Running in JamaicaA Slavery Ecosystem Hilary McD Beckles (bio) In 1655 an English army invading Jamaica defeated and ran Spanish occupiers off the island. On the run, settlers found refuge in neighboring Cuba, still under Spain's imperial control. Unable in the conflict to exercise effective control over their enslaved Africans, the Spanish had little choice but to bid their chattels farewell. Happy to be rid of their enslavers and unwilling to fall into the legal and military grip of English conquistadors, enslaved blacks ran to the Blue Mountains. High above the site of their enslavement, they constituted themselves into a maroon community out of sight of whites.1 In the century that followed, English occupiers converted the valleys under their control into their largest Caribbean slave plantation complex. More than four hundred thousand enslaved Africans were imported to work and die in the sugar fields and cattle pens. But each annual cohort of imported chattels supplied a steady stream of runners who multiplied by the thousands in the deep recesses of mountain ranges. An endemic war between mountain runners and valley enslavers defined social relations in the colony until treaties were signed calling for peace. The provisions of each agreement sought to nullify the benefits of running. Old runners agreed to return imitators to the valley in return for the right to walk about the plantations unmolested. This strategy was only partly successful. New runners formed new maroon communities, and the flight out of sight remained the norm in the political culture.2 [End Page 9] Running was resistance. It evolved as a social strategy that sustained a way of life. Uphill and across valleys, flights were methodologies of movement in which the spirit of the sprint defined daily life and defied institutional power. Fight and flight were as Jamaican as pirates and planters. But as the frontier gave way to the proliferation of creole communities during hthe second half of the eighteenth century, the running culture and its corresponding consciousness were diversified and incorporated into a more accommodating ontology of town and village living. Flight along the byways and highways that connected urban ecologies increasingly defined forms of movement. The sprint to freedom was accompanied by the silence of slipping out of sight downtown. Everywhere runners could be seen and not heard. An ecosystem of freedom emerged in which runners walked about freely and survived in plain sight of those with military might.3 Simon P. Newman's pathbreaking essay, "Hidden in Plain Sight," takes this evolved Jamaican colonial reality as a starting point. He traverses the movement of enslaved Jamaicans as recorded in the local archives and seeks to present them as enslaved subjects without chains and obvious ownership claims. The process of enslavement was demeaning and degrading for the Africans. Their strategies of resistance were designed to be uplifting and fulfilling. Not everyone could run and keep up the fight; not everyone possessed the body and spirit to spill blood in battle. Most had the desire for more space and full control over their bodies and time. In this sense, then, running was not simply a physical action but a process with multiple phases that was undergirded by a state of mind that understood periods of stillness to be as significant as persistent running.4 Newman's essay, furthermore, is a critical contribution to the booming literature on Jamaica's slavery enterprise. Its focus is the British perception of the social and cultural performance and production of the enslaved as revealed through the gaze of prominent enslavers and stakeholder narrators. The eye of the English, and the brutality of Britishness, are set in motion as analytic tools in order to display how chattel slavery was constructed and sustained as a profitable part of the colonial project, and how the enslaved excavated a culture committed to freedom within the constricted bowels of bondage.5 British colonists produced an enormous and diverse archive of racial opinion and belief that has long been the primary source of "histories." The [End Page 10] considerable historiography that depicts Jamaica in slavery is a main artery of Atlantic colonial imagination and (mis)understanding. More so than for any other British...