Grande Rivière and Limonade, had a reputation as a maroon haven since Colas Jambes Coupée’s campaigns in the early 1720s.²⁴ In the southern peninsula, the section of Grand Anse bears the name Plymouth after the maroon Plymouth who, along with his followers, destroyed plantations throughout the region and was captured in 1730.²⁵

While the northern plain was more densely populated and sprawling with closely connected plantations, the western and southern departments were less developed. Outside of Port-au-Prince, the western parishes of Artibonite, Léogâne, and Cul-de-Sac attracted the most runaways, probably because plantations were spread farther apart, and parishes sat adjacent to mountains like the Cahos and Montagnes Noires. The priest Jean-Baptiste Labat reported in the 1720s that 700 heavily armed maroons were occupying the Montagnes Noires northeast of Port-au-Prince.²⁶ Les Affiches advertisements also indicate that these mountains were places of retreat for runaways in the latter half of the century. Two men and a woman of the Ganga and Mina nations all marooned to the Montagnes Noires near Port-au-Prince.²⁷ A group of four Kongolese and one Mondongue men took haven in the Montagnes Noires – Houan (Juan) or Jean, Jean-Louis, and Jupiter escaped to join with Cesar and Louis who had already been there for some time.²⁸ Pierre-Louis, a griffe and a carpenter, hid for two months in the Grand Bois mountains in Croix-des-Bouquets, which was a site of conflict between maroons and the maréchaussée.²⁹ Above Port-au-Prince, a group of 17 unnamed maroons, described as mostly creoles, escaped a Gonaïves plantation in May 1769 and were presumed to have been hiding at Artibonite.³⁰ One unnamed Kongolese woman and ten Kongo men escaped from Artibonite and were suspected of finding haven with “other black maroons.”³¹ Télémaque, a creole from Jamaica who spoke English and “the language ordinary to the nègres,” had been in flight for nine months and was thought to be either in the Cahos mountains around Saint Marc or on the Santo Domingo side of the hills.³²

The southern parishes that most maroons fled from were Jérémie, Les Cayes, and Anse-a-Veau. Though these southern districts did not report as many runaways’ suspected destinations as northern parishes, this does not mean there were no maroon hideouts in those areas. Maroon activity was reported in Grand Anse as early as the seventeenth century prior to French rule, and bands like those led by Plymouth were hunted in the 1720s and 1730s. Since the southern department developed much more slowly than either the northern or western departments, maroons in these regions probably lived among themselves in relative peace until the rise of the mixed-race coffee planter class during the mid- to late eighteenth century. Planter Laborde learned in September 1780 that three bondsmen, Jean, Cupidon, and Jupiter, had been captured or killed during the pursuit of a maroon band residing in the mountains of Aquin.³³ Neron, an Arada man, and Cipryen, a Kongolese, had escaped for six months and were suspected to be hiding with a black man from Corail Guerineau and “several others” – other maroons presumably – in the southern Baynet mountains that separated Grande Rivière from Gris-Gris.³⁴ Just before Christmas of 1788, a Bambara woman named Françoise escaped from her owner in Cap-Tiberon and was suspected of attempting to reach an armed community near Jérémie:

Françoise, Bambara, stamped on the breast [MARAIS], age around 30 years, of tall height, red skinned, having marks of her country on the face and body, the middle finger of the right hand cut, speaking French and English; people have seen this nègress in the heights of the Riviere des Anglais, called Baumanoir, with a negro who carried a bundle of linen and a sickle, they have taken the road from the Source-Chaude [Hot Springs], opposite Jérémie, north and south, from the Anses, at that spring there are many maroon negroes; there is another negro who left as a maroon at the same time and from the same quarter, and who has carried off a gun with around six [units] of powder and lead. Give notice to M. Marias Lamothe, at Cap-Tiburon.³⁵

The fact that Françoise spoke English suggests that she was either brought to Saint-Domingue through the intra-American slave trade from Jamaica or North America, or perhaps she learned English from ongoing interactions with English-speaking Jamaican slaves and traders near Jérémie. In any case, she was seen with a man carrying a package of linens and a sickle near Riviere des Anglais, the northern end of which heads toward the mountains between Cap Tiberon and Jérémie. A third man escaped around the same time as Françoise, but was carrying a gun and six units of gunpowder. Françoise and her unnamed companion took the road of the Hot Springs near the coves of Jérémie, where many runaways were residing. The hot spring coves in which runaways would have sought refuge may have been either the Port-Salut Moreau Cave or the Grotte nan Barye of the Grand Anse.³⁶

Letters sent in 1775 described marronnage as a pervasive problem that had the capacity to undo the colony; one contributing factor cited was the dense, nearly impenetrable mountain ranges into which the maréchaussée and other hunters attempted and often failed to pursue fugitives.³⁷ Though Saint-Domingue’s mountains were increasingly occupied by coffee plantations by the mid-eighteenth century, maroons were adept to finding locations that were isolated and difficult to access enough to avoid capture. West Central African runaways especially would have been inclined to turn to the mountains, since the highlands north and south of the Congo River were more densely populated due to the hospitable climate for farming and fishing.³⁸ Spaces that were supposed to be unreachable and uninhabitable were the very places where maroons were able to find refuge away from the reach of the plantocracy. Waterscapes were also a space that, in Europeans’ imagination, provided the means of transportation associated with trade and slaving. However, enslaved people utilized Saint Domingue’s rivers and sea-adjacent ports as routes to free themselves.

Waterways: Routes of Un/slaving

Kevin Dawson’s (2018) work, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora, provides a unique lens through which we can view Africans’ and African descendants’ relationship to, knowledge of, and uses of waterways that were part of their cultural geographies. Contrary to beliefs widely purported by Europeans that Africans had water phobias or that their bones were too dense to float, continental Africans who lived along the coasts or on riverways were equipped with technical abilities to navigate waters, build and operate boats, deep dive and even surf — oftentimes with stronger proficiency than Europeans themselves. West Central Africa, the zone where most of Saint-Domingue’s African population originated, was a rainforest ecology that experienced heavy rains and had major river systems that flowed for miles from the interior to the coast, such as the Congo and Kwanza rivers. High waterfalls, whirlpools, and swamp wildlife made these rivers and their tributaries difficult for Europeans to navigate, while locals fashioned small canoes and arrows that allowed for easier fishing and hunting.³⁹ African children learned to swim, surf, and canoe at an early age, and various water sports provided opportunities for men to exhibit their bravery and masculinity. Water-based activities were not only recreational and cultural in nature; familiarity with waterscapes allowed Africans to resist the slave trade in ways other than suicide by drowning as an act of spiritual self-preservation, as associated with the Igbo.⁴⁰ In 1544, a marooned community of Angolan shipwreck survivors formed on the southern coast of São Tomé, and at the Bight of Benin, the lacustrine community Tofinuland originated from migrations of Aja-Fon speaking peoples fleeing the prolific slave trading Dahomey Kingdom‘s imperial conquests of the early eighteenth century.⁴¹

By the eighteenth century, transoceanic travel from Africa was associated with slaving activities. Few examples of Africans’ voluntary movement across the Atlantic exist; most of the millions who involuntarily voyaged on ships were captives whose collective experience constituted the Middle Passage. Over the course of three centuries, European nations refined their slave trading processes to a bureaucratic science, leveraging capital funds and insurance from privatized and state-sponsored companies, using ledger books to account for their cargo, employing a range of personnel – including sailors, surgeons, and brokers – to complete each voyage, and maintaining trading relationships at ports of each point of the “triangular trade” between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The systematic nature of the racialized slave trade nearly ensured that any black person crossing the Atlantic was destined to be enslaved in the Americas, making the ocean and other smaller waterways sites where freedom was impossible (Mustakeem 2016). Canoes and canoe-makers were critical components of fishing communities and were the fundamental means of transport that helped form commercial networks between African coastal ports and the hinterlands. Economic enterprise and cultural, social, and political developments associated with the slave trade were heavily dependent on these boatmen and their knowledge of waterways to establish trade relationships. Traveling along rivers allowed European slave traders and their African intermediaries to have greater access to communities deep in Africa’s interior, where violent raids resulted in boatloads of captives being taken to the coastal ports where they would then wait for weeks or months at a time to board a slave ship. The crisscrossing oceanic travel and commerce of European-owned slave ships made them “living, microcultural, micropolitical system[s] in motion” (Gilroy 1992: 4) that transported African worldviews, mores, sensibilities, behaviors, and practices.

Less frequently, enslaved Africans were not only made into cargo occupying the bellies of slave ships, they were owned by naval and other government officers, fishermen, and large-scale traders, and spent long periods of time on the vessels’ top decks, performing a variety of tasks associated with the maintenance of the vessel. Aquatic skills gained on the continent and at sea were part of the cultural legacy enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, which was useful in a water-bound colony like Saint-Domingue. The difficulty of crossing the colony’s many mountains meant that coastal shipping and water-based movement were primary modes of transportation.⁴² Over 30 identified rivers flowed from the mountains to the coastlines, and with a wet climate and natural disasters, flooding was a common and dangerous occurrence. Some of the major river routes included Trois Rivières, which flowed south from Port-de-Paix and the Artibonite River, often referred to as Saint-Domingue’s “Nile,” that flowed nearly 60 miles east into central Santo Domingo. The colony was made up of over 800 miles of coastline, which meant that every region of Saint-Domingue touched or was close to the sea.⁴³

Having access to a body of water, such as women who bathed or washed clothing in rivers (Figure 6.3) would have made boating or swimming away from slavery a tempting possibility; runaways who were skilled swimmers had an advantage in marronnage. For example, an unnamed Mondongue man threw himself from a schooner three leagues, or about ten miles, from land and was suspected of reaching Môle Saint Nicolas, since his comrades attested that he was an excellent swimmer.⁴⁴ Enslaved people who inhabited plantations with proximity to waterways had access to small boats and canoes that they used to escape – even if they were not particularly noted for having maritime experience. Dozens of runaways listed in Les Affiches américaines and other runway advertisements were suspected of taking flight in a canot or canoe. The Gazette de Saint Domingue reported that four men and two nouveaux women of the Nagô and Arada nations banded together to escape their owner Jarossay in a fishing boat in June 1791.⁴⁵ While long-distance trade in Africa was largely conducted by men, women similarly had canoeing skills and used them to conduct local trade. Two unnamed women, one of whom was breastfeeding a two-month-old child, may have already had boating experience when they left Cayes in a canoe in December of 1767.⁴⁶

