accustomed to working more or less on their own. Like the household
slaves, who also frequently tried to run away, they would have had access to
clothing that would not immediately give them away. “Slave clothing,” by
contrast, was almost as obvious as a modern prison uniform. A reward
notice in 1771, for example, notes that a “new” Negro named Step had
absconded in “a white Plains Waistcoat and Breeches, Osnaburg shirt and
a tolerable good bound Hat.” Field hands, unlike the artisans and house
servants, typically had no passable clothes, no marketable skills, no posses-
sions, and no good command of English, so the odds were against them.
The field hands, at least during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, were mostly “outlandish” blacks, many of whom bore the facial scars
(called “country marks”) that in some African tribal societies were a mark
of the coming-of-age ceremony. They were therefore easy to distinguish.
Moreover, since few of them had been born in America or had lived long
among English-speakers, they were—as noted above—unlikely to have a
command of English sufficient to let them pose as free blacks in towns or
cities. And because they had little or no access to geographical information,
few could have had any idea exactly where they might go.
Still, what an individual probably could rarely do, a group might
accomplish; so when field hands bolted for freedom, they tended to do so
in groups in which one might know English and another might have some
idea where they could hide. Hiding meant avoiding towns and heading for
the nearest equivalent of the African bush. The Spaniards in the New
World called an escaped person—or an escaped domestic animal—a cimar-
rón,from which comes the English word “maroon.”
By the end of the seventeenth century scores of runaway slave communi-
ties had been established. Close to Africa, on the tiny island of Principe,
escaped slaves managed to set up a free colony. In Surinam such communi-
ties became much more numerous and quite powerful. Those in the inac-
cessible areas of Jamaica were known as macambos.Others were established
in La Florida, in hidden valleys among the Appalachians, and in the then
virtually uninhabited Great Dismal Swamp that extended to the south from
Norfolk, Virginia.
White Americans saw the runaway blacks as a constant threat. Since
combating fugitives was dangerous and expensive, whites hit upon the plan
178 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA