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Frontispiece and title page from ‘The History of the Maroons’, Frontispiece and title page from ‘The history of the Maroons, from their origin to the establishment of their chief tribe at Sierra Leone, including the expedition to Cuba for the purpose of procuring Spanish chasseurs, and the state of the island of Jamaica for the last ten years; with a succinct history of the island previous to that period’ by Robert Charles Dallas, London, 1803, 1803. (Photo by Robert Charles Dallas/Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images)
Deep in Georgia, visitors may be stepping on sacred ground rooted in the history of slavery. The land in question comes from the descendants of the Maroons—the brave souls that escaped slavery to live in the wilderness, the New Yorker reports.
After Dawes Green’s novel, The Kingdoms of Savannah, was published last year, several archeologists, historians, and wanderers are traveling there to see if they can find any artifacts buried within. However, archeologist Rick Kanaski said he didn’t think he would find much but would be able to get a sense of what life was like for the Maroons. “Eventually, we’ll be able to tell some life stories about these individuals who were essentially creating their own community, and reclaiming their own individuality, and their own personhood, and their own society, so to speak,” Kanaski said. “We’ll get a sense of place.”
The Maroons didn’t just settle in deep Georgia. Some of them made it to Florida to Prospect Bluff within the Apalachicola National Forest.
Source: Black Enterprise