Figure 6.3. “Propriété sucrière des familles Thiverny et Fresquet à Saint-Domingue, aquarelle anonymeArchives Bordeaux Métropole, Bordeaux Fi Saint-Domingue 1”

Several runaways in Saint Domingue were canoe-makers or masons, fishermen, swimmers, or were part of the colony’s naval forces. Fugitives with maritime knowledge and experience, even those from different regional or ethnic backgrounds, could find common ground and escape together through the rivers or ports. For example, three sailors – Pierrit, a Kongolese man described as the captain, an English-speaking Nagô man named Louis, and Azor, who was also Nagô – fled Le Cap in a stolen boat over 30 feet long. It was believed they were headed to the Jacquezy neighborhood in Le Trou, a common maroon destination and hotbed for armed band activity.⁴⁷ Some maroon sailors were enslaved people sold to Saint-Domingue from other Caribbean islands, which gave them a wider understanding of inter-imperial waters. Saint-Marc, who claimed to be a freeman from Jamaica, and Jacob, who also spoke a little English, were two sailors who left in a Danish boat called The Iris.⁴⁸ Two other sailors from the Anglophone Atlantic, Robin and Guillaume, escaped Fort Dauphin in a small fishing boat, and may have taken another enslaved person with them.⁴⁹

For Europeans, waterways were highways for the commercial buying and selling of captive slaves. But for Africans, water and water-based activity facilitated trade and leisure, and in the colonial context their acquired recreational and practical skills also contributed to efforts to liberate themselves. Self-directed mobility was a scarcity for enslaved people, as were windows of opportunity to escape. Yet the vastness of Saint-Domingue’s topography, its mountains, rivers, plains, ports, sinkholes, and caves offered a number of options for seeking refuge in the act of marronnage. Also, part of this landscape was the ever-changing boundary between French Saint-Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo. The border not only drew the political distinction between two European empires, it represented a nearly 400-mile gate to a new geographic, social, economic, and cultural scene. The contention between the two colonies and their respective royal administrators made the border more than just an imaginary line in the earth; it became a literal site of grappling between French, Spanish, African and indigenous peoples through trade, competition for land and slaves, and collaboration and resistance. The next part of this chapter will explore relations between the Spanish and the French, and the ways in which people of African descent took advantage of inter-imperial conflict and carved out social and geographic spaces for themselves as maroons.

Sites of Contention: The Saint-Domingue–Santo Domingo Border

Spatial structures, like social, economic, and political structures, shape material conditions and humans’ lived experiences; conversely, human activity in the form of sustained collective action can impact or transform those structures. Mimi Sheller (2012: 191) argues that “despite the existence of dominant social orderings of space and legal systems to uphold that ordering, in practice other social productions of space nevertheless emerge alongside or are directly superimposed on hegemonic space.” The border between Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo operated as a spatial structure that delineated the nature of the colonial social order and slavery in Saint-Domingue. It also proved to be a structure – much like the colony’s urban areas, mountains, and waterways – that, through the conscious and sustained collective action of black people, could be manipulated and mobilized as a subversive rival geography. Two late seventeenth-century policies delineated the legal and geographical boundaries of French slavery: the 1685 Code Noir formalized regulations about slavery in Saint-Domingue and other French Caribbean islands, and the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick established French control of western Española. In the months leading up the Code Noir’s ratification in 1685, the governor of Saint-Domingue sought specific directives to limit the number of enslaved Africans in the colony. He also expressed concern about the numerous Africans, indigenous people, and mûlatres escaping to the Spanish territory after the French military captured 100 fugitives and returned them to Saint-Domingue. The governor alleged not only that runaways had learned the meaning of freedom during their escapes but that 24 of them were responsible for killing white colonists. These concerns influenced the Code Noir’s aim to maintain royal control of the colonies through the regulation of “crimes” committed by the enslaved – especially marronnage.⁵⁰ The inauguration of this repressive legal mechanism to extend and institutionalize the powers of plantation regimes, colonial authorities, and the French monarchy was in part a response to Africans’ ongoing collective agency, which certainly did not cease in 1685. Enslaved Africans also disregarded the Treaty of Ryswick by subverting and exploiting the artificial border between Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo, as conflicts between the French and Spanish provided Africans with geographic leverage to negotiate their freedom through marronnage. But more importantly, the ever-shifting geopolitical border itself was constituted by inter-imperial competition for land, resources, and laborers, as well as Africans’ collective acts of agency for their freedom.

From the earliest moments of enslaved Africans’ presence on the island of Española, runaways and rebels regularly resisted forced labor under the Spanish encomienda and repartimiento systems by reconstituting sections of the landscape as liberated zones. The first Africans and remaining Taíno escaped Spanish mines, ranches, and plantations, finding refuge in the Baoruco mountains or the western region that the French later occupied. Rebels in the northwest traded goods with French and Dutch settlers in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-centuries. Runaways joined up with Dutch raiders as early as 1625, but the formal onset of French colonization of Saint-Domingue in 1697 and its aggressive sugar-based plantation economy essentially reversed the directional flow of African runaways from east–west to west–east.⁵¹ Africans brought to Saint-Domingue encountered a slavery regime that was much more relentless, violent, and industrialized than anything developed on the continent of Africa or in Santo Domingo, especially after the Spanish redirected their energies to mining on the South American continent. For over a century, conflicts between the Spanish and French over land, resources, and slaves had an immediate impact on the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue and their perception of options for freedom. Not only did Spanish colonists raid French plantations and kidnap enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, but open warfare between the two royal governments created windows of opportunity for enslaved people to disavow their French owners and see what life in Santo Domingo had to offer.

