Marronage and the Specter of Black Autonomy

Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (2014) by Sylviane A. Diouf is a compelling, comprehensive, and original study of slaves in the American South who escaped into the wilderness rather than to the North. The term “maroons” was long reserved for use by Latin American and Caribbean historians, while scholarship and popular understanding of American slavery focuses on runaways who sought refuge in white-dominated free society. Reflecting this white-centric bias, 12 Years a Slave, Mississippi Burning, Amistad, and other pop culture representations depict whites as pivotal, whether as villains or saviours. It is Brad Pitt’s white abolitionist who saves Solomon Northrup.

Telling the story of maroons inverts this metanarrative of white hegemony. Thousands of black men, women, and children escaped to the South’s bayous and forests to live singly or build autonomous communities, living off the land, raiding plantations, and sometimes engaging in shootouts with white pursuers. They endured hunger, frostbite, bloodhounds, and armed pursuers to achieve autonomy and dignity, sans white benefactors.

The story of the American maroons is worth telling, and Diouf does a superb job of it.

Devil in the White City

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (2003) exceeded my highest expectations. Greeted with universal acclaim by critics and popular audiences alike, Erik Larson’s nonfiction narrative unfolds like a thriller set at Chicago’s huge World Fair (1893). Featured are a charming young serial killer (H. H. Holmes), a brilliant architect (Daniel Burnham), and a mentally ill newspaperman (Patrick Prendergast). Holmes was an amazingly manipulative psychopath who lured young women into a cavernous hotel later known as “Murder Castle,” with horrific consequences. Burnham was an energetic, overtaxed architect who led frantic efforts to design and build the fair in time for its grand opening. Prendergast fantasized that Chicago’s leading mayoral candidate would appoint him to office after election day. Each of these threads meet by the narrative’s end. This is a masterly tale of entrepreneurship in business and crime. The story embodies the spirit of bloody, decadent fin-de-siecle Chicago.

The Wolves that America Made

Jon T. Coleman. Vicious: Wolves and Men in America. 2004. History.

Coleman’s shrewd, genre-bending, and surprisingly informal environmental history lays out how Anglo-Americans have perceived and treated wolves since colonial times. The author approaches his sprawling topic from the angle of encounters; specifically, he examines how the Anglo-American perception of our furry brethren shifted over time. We dreaded wolves as fearsome monsters, criminalized them as skulking robbers and rustlers, demonized them as troublesome vermin, and ultimately lionized them as romantic heroes. As he documents these shifting perceptions, Coleman reviews how Americans have perpetuated myths about Canis lupis and projected their own psychosocial concerns onto wolves.

The Little Red Riding Hood motif eventually faltered because gray wolves are NOT aggressive toward humans. One ghastly anecdote describes a wolf cringing and whining as a trapper cuts the wolf’s hamstrings. Eventually, colonists came to malign wolves as little more than untameable outlaws skulking in the woods and raiding livestock. To ensure the triumph of domesticity over nature, wolves had to be exterminated—poisoned, trapped, mutilated, or herded together to be slaughtered. And the vast majority were.

Vicious is not perfect. Given that Anglo Americans put bounties on the scalps of wolves and Indians alike, it’s a shame that Coleman fails to compare perceptions of the two groups. The book’s other drawback is its language, which can be surprisingly polemical and colloquial for a book published by Yale University Press. For example, Coleman ridicules one wolf-killer as an “underemployed lover of guns, beer, and bear hunting” and hunting as a way to “make a small man feel big”—a fair critique, perhaps, but one applicable to any non-essential human activity, including writing. Even so, Jon Coleman’s Vicious delivers a solid, engaging study of the interaction of wolves and Americans, though one lacking the profundity that accompanies greatness.