Closer to Freedom

Chapter 2 examines truancy, or temporary absenteeism from enslavement. Truants would often hide in woods, swamps, abandoned buildings, or occasionally with other enslaved people to secure a physical or psychological break from the conditions of their enslavement. Unlike fugitives, who attempted to secure permanent liberation by running to the North, truants did not seek permanent removal from the plantation. Truancy also allowed for “independent activity,” ranging from visiting relatives or partners to foraging for medicinal plants.

In every Southern state, the majority of both truants and fugitives were men. Gender roles created different expectations and norms regarding escape so that women attempted both permanent and temporary escape less often than men. These gender norms upheld the importance of women remaining with their families; men’s escapes to the North were generally not viewed as betrayal by their family members, whereas women’s escapes were. This “betrayal” became even more vilified moving into the antebellum era, when men were sold disproportionately to the Deep South, leaving women to maintain fractured family life in their absence. At the same time, however, many men refused to leave their families or escaped and worked to bring their families north. Logistically, too, women were not generally assigned labor that allowed them to move beyond the plantation, so they lacked knowledge of landscapes and ways of moving without arousing suspicion, making any attempted escape, whether temporary or permanent, more dangerous for them. Because of the greater immobility of women, too, they were inherently more conspicuous in public spaces.

Women were more likely to be truants than fugitives. Camp is careful to emphasize that truancy was not a “‘female form’ of resistance” (39), however. Truancy was probably more widespread in the lower South, where permanent escape to the North was more difficult.

Camp organizes the reasons for truancy into “push factors”—violence and terrorism, for example—and “pull factors,” such as the hope of (limited) privacy or the chance to reconnect with one’s family.

Truancy increased during the push factor of intense labor of harvests as well as during the pull factor of the holiday season. Camp notices a pattern in interviews and autobiographies of enslaved people speaking openly of women temporarily leaving in response to violence, but not of men doing the same thing. Camp argues that men may not have left because of masculine ideals that required a more stoic response to violence and/or that there is a “gendered rhetoric about reactions to violence” (42). Women may also have experienced greater violence—specifically, sexual violence—than men.

One of the pull factors was the chance to visit family. The separation of enslaved family members was devastating but also catalyzed an emphasis on extended family within enslaved communities. Many truants would travel at night to visit family, returning before work began the next day, as Frederick Douglass describes his mother’s visits to him as a child in his 1845 narrative.

Truancy was a way to refuse work, to visit with friends or family, to “simply” rest, to protest, and to pursue one’s own passions. However, truancy was dangerous, and many truants spent most of their time trying to survive. Food was often difficult to find, and many had no shelter except for moss, leaves, and “brush harbors” under which they could only huddle.

Truants relied on women for food, and many truants stealthily moved between the slave quarters and their hiding place. The slave quarters were part of enslavers “geography of containment,” but they were also used by truants to enable their continued absenteeism and were part of their “rival geography.” If returning to the quarters was too dangerous, truants would arrange to meet where containment and rival geographies met, such as the space where agricultural field met woods.

While truancy was often a sudden, personal response to a specific incident, it was also recognized as a response to a communal and unjust state of existence, and while it entailed a solitary existence, truants relied on community support to survive. Not all enslaved people supported others’ truancy, however. Some enslaved truants worked with enslavers to capture other truants so that they could avoid punishment themselves and continue their own truancy. Enslavers were rarely able to capture truants on their own and relied on the help of enslaved people. Because truants had local geographical knowledge, they generally avoided capture if other enslaved people were not hunting them.

Usually, however, truants returned on their own, as “they had always intended” (54). Camp asserts that it was food and shelter that were the ultimate reasons for returning to plantations. Though enslaved people were often given very little food, it was often fatty food and thus higher in calories than what they were able to obtain in foraging or by relying on others for a long period of time. For those living in outdoor spaces like the woods, shelter was another issue. Truants made the decision to return to enslavement because “material deprivation, already severe, worsened in the rival geography” (55).

Most truants, though they voluntarily returned, were punished, often whipped severely. Sometimes they were “smoked” in the plantation smokehouse, placed in solitary confinement, given harder work, branded, or shot. Some were forced to wear an apparatus on their head with bells so that their movement could be tracked sonically. Because women were generally allowed less mobility than men, their truancy was punished more severely than men’s.