Early reviews of the pre-release book have been positive. Here’s a couple.
“This book paints the story of the actual conditions and challenges residents of the Maroons faced in their determination to live free.”
Tim Lockley, Author, Maroon Communities In South Carolina
“The story of those who sought refuge in the Dismal Swamp seldom has been dramatized in such an engaging way that allows the reader a glimpse into the hearts and minds of those who risked everything to be free. Weedall leaves you wanting more.”
Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander, Author, Virginia Waterways and The Underground Railroad
Mike Weedall is the author of two already published books, ”War Angel” – an account of front-line nursing in the Korean War and ”Iva – the true story of Tokyo Rose”. With the publication of ‘Escape to The Maroons’, he further reinforces his fascination with perhaps little explored facets of near contemporary history with an exciting fictional account of life within a community of escaped slaves in ‘The Dismal Swamp’ area on the border of Virginia and North Carolina in the last decade of the eighteenth century at the very infancy of the United States of America. The Swamp was then a vast area of truly inhospitable swampland; an approximately 2.000 mile ‘blight’. In his introduction to the book, Weedall is graphic in his description of this land: ”How does one navigate through this hell hole of nature assailed by clouds of biting insects, where to step? When one’s foot does not sink into boot-sucking mud, the so called land is a sponge. Bushes and trees sporting oversized thorns tear at flesh. Dense stands of bamboo show no way forward…….Liquid and land blend. The water is tannin and acidic……The same water yields escaping gases from decaying matter. Fumes flare and spontaneously combust, smelling like rotten eggs……
Mike Weedall continues in this vein, painting a far from edifying picture of the place; venomous insects, dangerous beasts, deadly snakes. It is a far from bucolic vision; all in all, it is not the ideal holiday location. It is this very place that the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow locates his fugitive slave ”crouching like a wild beast in his lair” in his poem ”The Slave in the Dismal Swamp”, published in 1842: ”Where will o’ the wisps and glow-worms shine, In bullrush and in brake; Where weaving mosses shroud the pine And the cedar groves, and the poisonous vine Is spotted like the snake.” It seems almost inconceivable, therefore, that a community, free or otherwise, could hope to maintain and sustain itself, given such unpromising geographical and climatic conditions, but, nonetheless, it has been variously calculated that this area supported the largest ‘marron’ community in the United States of America and that between the years 1630 to 1865 supported a population that could be numbered in its thousands, before a combination of road and canal construction, swamp drainage, continued white encroachment in search of timber and other resources and policing by black troops of the United States government ultimately brought it to an end.
In ”Escape to the Maroons” the writer Mike Weedall tells a fine story of courage and endurance. Endorsement: In ”Escape to the Maroon” Mike Weedall casts a much needed light on a perhaps neglected subject. He relates this stirring tale of an oppressed community with great compassion and sensitivity and the reader cannot fail to be moved by this account of the Maroon community of The Great Dismal Swamp.
Julian de la Motte, Author