Slave codes, existing in both the French and Spanish colonies, attempted to delineate the social boundaries of bondage as it related to enslaved people’s freedom statuses, family, and rights to humane treatment. A major distinction between the two codes was that the Spanish system was based on the medieval Siete Partidas code, which stated that though slaves had no civil rights, they did have innate human rights. This is not to suggest that enslavement itself was easier in the Spanish Empire than elsewhere in the Americas, but in contrast to officials in slave-holding French Caribbean colonies, Spanish officials actualized aspects of their policy to ameliorate the basic living conditions for enslaved people. Assimilation into Christianity and the Spanish language and culture, as well as marriage rights, were important avenues for enslaved blacks to create extensive social networks. Narrow paths of manumission were also available and served as a form of social control to discourage rebellion. Courts in the Spanish Empire reinforced enslaved people’s human rights by allowing them to seek prosecution of abusive owners using a court-appointed defender. They also sued for their freedom, the right to marry, and the right to keep their families together. The Catholic Church had traditions of charitable works that created social institutions which benefitted enslaved people, such as the cofradias or confraternities, hospitals that served slaves and free people of color, and service in local militias, which could lead to mobility or emancipation.⁵²

The willingness to arm blacks through militia participation and other means to fight enemy forces was a feature of slavery in Santo Domingo from as early as 1600–1650, when Spanish planters armed slaves against their local sugar-planting competitors.⁵³ Not only could blacks be armed in Santo Domingo, but some freemen occupied their own town, symbolizing a possibility of freedom and mobility that would never have been officially sanctioned by the French colonial state. After nearly two centuries of fighting rebels during the Christmas Day Wolof uprising and maroons like “Captain” Sebastian Lemba, Diego Guzman, and “the cowboy” Juan Vaquero, the Spanish established a town near Santo Domingo for self-freed runways called San Lorenzo de los Negros de Minas. The town was self-governing and captains from each major ethnic group – Minas, Aradas, Kongos, and Brans from the Gold Coast – held authoritative control over their respective group. Garcia Congo was the sergeant of the town militia, while his lieutenant was Mina and the captain was of the Bran nation. The groups operated independently but collaborated when necessary.⁵⁴

In 1679, the same year as San Lorenzo’s founding, a man named Padre Jean led an insurgency in the north aiming to kill all the white colonists between Port-de-Paix and Port Margot. Padre Jean killed his Spanish owner then headed toward Tortuga for refuge; the small island had been the site of rebellion of white planters desiring independence from France.⁵⁵ From there, he crossed over to Petit Saint Louis, where he recruited 25 enslaved Africans, some of whom had been kidnapped by the French from Spanish owners. As they travelled east, nearly reaching Port Margot, they mobilized others and killed any Frenchmen with whom they crossed paths, with hopes of gaining a pardon from the Spanish. The insurgents were blocked at the Borgne parish while raiding plantations for additional arms and supplies. Boucaneers commissioned by the governor eventually sought out the insurgents who then retreated to the mountains near Port-de-Paix and were found by French settlers’ defensive units who were initially reluctant to engage. Padre Jean and six associates were killed, but many others fought their way back into Spanish territory, where they were received with impunity. Other runaways from French plantations in the west began running east to claim religious asylum.⁵⁶

Ongoing inter-imperial warfare fostered the seeds of rebellion among the enslaved. In 1689, the French fought against Spain, England, and parts of the Holy Roman Empire in a conflict known as the Nine Years War, and Española’s western lands became a local scene as the Spanish and French embarked on a near-century-long struggle for control of the territory.⁵⁷ The French attacked the Spanish city of Santiago in 1690; and the next year, the Spanish retaliated by pillaging what would become Cap-Français and reinstating it into their territory. Between 1691 and 1695, Spanish and English forces penetrated as far west as Port-de-Paix, burning towns, capturing enslaved Africans, and taking them to San Lorenzo de los Negros de Minas.⁵⁸ Bondspeople owned by the French took advantage of the conflict and planned to rebel: in 1691, around Léogâne, 200 were implicated in a conspiracy to kill their owners and take over their plantations. Authorities executed two of the men involved on the breaking wheel and three others had their legs cut off.⁵⁹ November of 1691 saw another conspiracy in Port-de-Paix organized by Janot Marin and an 18-year-old Senegambian named George Dollo “Pierrot,” who planned to rally others to leave the colony and go to war against their owners. With Marin at the head of seven, their plan was to assemble in Limonade and head to the Spanish territory. Once they left, the remaining slaves at Port-de-Paix would kill all the white men, women, and children of the parish and the rebels would be granted power over the district by the Spanish. Marin and Pierrot were assisted by a young white indentured servant, who later revealed the plot, and a bilingual, bi-racial man from the Spanish territory. The “mûlatre Espagnol,” named Espion, was a spy who had been in communication with Marin and Pierrot for three months. Espion instructed the men to try to take over Port-de-Paix by convincing the blacks to leave, and, once the masses agreed, Marin and Pierrot would send a black lieutenant named Congre to Gonâve so the Spanish could receive the news then descend on Cap Français. Upon arrival, the Spanish would relinquish control over Port-de-Paix to the black rebels. However, once the French learned of the impending Spanish attack, military aid was sent to galvanize troops from the northern districts who were then informed of the conspiracy to join the Spanish. Although it was nearly a successful attempt to exploit the fighting between French and Spanish forces during the Nine Years War, the plot failed, and a military tribunal sentenced Marin and Pierrot to be burned alive.⁶⁰

