Maroons and their actions provide an excellent example of how fugitive slaves utilized their surroundings – either in rural plantations or urban cityscapes – to stretch their freedom. Rather than focusing on the most observable aspects of flight to northern states or Canada, maroons offer us an alternative perspective of what escape actually looked like for those who had different circumstances preventing them from escape in free states. With this lens, escape can be seen as a perpetual process that is always precarious, impermanent, and underground.

Marronage represents itself in many different forms. Some formed grand maroon communities which were nestled in the hinterlands from the plantation – like in the woods, mountains, or swamps. Some ran away temporarily for weeks or months at a time as they sought shelter in the borderlands, neighboring plantations, or nearby woods. Others sought to seek opportunities in the city to hide in plain sight, either by lodging with free African Americans or working odd jobs to scrape by.

Although escape took many different forms, maroons navigated similar systems of exchange and communication with others to sustain freedom. Maroon communities in the Great Dismal Swamp spanning the border of North Carolina and Virginia, for example, traded resources and communicated with others outside to survive. Borderland maroons collaborated with enslaved allies who either helped them hide, provided them with food, or communicated intelligence to extend their freedom. Maroons in the city took advantage of complicit employers seeking undocumented work to keep labor cheap. Overall, it is important to understand how various landscapes allowed maroons to simultaneously cross the lines between slavery and freedom through relationships, “networks, and exchange.”