I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad-and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground-with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019). Ultimately, it contends that Blake may be imagined as a text that works to theorize marronage through its representations of multiple configurations of the practice as they endured in and against the landscape of US slavery. Blake, then, also reveals the ways in which marronage unsettles white supremacist logics and the underpinnings of the system of chattel slavery itself, not only because maroons pose a potentially violent threat to the white population but also because they represent a total refusal of the logics by which their enslavement is rendered ideologically coherent in the tradition of liberal thought.

It argues that Blake anticipates recent critical revisions of our understanding of marronage, especially in the US context, not only by disarticulating marronage from insurrection and direct resistance but also by revealing that marronage was in fact an ever-changing, multidimensional project and process of individual and collective resistance existing in the liminal space between the codified poles of “freedom” and “enslavement,” one that cannot simply be reduced to a process of self-exile, autonomous community formation, or a mere waypoint on the path to potential revolt. This essay examines the quest for freedom in Martin Delany’s Blake or, The Huts of America (1859, 1861-62) through the lens of marronage, arguing for Henry Blake as a maroon figure and suggesting that Blake-by virtue of being unfinished, the insurrection never yet begun-allows us a window into freedom in (perpetual) process, into an assemblage of self- and community-affirming resistant practices that are constellated around marronage.

Blake by martin delany