Others were more successful at using Spanish aggression to their benefit and they escaped to San Lorenzo de los Negros de Minas or other small towns near the capital city, Santo Domingo. Over 100 escaped in 1692, and 20 years later approximately 500 former enslaved Saint-Dominguans were still living in the Spanish lands. In May 1697, 300 enslaved people in Quartier Morin and Petite Anse organized an insurrection but were quickly disassembled, though it is not clear if this was another attempt by the Spanish to undermine French control of enslaved Africans in order to gain the upper hand in combat.⁶¹ Still, the Treaty of Ryswick was ratified in November 1697, ending the Nine Years War – but it would not be the last time enslaved people’s uprisings and escapes were timed to exploit the ongoing French–Spanish conflict that created vacuums of power in Española’s northeastern regions.

Another plot was uncovered in 1704, when M. de Charritte proclaimed that Africans near Le Cap were again planning to kill the local whites at the behest of Spanish agents.⁶² This conspiracy may have been connected to a maroon camp that formed in the mountains outside of Cap Français, where entire family units resided and organized incursions until 1704.⁶³ Acknowledging that rates of marronnage into Santo Domingo tended to be excessive during wartime, the Council of Léogâne issued a bounty for the government to pay 25 piastres for any person in Santo Domingo who could return a runaway, but this restitution was rarely paid. In February 1711, the king of France overruled the Council of Léogâne, stating that each planter had an individual responsibility to re-locate fugitives.⁶⁴ Still, government funds were used to help planters recoup costs associated with chasing runaways. Later, in May 1711, two runaways – Houx and Moussac – were killed, and their owners were compensated with six hundred livres each for their losses.⁶⁵ Even after the war ended, early eighteenth-century Saint Domingue had not yet fully formed into the proto-industrial sugar-producing powerhouse it would soon become and maroons seemed to have free rein of the colony, prompting the creation of the maréchaussée fugitive slave police in 1721.⁶⁶ M. Dubois, the colonel commandant of Cul-de-Sac, reported mass desertions, to which militias were organized to capture the deserters in 1715 and 1717.⁶⁷ In July 1715, Dubois sent a convoy to Santo Domingo to re-capture runaways, but this search came up empty handed because the Spanish warned the escapees of the convoy’s arrival.⁶⁸ The 1717 dispatch did discover a settlement that had a well that was 40 feet deep, presumably constructed by the fugitives to meet their needs for fresh water.⁶⁹

Runaways to the Spanish territory remained an issue and attempts to control them resulted in mixed outcomes. In 1718, the Spanish king gave an order to return to the French all the blacks who had taken refuge in Santo Domingo.⁷⁰ The French moved into Azua, with the commandant of Azua leading the charge. An expedition into the Baoruco mountains in 1719 resulted in the capture of a band leader and ritual healer named Michel, as well as other leaders in Maribaroux.⁷¹ In another case, runaways in Santo Domingo were rounded up for return to Saint-Domingue in 1719, but local Spaniards forcefully opposed this ruling and instead took the captives to San Lorenzo. By the late eighteenth century, San Lorenzo held some 300 free black inhabitants, all descendants of either kidnapped or runaway African Saint-Dominguans.⁷² Between 1721 and 1723, tensions between the Spanish king and his colonial officials were again exacerbated when the governor of Santo Domingo declared that he would no longer return French runaways to Saint-Domingue. In somewhat of a ploy, he wrote to French administrators that he had captured 128 runaways and that the colonists could come and retrieve them, so the French colonists sent a ship to the bay of Ocoa with two representatives onboard. The two agents went to Santo Domingo, but as the fugitives approached the boat the Spaniards changed their minds and gave arms to the Africans, who then revolted in a declaration that they were free. The two agents only narrowly escaped but later attempted to charge the Spanish crown for the sunk costs.⁷³ Aggression between the French and Spanish continued into the 1730s; in 1727, 15 Spaniards destroyed two French settlements in Trou-de-Jean-de-Nantes, Ouanminthe, and took with them some enslaved Africans.⁷⁴ Later, a group of Africans stole a boat and went to Santo Domingo, where they intermarried with members of the local population, and a colonial officer, LaGrange, was tasked with finding them and returning them to Saint-Domingue.⁷⁵ Despite the Treaty of Ryswick establishing the west as French territory in 1697, the presence and value of black people cast a stark relief onto the distinctions between life, society, and slavery in the two colonies, making the border a hotly contested, politicized entity. Spanish incursions from the east continued until the 1770s, when a formal agreement in December 1777 finalized the final geographical boundaries between the two European colonies.⁷⁶

