Mired Memory: Marronage in The Great Dismal Swamp

摘要

For most antebellum observers, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia figured as a geography ripe for colonialisation, either economically as farmland or space for development, or creatively as a haunted and mysterious wilderness. But the swamp was more than just a geography to be exploited for profit by powerful white planters; it was also a space of interaction between slave society and a community of self-freed people of colour. As scholars have increasingly noted, the swamp provided a sort of haven for Maroons in Virginia, but the white creative, cultural, and archival legacy has largely forgotten them. This paper argues that this legacy contributed to the colonial project aimed at expanding white control over a space of resistance, exploring how the removal of the Maroons from popular memory worked in tandem with legal and economic colonial endeavours.In dark fens of the Dismal Swamp The hunted Negro lay;He saw the fire of the midnight camp,And heard at times a horse's tramp And a bloodhound's distant bay...Where hardly a human foot could pass,Or a human heart would dare,On the quaking turf of the green morass He crouched in the rank and tangled grass,Like a wild beast in his lair (Longfellow [1842] 1922, 25).