Haunted by Waters 

As “eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it,” the Haunted by Waters: Seeking Freedom Through Maritime Means project’s foundation flows from recent scholarship on the nautical paths used by freedom seekers who sought deliverance from slavery. Two recent books, Timothy Walker’s Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad and J. Brent Morris’ Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp are the inspiration of this project. In November of 2021, David Blight and Michelle Zacks of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition hosted GLC@Lunch podcast where they interviewed Timothy Walker on his recently published book, Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad. His book explores the intersection of “two distinct historical spheres—American slavery and maritime experience... that enslaved people frequently used waterborne means to escape to freedom."

In the summer of 2022, J. Brent Morris published Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp which explored “people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites.” Morris honors the courage of the people  that escaped into the wet and dangerous environment of the swamp noting, “the worst day of Dismal freedom was better than the best day in chains.”