absconding
![African-American children in housing courtyard. View through arched doorway with woman in foreground. Source: Federal Writers' Project (S.C.), [Charleston, S.C.: Houses], South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a43ff57ccc5c504cd257d41/1595469592140-UJ6COBVD5KC9RPV49KYW/African-American+children+in+housing+courtyard.++View+through+arched+doorway+with+woman+in+foreground.jpg)
African-American children in housing courtyard. View through arched doorway with woman in foreground. Source: Federal Writers' Project (S.C.), [Charleston, S.C.: Houses], South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina.
how does a fugitive escape to/within/throughout the black south?
RULE 1:
give into waywardness
“waywardness: the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man, or the police. the erranr path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here.”
“wayward: the unregulated movement of drifting and wandering: sojourns without a fied destination, ambulatory possibilty, interminable migrations, rush and flight, black locomotion; the everyday struggle to live free. the attempt to elude capture by never settling. not the master’s tools, but the ex-slave’s fugitive gestures, her traveling shoes.”
“Wayward: to wander, to be unmoored, adrift, rambling, roving, crusing, strolling, and seeking. to claim the right to opacity. to strike, to riot, to refude, to love what is not loved. to be lost in the world.”
Saidiya Hartman, “Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible,” Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
RULE 2:
Surrender distinctions between the physical and spiritual world
A fugitive in the black south returns to folk epistemologies rooted in the kongo cosmogram. The boundary between living and dead is blurred. Instead, life and death represents rising and setting, “the circular motion of human souls” [1].
place your trust in the ancestors, connect with the dead, embrace (im)mortality to guidance. Find Yourself in a boneyard, praise house, or the home of a root-worker.
Plate 82, Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, 137
pictured above is a grave in the Carolina Lowcountry beautifully decorated with seashells, a practice traced back to the Kongo who believed seashells enclosed the soul’s immortal presence.
“The shells stand for the sea. the sea brought us, the sea shall take us back. so the shells upon our graves stand for water, the means of glory and the land of demise.” —Bessie Jones quoted in Flash of the Spirit.
“Boneyard” from Sea Islands Series, Carrie Mae Weems
“Praise House” from Sea Islands Series, Carrie Mae Weems