Searching for a Fortress Built by People Who Escaped Slavery

On a rainy morning in March, George Dawes Green, a seventy-year-old novelist and the founder of the storytelling nonprofit the Moth, arrived at Millstone Landing, about twenty miles north of Savannah, Georgia, on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. He and thirteen others were preparing to look for remnants of a secret fortress built in the seventeen-eighties by Maroons—people who’d escaped slavery to live in the wilderness. (The term derives from the Spanish word “cimarrón,” which means “unruly” or “fierce.”) Maroons existed in the South from the beginning of slavery, and, according to historical accounts, the population of this encampment—around a hundred—dwarfed that of any other known group. The fortress was said to have been uniquely defended, with a wall, weapons, and sentries; its residents had lived there and in another nearby camp for years until white militias finally found the sites and burned them to the ground. Green had first read about the fortress decades ago; last year, he published “The Kingdoms of Savannah,” a thriller involving a search for its ruins. Early in writing the book, he began reaching out to scholars to turn the fictional search into a real one. Now archeologists, historians, and others were donning rain gear and wrestling with tall snake-proof boots in a parking lot by the Savannah River.

Rick Kanaski, a gray-goateed archeologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, was part of the expedition. He warned that we were unlikely to find the fortress itself. Instead, he said, “We’ll get a sense of place”—an idea of what the Maroons’ life had been like. Archeology is slow work, Kanaski went on: “Eventually, we’ll be able to tell some life stories about these individuals who were essentially creating their own community, and reclaiming their own individuality, and their own personhood, and their own society, so to speak.” But the first step was to get the lay of the land.

We strapped on life jackets, climbed onto a boat, and headed north. South Carolina was on the east bank and Georgia on the west; the temperature was in the fifties, and gray clouds spat water in our faces. Brown water sprayed up behind the motors. We had a rough idea of where we were going. Running parallel to the river, about a mile to its west, was Bear Creek; historical documents indicated that the fortress had been near the creek, and about two miles north from a lower fork. Green’s research had pointed him toward a region just south of where Bear Creek jutted east and then west, creating a thumb-shaped area of land. His target zone covered maybe twenty acres.

If the ground were dry, the area would be about fifteen minutes’ walk from shore. But we soon encountered a small, winding creek that cut through the lush vegetation. We sloshed across, walked for another few minutes, then hit another creek. This one was waist-deep, and we halted at the impasse. I was shivering, and my fingers had turned blue from the damp and cold. If it were warmer, I knew, we’d be getting eaten alive by mosquitos.

“This actually helps as part of their defense,” Kanaski said, of the forbidding landscape.

I imagined living on this land for years, with scant supplies. What had life been like for the Maroons? How had they survived? How had they understood their own story? Answers to these questions had been lost, like the fortress, in the swamp.

Although Maroons existed wherever slavery did, they are often left out of U.S. history curricula. In her book “Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons,” from 2014, Sylviane A. Diouf, a historian and visiting scholar at Brown University, offers several explanations for this. American Maroon communities weren’t as large as their counterparts in Central and South America, she writes, and they didn’t wage wars against enslavers; their settlements weren’t well documented, and, whereas everyone has heard of the Underground Railroad, marronage “lacked the high drama of the escape to the North.” Diouf also argues that the Maroons’ “narrative of autonomous survival without benevolent white involvement” probably lacked mass appeal.

Nonetheless, Maroons lived at extremes. They faced the constant risk of capture, especially while sneaking supplies from plantations. Some Maroons built underground dens and lived in them for years, occasionally even filling them with furniture and stoves; children were born and raised in darkness. While reading archival documents, “I found examples of caves all over the South,” Diouf told me. “It’s just mind-boggling that that kind of life could exist.” If Maroons returned or were caught, Diouf writes, “severe whippings were the ‘mildest’ punishments.” They could be branded, castrated, dismembered, or executed. After hanging, their bodies might be decapitated, quartered, and displayed.

Diouf dedicates a chapter of her book to the Maroons of Bear Creek. (A 2009 volume called “Maroon Communities in South Carolina,” edited by the historian Timothy James Lockley, also contains many original records from the period.) The Bear Creek Maroons built their first settlement around 1780, at the southern end of the waterway. In 1786, the group swelled in size, and their plantation raids attracted negative attention. That October, the grand jury of Chatham County complained that “large gangs of runaway Negroes are allowed to remain quietly within a short distance of this town.” Militia members located the Maroons and attacked them. Several people on each side were injured, and the militiamen, low on ammunition, retreated. They returned with more men that evening, but were ambushed, and fled.

