Inside the Historic Swamp Refuge for African-American Slaves — Transcript

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1. 0:00(birds chirping)
2. 0:02(mosquito buzzing)
3. 0:04- The Dismal Swamp is an environment
4. 0:07that has hazardous conditions associated with it.
5. 0:12The heat.
6. 0:13You got poisonous snakes and mosquitoes come out
7. 0:16at certain times of the year and it's unbearable.
8. 0:21But when you think about some
9. 0:23of the torture the enslaved peoples endured,
10. 0:28I think if most of us were living during that day
11. 0:30and we had an option to go in the swamp and live freely,
12. 0:34I think a lot of us would take that option.
13. 0:37(birds chirping)
14. 0:47(dramatic music)
15. 0:49- [Yvonne] From the 17th century until the Civil War,
16. 0:52escaped slaves, known as maroons, found refuge
17. 0:55in the Great Dismal Swamp.
18. 0:58Located on the border of Virginia and North Carolina,
19. 1:01the swamp was wild and inhospitable.
20. 1:04Nevertheless, it was there
21. 1:06that runaways created self-sufficient communities
22. 1:09almost entirely cut off from the outside world.
23. 1:14For the past 10 years,
24. 1:16archaeologist Dan Sayers from American University
25. 1:19has been studying these settlements.
26. 1:21- Part of what I did was develop
27. 1:23this sort of research program called
28. 1:25the Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study.
29. 1:27Most of my focus has been on archeological discovery
30. 1:30of sites out in the swamp as well as historical research
31. 1:34and then, of course, trying to understand it.
32. 1:37Before we started our research,
33. 1:38there was a sense people lived in the swamp
34. 1:40for a variety of reasons but we really wanted
35. 1:42to go in the swamp and find remnants
36. 1:44of their lives out there.
37. 1:46And sure enough, we've been able to look
38. 1:48at several sites associated with several
39. 1:50of these different groups.
40. 1:54Probably an 1790 to 1825 or '30 nail that we found
41. 1:59in one of the resistance community settlements.
42. 2:02I'm sure the population went up and down
43. 2:05but very strong potential for any given moment
44. 2:08for thousands of people that went out into the Great Dismal
45. 2:10and formed these multi-generational communities.
46. 2:14It was a radical form of resistance in a good way.
47. 2:19- [Yvonne] The runaways who escaped slavery
48. 2:21risked everything to be free.
49. 2:23Even if it meant living
50. 2:24in the harsh environment of the swamp.
51. 2:28One former slave who briefly lived
52. 2:30in the swamp was a man named Moses Grandy.
53. 2:33- I've done family genealogy research
54. 2:36in which I've uncovered a slave narrative by Moses Grandy,
55. 2:42who I believe is my great great grandfather's uncle.
56. 2:47This is Edmond Grandy,
57. 2:48my great great grandfather's headstone,
58. 2:51who was born in 1827.
59. 2:54He was a waterman and a boatsman on the Dismal Swamp Canal,
60. 2:58which was being hand dug.
61. 3:00And he describes very vividly
62. 3:02in the slave narrative how they were treated,
63. 3:05what they endured, how they were tortured.
64. 3:10If you had that kind of experience
65. 3:11and you had an opportunity to come out to the swamp
66. 3:15and live freely under challenging conditions,
67. 3:20you're gonna have a hard time getting them out of there.
68. 3:25The idea of Africans setting up communities
69. 3:29and being in charge of their destiny in the swamp,
70. 3:35I don't want people to ever forget this history.