#maroonage

Most of the time when people ask, “What should I do?” they’re really asking “What organization should I join? What leader do I follow?” So, we must always try to debunk that. We should say that if you find yourself in a movement that has formed around an obviously dominant leader, you might as well go the hell home. That movement is a dead end. But if you have people who are organized around an issue or idea and they are able to sit down and listen to one another and develop a strategy, then you’re on the right track. I can’t find those people for you. You have to learn to look for them, because those are the people who are making history.

VIDEO/FILM: Landscape and Power: Freedom and Slavery in the Great Dismal Swamp

To believe, as I do, that the enslaved are our contemporaries is to understand that we share their aspirations and defeats, which isn’t to say that we are owed what they were due but rather to acknowledge that they accompany every effort to fight against domination, to abolish the color line and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it was not the kind of thing that could ever be given to you. The kind of thing that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. Freedom is the kind of thing that required you to leave your bones on the hills at Brimsbay, or to burn the cane fields, or to live in a garret for seven years, or to stage a general strike, or to create a new republic. It is won and lost, again and again. It is a glimpse of possibility, an opening, a solicitation without any guarantee of duration before it flickers and then is extinguished. The demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with making good on the promise of abolition, and this entails much more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of society, which is the only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is the intimacy of our age with theirs – an unfinished struggle. To what end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not to incite the hopes of transforming the present?