James Jackson, a Revolutionary War hero and future governor of Georgia, took over the effort to capture or kill the Maroons. A few days later, he brought in fresh soldiers, but by then the Maroons had evacuated. He destroyed what they’d left behind, including houses, about fifteen boats, and four acres of rice. That December, Jackson wrote to the governor of South Carolina, Thomas Pinckney: “Your Excellency may have heard of the daring banditti of slaves, who some weeks since, attacked two of my detachments, & were at last with difficulty dislodged from their camp.” He warned that some Maroons had relocated to South Carolina, across the river, where they were again raiding plantations for supplies.

The following March, Pinckney authorized a plantation owner to hire up to a hundred minutemen—volunteer soldiers who were ready on short notice—for a monthlong search. He sent supplies and offered bonuses of ten pounds per Maroon caught dead or alive. He also asked an associate to hire twenty members of the Catawba tribe—who knew the land and were skilled trackers—to join the search, offering the same reward. The Maroons, meanwhile, had regrouped at a new location, two miles north of the old one, and fortified it.

On April 21, 1787, a group of Maroons went out in boats, planning to collect family members and others who wanted to join them from a nearby plantation. They ran into a group of minutemen, and several Maroons were shot and killed. The militiamen now knew of the encampment’s general location; even so, it took them two more weeks to locate it in the swamp. Finally, on the morning of May 6th, they killed a sentry and rushed through an opening in the fortress’s defensive wall. The Maroons fired a few shots before running away, leaving behind an enclosed area that covered seventeen acres and contained rice and potato fields and twenty-one houses. The attackers chased the Maroons for two miles, killing six of them, then burned down the camp and reported their victory. Later, the Charleston Morning Post would describe how the Maroons “had got seated and strongly fortified in the midst of an almost impenetrable swamp.”

“Running away from a fight was the best strategy,” Diouf said. “People say that’s not what heroes do, but it is. The goal of the Maroons was to stay alive.” Their leader, who went by the names Sharper and Captain Cudjoe, and his wife, Nancy, were among a group that escaped and eventually made its way to Florida. But the second-in-command, a man called Captain Lewis, was captured shortly after the raid and tried, in Savannah, for the murder of a white man whom he had brought back to the settlement before it was discovered. He was sentenced to be hanged, and to have his head displayed on a pole. Some audiences cheered for the Maroons’ defeat, but others celebrated their success. In an editorial, the Massachusetts Centinel admired “those brave and hardy sons of Africa” who “seem wisely to prefer a precarious existence, in freedom, on the barren heath, to the chains of their oppressors, whose avarice, cruelty and barbarism increases with their wealth.” The article concluded, “The spirit of liberty they inherit appears unconquerable. Heaven grant it may be invincible.”

Green is an eighth-generation Savannahian, and “The Kingdoms of Savannah” grew out of stories about the region that he’d heard as a child. The gothic tales often mixed horror with glamour. Once, an elderly relative described a group of escaped enslaved people who’d established a camp on an island in the Savannah River; they’d come upon a pirate ship run aground, its occupants all drowned, and had found gold inside, which they’d taken and buried. Green remembered the story in the early two-thousands, when a friend who was a local professor and historian of Savannah also mentioned a group of escaped enslaved people who had lived in the wilderness. He went to the Georgia Historical Society and pored over the archives. Along with his brother, an archeologist who studied the Taíno people of the Caribbean, he borrowed a canoe and spent a day paddling through the creeks and woods near where the fortress might have been. They didn’t find anything.

“The Kingdoms of Savannah,” which Green wrote about two decades later, centers on the disappearance of Matilda Stone, an archeologist studying the fortress site. The novel is about “a panoply of historical injustices,” Green told me—not just slavery but corrupt police, abusive labor practices, and pollution. At one point in the story, a member of an old Savannah family hoping to solve the kidnapping case is at the library browsing books about Savannah’s history. “I mean that’s what these books are all about,” someone says. “The crimes of Savannah. Every book in here. They’re all just the sickest crime stories you can imagine.” The novel is “sort of a tapestry of stories, which are all based on reality,” Green said. He explained that he’d been inspired in part by Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandria Quartet”—a tetralogy of novels set around the time of the Second World War which is “about folks wandering around Alexandria, Egypt, and all of the little ethnic enclaves, and the incredible corruption that rules everything, and how every little enclave is making deals constantly just to survive,” Green said.