Maroons Making the Border

Geopolitical contestations between the French and Spanish starting in mainland Europe continued to spill across the Atlantic to the island of Española and caused conflicts between colonists, as well as rifts and misunderstandings between colonists and their respective royal governments. These struggles centered on competition for land, resources, and enslaved people, whose very presence and collective actions to self-liberate further ignited and shaped inter-imperial contestations over the border, and shaped the border itself. The decrease of sugar production in Santo Domingo did not stem the desire for outputs like those occurring in Saint-Domingue, leading envious Spanish planters to take advantage of Saint-Domingue’s deadly labor regimes and harsh punishments for maroons by luring or kidnapping enslaved people from plantations during raids from the east. Spaniards attempted to drive away several planters from Bassin-Cayman, Dondon in 1741, and in 1747 they kidnapped five blacks and a plantation overseer from Marre-a-la-Roche, Dondon.⁷⁷ When Port-au-Prince was founded in 1749 and sugar production increasingly spread in its suburban areas, economic development in the areas surrounding the city and the Cul-de-Sac region pushed Saint-Domingue’s boundaries eastward, and maroons who had been in these border regions found themselves at the center of conflicts between French and Spanish authorities.⁷⁸ As in previous decades, a major concern of Saint-Domingue colonists was that enslaved Africans were continuing to take advantage of geographic proximity to the Spanish territory as a channel for escape. African Saint-Dominguans had an incentive to do so since Spanish codes held several provisions that allowed for manumission from enslavement and, at times, the establishment of free black towns such as San Lorenzo de los Negros de Minas.

In October 1751, the militia commander of Mirebalais received a substantial budget from colonial authorities to chase runaways into Santo Domingo. The commander, Bremond, had at his disposal 300 livres for every captured runaway, a high-ranking militia officer, and as many maréchaussée archers as he could pay himself.⁷⁹ According to Spanish officials, some 3,000 runaways from Saint-Domingue had escaped to Santo Domingo, or the Baoruco mountains more specifically, in 1751 alone.⁸⁰ A good number of these perhaps escaped after the earthquake on November 21 of that year that almost destroyed Port-au-Prince.⁸¹ Spanish planters likely welcomed these refugees to provide additional labor due to the lack of plantation-based economic growth in the island’s eastern regions. While Saint-Domingue’s enslaved population grew exponentially in the eighteenth century, Santo Domingo’s reached a maximum of 15,000 in 1789, a far cry from its neighbor to the west. Though there was growing industry toward the end of the century, Santo Domingo had essentially become a sparsely populated “backwater” colony of the Spanish empire.⁸² Spanish colonists’ desires for land and black workers continued to manifest as aggression over the border – they burned four plantations in Ravines-a-Mûlatres in Valière in 1757 after warning the planters to abandon the settlements.⁸³

While island-dwelling Spanish colonists irritated relations with their French neighbors, during the 1760s, the Spanish crown offered collaborative support regarding Saint-Domingue’s problem of runaways. A letter from the king of Spain on October 18, 1760, revealed that the primary cause for marronnage was the harsh treatment enacted by French planters, who had not held to their agreement to stop punishing deserters.⁸⁴ Yet, Spanish colonists again undermined Saint-Domingue’s attempts to regulate its runaway problem when on May 22, 1764, the governor of Santo Domingo, Don Manuel d’Azlor, proposed that Saint-Domingue model San Lorenzo de los Negros de Minas and build its own free settlements to house runaways.⁸⁵ Spanish attitudes toward re-settling fugitives may have incentivized more runaways from Saint Domingue, resulting in another expedition in pursuit of fugitives into the Spanish territory on August 21, 1764.⁸⁶ In February 1765, the Saint-Domingue colonial governor, Comte d’Estaing, declared a state of alert, mandating that all colonists were required to be armed at all times with guns, bayonets, gunpowder, sabers, and machetes or swords. Further, he ordered that fugitive-chasing militias would be comprised of gens du couleur and free black affranchis.⁸⁷ One year later, a treaty was established between d’Azlor and Rohan, general governor of Saint-Domingue, to return all maroons, thieves, and absent-without-leave soldiers, and to stop the sale of goods by merchants who passed through Bete à Cornes without legal right.⁸⁸ The 1766 treaty also stated that any Santo Domingo planter would be fined 50 livres for harboring fugitives or kidnapped Africans. The two colonial forces also decided to cooperate to chase maroons in the mountains.⁸⁹ This agreement suggests that despite ongoing negotiations between the two royal representatives, Spanish planters continued use Saint-Dominguan runaways as labor and as trading partners – meaning that maroons played an active role in orchestrating relations between the two colonies as they attempted to concretize and manage the border.

The Spanish and French royal and colonial governments were conjoined by shared interests in enslaving and preventing maroons from dominating areas that bordered the two colonies. Yet, their common goals did not reach the local level, where planters from Santo Domingo continued to antagonize Saint-Domingue planters over land and slaves. In 1769, Don Nicholas de Montenegro, commander of St. Raphael in Santo Domingo, renewed aggression against Saint-Domingue when he kidnapped a Dondon planter and four black captives and took them to Santo Domingo until 1771, when the planter paid a ransom to the king of Spain. Spanish planters continued to violate the 1766 agreement and stake claim to French lands in Saint-Domingue, again in the parish of Dondon. Montenegro gave a French mûlatre permission to settle in Dondon in March 1771, but 50 Spanish men arrived in May, kidnapping the plantation overseer and a black woman, then burning down several plantations. In retaliation, an armed force went into Santo Domingo and kidnapped nine blacks and an overseer without damaging any property. Negotiations to return each set of hostages ensued, and the French agreed to return portions of Dondon to the Spaniards.⁹⁰ Interestingly, over twenty years later, on the night of October 10 or 11 in 1789, nine men and four women, all Kongolese, escaped to Saint-Domingue from their owner, Montenegro, the commander of St. Raphael.⁹¹ These maroons may have been the kidnapped slaves who chose to return to Saint-Domingue, perhaps due to its familiarity or kinship ties they may have formed. In either case, these maroons and people enslaved along the border were both subjects and agents of the border’s creation.

