I SOUGHT MY BROTHER, EXCERPT...

I SOUGHT MY BROTHER: AN AFRO-AMERICAN REUNION, by S. Allen Counter and David L. Evans, foreword by Alex Haley, (M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass.: 1981) p.3-4 “In the battles against the Euro-American enslavers, the Bush Afro-American women fought alongside their men. In many cases when plantations were attacked and raided by the freedom fighters, the women assisted by acting as intelligence gatherers or by aiding their enslaved sisters to escape to the bush. In instances of military confrontation with army troops and mercenaries, many women were part of the front-line forces of the freedom fighters. There they fought valiantly, charging trained European soldiers and repelling them, fighting to the death, even when parts of their body had been blown off. “When freedom fighters raided the plantations, they took African women who were willing to flee to the bush, as well as those who were too frightened to escape. The white colonists viewing the freeing or capture of female slaves by the rebels an act of guerrilla warfare against the state because they considered slave women their property. “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the African slaves were classified according to color. Although most were pure African, many were lighter the lighter complexioned result of forced miscegenation by Euro-American men. The offspring of these unions were referred to as mulattoes, samboes, quadroons and maesti. [John Gabriel] Stedman once said of Surinam that “Here, one meets not only with the white, the black, and the olive, but with the Samboe dark, and the mulatto brown, the maesti fair, the well-limbed quadroon.” A mulatto resulted from the union of a white man and a black woman. A samboe was defined as “between a mulatto and a black, being of a deep copper-colored complexion, with dark hair that curls in large ringlets.” A quadroon resulted from the mating between a “white male and a mulatto female.” A maesti (octoroon) was defined as “the offspring between a European [male] and a quadroon [female].” It is to be emphasized here that each of these mixtures resulted from the mating of a European, white male and a “colored” slave female. For as Stedman put it, “should it be known that a European female had intercourse with a slave of any denomination, she is forever detested, and the slave loses his life without mercy.”.... “While rebel slaves waged successful attacks against them, the militia suffered from malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, jungle rot, and very poor discipline and moral. Military victory over the rebels seemed more remote with each passing day. Moreover, advanced military technology could not be used against the menacing rebels. Cannons, cavalry, and ships were ineffective in the thick jungles and rock-strewn rivers of Surinam.”