The people across the Americas who escaped slavery — and the descendants born free alongside them — who built free, self-governing communities in forests, mountains, and swamps, from Brazil to Jamaica to Suriname to the United States. Across more than three centuries, marronage was the longest-running campaign of resistance to slavery in the hemisphere: freedom not hoped for but seized, defended by force, and sometimes wrested into formal treaties, a few of which bound the maroons to return future runaways.
Somewhere beyond the last plantation, the land turned against the planters. In the limestone sinkholes of Jamaica, the flooded cypress of Virginia, and the vast interior of Suriname, people who had been bought and sold walked away and did not come back. They left plantations, ports, mines, and work gangs behind. They built towns, planted fields, chose leaders, and raised children born free. When soldiers came, they fought, and often they won. This is the story of the enslaved people who did not wait to be freed.