Despite these local spats, Spanish colonial forces adhered to their earlier agreements and sent convoys into the border region to search for runaways, and the French continued to establish militias to retrieve the numerous maroons from the Spanish territory.⁹² In 1770, a group of 13 runaways from Saint Domingue were captured in the countryside along the border and then interrogated in the city of Santo Domingo. Six were from the Loango Coast, identifying as Kongo and Mondongo. Several knew their French owners, while others were recently arrived and could not speak Spanish or French. An unbranded African named Bucu did not know how long he had been in the colony because he had escaped toward the east immediately after leaving the slave ship. This indicates that the political strife over the Spanish–French border was not lost on even the most recently arrived Africans, who used the contestation to their benefit.⁹³ By 1775, some 15,000 maroons were believed to be in Santo Domingo.⁹⁴ Africans’ knowledge of the eastward haven did not go unnoticed; the French government created a commission in January 1776 to search for runaways “who passed daily into Spanish Santo Domingo,” providing compensation per fugitive recovered.⁹⁵

Some maroons who fled Saint-Domingue for Santo Domingo blended into colonial society, either farming, working for local Spanish planters, or residing in San Lorenzo de los Negros de Minas. Others joined established maroon communities who operated outside the sphere of both colonial societies and antagonized plantations in Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo. In Saint-Domingue’s western department at Béate – a small island that forms a sound with Baoruco and Anse-a-Pitre in Cayes de Jacmel – maroon bands’ attacks on plantations in the 1770s prompted a renewed struggle between the French and Spanish to defeat the maroons. The Council of Léogâne had already increased maréchaussée presence in the south in 1705, 1729, and 1741. Yet as the numbers of troops increased, so did the number of runaways. Administrators sent a detachment to Fond-Parisien in Croix-des-Bouquets on February 19, 1771, and another group was sent to Grands-Bois in Mirebalais on May 19, 1774. On February 8, 1775, there was an ordinance to build a town in Croix-des-Bouquets and a sheriff with several mounted police were assigned to Fond-Parisien, Roche-Blance, and Grand-Bois. These troops were ineffective in preventing raids from runaway bands, and on October 13, 1776, another dispatch arrived at Boucan Patate because the maroons destroyed a newly built guardhouse. Though this offensive was somewhat successful, resulting in rebel deaths between Fond-Parisien and Grand-Bois as far south as Sale Trou, maroon militaristic strategy bewildered Spanish and French forces. The colonial militias were not as adept at navigating the mountains as the maroons, who for generations had deployed the mountains as part of their geography of subversion.

Two months later, in December 1776, a full-scale collaborative offensive between the French and Spanish – numbering 180 men and costing 80,000 livres – launched from Croix-des-Bouquets against the maroons in the Baoruco mountains. But by January 1777, the expedition was struggling to enter the dense forest and was running out of energy, food, drink, and supplies; troops were even reduced to drinking their own urine in order to survive. While some retreated to Port-au-Prince for provisions, the rest went south to Cayes and sent a boat of 100 men to Béate, where Spanish guides suggested there were maroon settlements based in the caves. When the boat arrived, the maroons had temporarily disappeared. That spring, the maroons re-appeared, initiating a counter-attack at Fond-Parisien – back in Croix-des-Bouquets where the expedition had begun. The rebel bands attacked Boucan-Greffin in May 1777 and again in November 1778, this time kidnapping an enslaved domestic worker named Anne from the Coupe property. On December 15, 1778, another detachment was sent to Boucan-Greffin in Croix-des-Bouquets, where a brigade of eight archers and two corporals were lodged at Sieur Coupe’s property to protect him. While in the hands of her captives, Anne was coerced into marrying a rebel leader named Kebinda, perhaps a BaKongo man named after the port city Cabinda. However, before the nuptials started, she convinced Kebinda to take her to a church where she was recovered by Spanish officials.⁹⁶

Once divided by maroons who took up arms for the Spanish against the French, collaborations on expeditions in pursuit of maroons united the two colonial forces and pushed them to an agreement on the contours of the geopolitical landscape and the treatment of future maroons. After a year of negotiation, on June 3, 1777, Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo ratified the Treaty of Aranjuez to finally settle the geographical limits of the boundary between the two colonies. One of the central parts of that treaty concerned the treatment of maroons who abandoned Saint-Domingue for the Spanish countryside and mountain ranges. The two nations again agreed to collaborate on pursuits, since maroons were considered a threat to both colonies, and that the French would give compensation of 12 livres for returning runaways.⁹⁷ But, Saint-Dominguan runaways, and perhaps also kidnapped enslaved people, continued to disregard the agreements between the French and Spanish authorities by making new lives for themselves in Santo Domingo. In January 1778, the Intendant of Saint-Domingue suggested that there needed to be concern and consensus about the price of return for runaways who were married and living in the Spanish territory, and in the rare case that Spanish blacks were caught in Saint-Domingue as runaways, they would not be sold in the cities but kept in jails separate from other absconders.⁹⁸ Colonists’ fear of maroons from Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo possibly co-mingling indicates their conscious awareness that maroons collaborated in manipulating inter-imperial relations and persuaded each other to rebel. Over the course of three centuries, maroons forced French and Spanish colonists to expend energy, time, and resources toward finalizing the border between Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo. Colonists were ineffective at using the border to maintain separate societal spheres and control over the respective enslaved populations, and therefore turned to other policies that they hoped, incorrectly, would placate the enslaved and prevent further rebellion.

