Page 64 - 1619 Project Curriculum

The 1619 Project

27, 1816: American troops attack Negro Fort, a stockade in Spanish Florida
⬤ July

established by the British and left to the Black Seminoles, a Native American
refugees, free black people and fugitives from slavery. Nearly all
nation of Creek

the soldiers, women and children in the fort are killed.

They weren’t headed north to freedom — on plantation ground. In swampland, seem alone, abandoned, adrift —
They fled away from the North Star, they raised flags of their native tongues but they were bonded,
turned their back on the Mason-Dixon line, above whisper smoke side by side,

put their feet to freedom by fleeing into billowing bonfires Black and Red,
further south to Florida. of chant, drum and chatter. in a blood red hue —
Ran to where ’gator and viper roamed They remembered themselves maroon.
free in the mosquito swarm of Suwannee. with their own words Sovereignty soldiers,
They slipped out deep after sunset, bleeding into English, Black refugees,
shadow to shadow, shoulder to shoulder, bonding into Spanish, self-abolitionists, fighting
stealthing southward, stealing themselves, singing in Creek and Creole. through America’s history,
steeling their souls to run steel With their sweat marooned in a land
through any slave catcher who’d dare forging farms in they made their own,
try stealing them back north. unforgiving heat, acre after acre,
They billeted in swamp mud, never forgetting scars plot after plot,
saw grass and cypress — of the lash, fighting war after war,

they waded through waves battle after battle life after life.

of water lily and duckweed. for generations. They fought only
They thinned themselves in thickets Creeks called them Seminole for America to let them be
and thorn bush hiding their young when they bonded with renegade Creeks. marooned — left alone —
from thieves of black skin marauding Spaniards called them cimarrones, in their own unchained,

under moonlight and cloud cover. runaways — escapees from Carolina singing,
Many once knew another shore plantation death-prisons. worthy
an ocean away, whose language, English simply called them maroons, blood.

songs, stories were outlawed flattening the Spanish to make them Cypress: Ron Clausen via Wikimedia

By Tyehimba Jess

58 Photo illustration by Jon Key