Lurking as Relation: Narratives of Marronage and Carcerality in Early 19th-Century North Carolina

This paper considers the story of a woman whose name we do not know and whose marronage was described in 1820 by an interposing resident of New Bern, North Carolina. While the woman was imprisoned after recapture with her two children (the youngest born into marronage), the author solicited details of her seven years (roughly 1807-1814) in the nearby swamps. Her “rival geography” presages the infamous life of Harriet Jacobs who chose nearby “Snaky Swamp '' over the fangs of her white owner in 1835. Unlike Jacobs, this woman stays for years and is regularly visited by her husband with whom she has another child while living as a maroon. I read through the racist ethnographic account for a story of family, kinship, and reproduction in the swamps and the subsequent disruptive violence of the long-established carceral state in New Bern. I read for what can be ascertained of the woman’s narrative strategies of omission, centering her as the core narrator of this maroon narrative. By attending to the overlayed geographies of bondage, incarceration and marronage particular to this region, I theorize the rhetoric of “lurking” in runaway ads of the period as a form of relation. Rereading this colonial vocabulary for its significance to marronage in the region opens up the mostly foreclosed story of the woman, her husband and two children, and makes legible the ways that kinship shaped flight in early nineteenth-century North Carolina.