Sylviane A. Diouf

Slavery’s Exiles examines a little-known part of American history: marronage within the American south. Marronage refers to the flight from slavery and the subsequent survival of either individuals or groups in the wilderness.

Author Syvliane A. Douf does a marvelous job of describing the day-to-day lives of maroons who chose freedom often in inhospitable swamps or caves rather than live in bondage. She looks at those who chose to stay on the borderlands near or even, in some cases, on the show more plantations as well as those who chose to escape further into the hinterlands in search of freedom. She examines the hardships they faced, the methods they developed for survival, how they lived and, in many cases, how they were caught and punished.

Using contemporaneous sources such as advertisements for escaped slaves and memoirs as well as other research documents, she draws a very detailed portrait of the lives of maroons with great insight and compassion. Given how little was written down by the maroons themselves or by others about their lives, the story is, by necessity, incomplete. However, that doesn’t make Diouf’s account any less compelling or interesting. This is a well-researched, well-documented portrait of the struggles these men and women were willing to endure to be free and is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of slavery in America. show less

This is a marvelous research study that informs about a very important missing piece of American history, slave resistance, and self-determination. This book does not leave any stone unturned as I was informed about the development of marronage in the South, borderland maroons, hinterland maroons, their everyday lives and much more. I appreciated how Diouf explored American marronage on the communal and individual levels. This helped to understand how marronage fit into the American show more landscape and social/economic/political conditions of the times. The stories of the individuals showcased the theory but most importantly illustrated the skills, intelligence and self-motivation to define themselves by their own terms and not to live under the control of others. One of the most fascinating aspects of learning about the everyday lives of maroons for me was about their dwelling structures – the caves and underground structures so close to those who were hunting them yet invisible. Lastly, I was also provided answers as to why this is not a topic as known as “runaways” – little sensationalism in the maroons’ daily lives, their autonomous survival without white involvement had little mass appeal, and southerners really did not want this known outside of their region because of their difficulty in capturing and eliminating maroons.
A must read for anyone who is interested in American history, slavery, and resistance to being enslaved. I look forward to this book winning many awards. show less

Piecing together legal records, oral history, memoirs and the like, Diouf aims to put the American expression of the maroon phenomena into context. While not generating large communities as happened in, say, Jamaica and Guinea, Diouf argues that over time there was a substantial number of self-freed slaves that lived in an uneasy symbiosis with the plantation economy and whose will to live their own lives as much as possible served as a rebuke to the slave culture of the Old South.

Bintou longs for braids like adults but they say she is too young. In the African culture displayed in the book, braided hairstyles were only for mature elder woman. She aspired to be like her sister and those around her with gold coins and seashells in her hair. She wanted so badly to fit in and feel beautiful within her physical attributes such as hair. She does a good responsible deed of getting help for drowning boys, she then earns a reward. She wanted her reward to be nice braids like show more everyone else but she keeps her tuffs and adds blue and yellow birds like in her dreams. The tuffs she decided made her different which could be good, she was beautiful without copying others. She finally felt happy and pretty. The illustrations done by Evans transforms you into Bintou's culture and environment very well. show less