Marronnage and Childhood in Colonial Haiti

It is difficult to define what it meant to be a child in the context of slavery, particularly in a deadly slave society like colonial Haiti where birth rates were notably low – meaning enslaved children were not numerous – and nearly half of infants who were born in the colony died within a short time span. To enslavers, children represented the embodied future of slavery and the forecasted economic gains from forced labor. When enslaved children did grow to adolescence, they were not spared the harsh realities of the exploitative labor and sexual violence that characterized the plantation economy: some girls became pregnant as early as eleven years old and performed domestic labor, and boys labored in the fields and performed other domestic labor as early as seven or eight years old. Among the enslaved population, children were important not because of their labor potential, but because they represented future possibilities of freedom. Enslaved women and men at times fled with their children during marronnage, but children and adolescents at times ran away from plantations without adults and were reported as maroons – although less frequently than adults – suggesting that some children were consciously part of the broader fabric of resistance in colonial Haiti. This paper will draw on archival insights from fugitive advertisements published in the newspaper Les affiches américaines, as well as fictional accounts by Evelyn Trouillot and Isabel Allende, to shed light on the experience of childhood and resistance during slavery in colonial Haiti.