While the Spanish actively sought to expand the slave trade in its Caribbean and South American territories, they aimed to do so according to customs and codes that governed the treatment of enslaved people throughout the empire. The Code Noir was the envy of the Spanish Empire and was perceived as an important source of Saint-Domingue’s economic prosperity. In 1785, a year after the French king issued a royal decree aimed to ameliorate conditions in Saint-Domingue, the Spanish similarly issued the Carolinian Slave Code for Santo Domingo. Included the Code were provisions for learning Catholicism, the right to a small plot of land for personal cultivation, several conditions for slaves to earn their freedom, and the right to marry. In response to this new code, it seems that the number of runaways from Saint-Domingue into the east was increasing. Moreau de Saint-Méry, writing from Cayes de Jacmel, claimed that raids in this area stopped after 1785, but as Chapter 8 will explain, later incursions and conflicts with the Maniel maroons would prove this to be false.⁹⁹ In 1788, the Marquis de Najac wrote to a former governor of Saint-Domingue essentially accusing the governor of allowing the maroon problem to grow: “during your administration, over four thousand slaves fled into Spanish territory; since your departure, the Spanish hardly returned any of them, and I am convinced that there are now six thousand in the Spanish colony.”¹⁰⁰ Saint-Dominguan planters and traveling merchants also attested to growing unrest among their slaves in October 1789 because of circulating rumors that the Spanish were again giving refuge to runaways.¹⁰¹ This may reflect local interpretations of the 1789 Spanish code Royal Instructors for the Education, Trade, and Work of Slaves, which limited punishments to no more than 25 strokes of the whip and threatened punishments to owners who caused serious injury, blood loss, or mutilation.¹⁰² However, these policies were not qualitatively distinct from those that existed in Saint-Domingue, and the 1789 Real Cedula was not actually promulgated in Santo Domingo.¹⁰³ Whereas there once may have been a perception among runaways that Santo Domingo was a safer space due to its underdeveloped plantation economy, the changing circumstances in which Spain now aimed to reinvigorate its agricultural production and slave-holding practices meant that the Bourbon colony might no longer be considered a haven for Saint-Domingue’s maroons. After centuries of exploiting the border as a geography of subversion, new Spanish policies attempted to bolster Santo Domingo as a geography of containment.

Conclusion

Geographic proximity to what was perceived as a less-hostile colony, Santo Domingo, was a critical component of Saint-Domingue’s context. Though Les Affiches américaines advertisements only indicate 80 runaways headed east over the 26-year publication span, other primary sources paint a very different picture: one in which, for several decades, streams of Saint-Domingue’s enslaved labor force made their way to Santo Domingo with the implicit and explicit welcome of the Spanish. On the other hand, it would not be unlikely that planters exaggerated their losses to obtain financial compensation from the royal or colonial governments. Further, the overwhelming majority black population in Saint-Domingue kept white residents at a heightened level of anxiety about a possible revolt – especially when the colony was most vulnerable during periods of war. Whites feared a looming maroon presence and often requested reinforcements to protect plantations from fugitives who returned to steal goods, food, weapons, tools, or to bring others to freedom. It is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the actual number of runaways in the colony due to the failure of some plantation managers to report fugitive advertisements. Additionally, we do not know the numbers of children that maroon women birthed while living in self-liberated zones – though it is highly likely that they had more children than enslaved women.¹⁰⁴ Therefore, it is a challenging task to determine how much of planters’ anxieties were justified. On the other hand, corroborating contemporary sources about rogue fugitive bands can help fill in the picture about the nature and scope of marronnage in Saint-Domingue.

When considering the complex geographic and geopolitical history of marronnage in Saint-Domingue and its neighbor Santo Domingo, it is no mystery why the Spanish were eager to support the revolutionary forces of 1791 led by Georges Biassou and Jean-François Papillon, himself a maroon. African collective action through marronnage had long helped shape Saint Domingue’s colonial landscape and inter-imperial relations well before 1791. In the same way that structures of domination and counterhegemonic practices co-exist and grapple with each other in ongoing dialectal processes, the maroon presence was equally as pervasive as the reach of the plantocracy. Maroons hid in plain sight in urban areas and created spaces for themselves in geographically difficult areas. Not only was their presence a reality, but their collective impact on the colonial order was undeniable. Maroon domination and agency marked locations that were re-named to reflect histories of rebellion. Moreover, marronnage pushed the boundaries of empire by forcing French colonists to reckon with their Spanish neighbors, giving insight to the ways in which subaltern intentionality impacts social and the spatial structural processes.