Last fall, after the publication of “The Kingdoms of Savannah,” Green organized two events with Diouf and Paul Pressly, a historian writing a book about people who had escaped from slavery. The three soon started assembling a group to search for the fortress. “Historians like me, even public historians—you tell stories, and they just hang in the air, and they don’t go anyplace except for the twenty-five people that you talk to,” Pressly told me. “In talking to George, I realized, This man knows how to bring this into the public arena. A novel is the way you can bring it.” Diouf concurred: “There are more people who read fiction than there are people who read academic books.”

The day before the swamp trek, I spoke with Daniel Sayers, a historical anthropologist at American University who has spent years exploring Maroon history in the Great Dismal Swamp, in Virginia and North Carolina, and had agreed to join the search party. I asked him how he’d proceed once we were out in the wilderness. What would he look for, specifically?

“I’ll probably rely on my Spidey sense—‘Wow, people were here,’ ” Sayers said. His voice was gruff from years of smoking cigarettes and chewing tobacco; he wore jeans, a torn T-shirt, and an Olympia Beer trucker hat. It would be great to find an artifact, he went on, but that was unlikely; he would be satisfied with vibes. The site would probably be on slightly high and dry ground, he thought. “I’m hoping the place speaks to me,” he said.

Savannah, along with other Southern cities, is home to many macabre tours that mix history and spiritualism. In “Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era,” Tiya Miles, a historian at Harvard, writes that, “according to popular lore and common knowledge alike, ghosts dwell in places stained by unresolved conflict—places marked by pain, violence, betrayal, suffering, and ugly death.” That night, before dinner, I asked Esther Blessing, Green’s wife, if we might go on one. She described the tours as “this weird Tarantino-meets-‘Gone with the Wind’ clickbaity bullshit about enslaved people that isn’t even real.”

“They’re telling these fake stories about history,” she went on, her voice rising. “Why are they doing that when stories like this are there?”

In the swamp, we noticed a spot where the creek seemed to be shallower, and decided to try our luck crossing there. But we arrived only at another deep creek. “It looks like what we have is a whole series of dendritic creeks that are interlacing with this landscape that’s not well shown on any of the U.S.G.S. topographical sheets,” Kanaski said. In other words, we were in a watery maze.

“Where we’re standing might also have been where a small encampment of Maroons was,” Sayers ventured. “This is a Maroon landscape we’re in already.” It was a view that offered some consolation.

Dionne Hoskins-Brown, a government marine scientist who teaches at Savannah State University and is the chair of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, spoke up. “Is it just the terrain that allowed the community to persist?” she asked. “I mean, it’s given us a fit today.”

“Even militia, who are trained to carry their guns and shoot people and track them down—they’re kind of afraid to go in,” Sayers said. “This is a big deal to just even experience this place,” he went on. “We’re in the heart of resistance in marronage.”

Green and a companion returned from a scouting mission. They’d followed the creek in one direction and found no easy way to cross; they wanted to try in the other direction, but Kanaski proposed coming back another day, when the ground was dry. While they debated, Hermina Glass-Hill, a Black activist and historian wearing pink-fringed boots and a red flower in her hair, removed a Congolese vessel—an engraved wooden chalice—from her bag and filled it with distilled water.

“Before we proceed, can we just pour libations right now, since we have identified that this is the terrain of that Maroon community?” she said, building on Sayers’s hopeful notion.

Glass-Hill stood and led us in a round of “Kumbaya”—“Come by here, my Lord”—an African American spiritual, first recorded in that part of Georgia. “Libations is about honoring the ancestors, honoring those who have come before us,” she said. “We want to give thanks to those brave, courageous souls who thought that taking the risk for freedom and the wildness of this place was more safe than staying on dry land.” She started pouring out some water. “To the men, to the women, to the children, who made this place home,” she said. “Ashé.”