What Type of Maroon?

March 11, 2024

By Jacqui Brown

I frequently wonder what kind of maroon I am. Which type of maroon I’ll be. Which marronage I will pass on down my line. What type of marronage I have and am receiving. Am I too light-skinned to be a maroon? Too educated? Too synchronized to respectability? And thus, too untrained?

Dionne Brand. At the Full and Change of the Moon. Vintage Canada, 1999, 55.

This past month, Black History Month, I found some clues. And I have a story for you.

Portrait of Deacon Paul Bogle, taken from “Catch a Fire” press clippings.

Menelik Shabazz is a, was a, renowned Black British auteur, filmmaker, and culture worker. My mother introduced me to his films in my 20’s; but because she was the source, I didn’t take them seriously, even when I liked them. I am now in my 30’s, a lovely decade in part because I take my mother seriously now as a culture worker. So, I rewatched Menelik’s “Catch a Fire,” his 1995 short documentary on Paul Bogle’s rebellion in Morant Bay, Jamaica in 1865. 

I rewatched “Catch a Fire” with Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II the Terrordome (U.K., 1996) with the Luminal Theater’s Film Club. The Luminal Theater is a Black nomadic arthouse microcinema based between Brooklyn, the Carolinas, and Atlanta. The theme for this year’s programming is “revival”. I didn’t realize how direct the connection between revival and “Catch a Fire” is until this rewatch. And because of this connection, I am, my family are, implicated in this issue of faith. 

The Luminal’s programming notes on “Revival” reads: 

“As always, it’s a feeling. Revival, as a Black concept <<>> a Black state <<>> a Black world. Ecstatic experiences: we stomp. we shout. we testify. Reawakening alignment: we witness. we rise. … 

… Our theme unfurls in experimental and psychedelic invocations of resistance within dystopia, revisiting the progress Black cinema has made on the planes of the political Black image. The Revival we are seeding with our 2024 programming is settling into the circuits of power through reflection and witness in solidarity, to live with this power, and one another in our power. …

We’ve been here and will always be here. We will be wading this water. Faces upturned, together, to the sky.” (The Luminal Theater, Film Club, 2024)

“Catch a Fire” constructs its retelling of Morant Bay through fluid reconstructions, scholar interviews, and participant narration by his great-grandson (x). And boy, “Catch a Fire” now reads as sun-drenched with bright red textual undertones and bronze overtones. Not in a tropically symbolic way, but in a way evoking the nostalgic life affirming texts of 90’s nonfiction diasporic cinema. The film’s worlds center on the back roads between plantations, crisscrossing networks through fields connecting Slave quarters. The earth is lush green, but dark still – the sun often occluded unless and until Bogle and his fellow organizers emerge from the overgrowth to be with one another, or, to confront the empire. 

Brother Paul, as his great grandson ensures we know he was known, is reconstructed as a Revivalist Baptist organizer, part of a movement of freed Black folx who used religious organizing to re-member their worlds post-emancipation. And where there may be a grassroots, where there may be an insurgency, there is always a panoptican-like power. Nuh suh?

In this case, the panoptican-like power is the empire – manifested through its own use of religion, The Church of England, whose followers are known as Anglicans. This Church, at the time of Bogle’s rebellion, was now the state church – an imperial church. I am Episcopalian – born to an Anglican family. And not just any Anglican family. But, soon come, yeah? Let me tell my tale, yeah?

Anglican faith is directed from the top-down through an institutional synchronization which has each diocese, each parish, reading the same Biblical passages and reciting the same prayers, interrupted by a 15 – 30-minute homily, each Sunday. Reading directly from the Word, that Word which, in the beginning was the Word, which was with God, and was God; the word which became flesh and lived amongst us. (The Gospel, or Good News, according to John, Chapter 1) The word which re-members, re-stores, re-suscitates. The word which witnesses and revives. 

This word, which was experienced ecstatically, communally, and singularly, was too retrograde for empire. Too Black. In “Catch a Fire,” Blackness includes the Black garrison soldiers, dressed in their colonial British army reds, protecting the imperial Governor of Jamaica with their long rifles and white gloves. Were these soldiers Anglicans as well? Does my Anglican faith leave a residue of overseer in me?

Brother Paul, Mas Alfred, Captain

My Grandfather, Noel Foderingham, pictured with Church Army peers.

It was only during the pandemic that my Grandmother started speaking. Critically, that is. You see, Bogle was Brother Paul, while my great-grandfather, my grandmother’s father, was known as “Mas Alfred”. In Jamaikkan, short for “Master” Alfred. He was the overseer of what remained of a plantation in Job’s Hill, Clarendon, two parishes over from Morant Bay, in St. Thomas. My grandmother was named by the white wife of the White plantation owner, who decided that she would name the child my then very pregnant great-grandmother, Auntie Lulu was carrying, when she visited the great house one day on business. And yet, they were still Baptists.

My grandmother would become an Anglican as a young adult. Was this a move of social mobility? I’ll have to ask her – because she was formally educated, an education which began when her neighbor who was a teacher, taught my young grandmother how to read. My grandmother only remembers her as a teacher, and as “mulatto” with long Black hair down her back.

It was at the Anglican Church of St. Gabriel in May Pen where she was introduced to my Grandfather, a former sailor turned “captain” in the “Church Army,” from Barbados. My Grandfather was one of the first Black priests in the Church Army, which was a missionary expedition from the imperial metropole to combat the growth of Revival baptism and its political organizing and Black power potential in the English empire.  

What type of Maroon?

My grandfather – the priest – was known as “Captain,” as my great-grandfather was known as “Mas.” My grandfather, captain, baptized me, my older sister, and my two older cousins, nearly the entire generation of my family, into the Anglican denomination. What type of Maroon? What type of maroon has a great-grandfather who was an overseer? A grandfather who likely worked to interrupt Black political and independence organizing? What type of Maroon finds this out in their 30’s without even suspecting the duplicity lurking around them? What type of culture worker? What type of insurgent?

Yes, Bogle’s post-slavery rebellion was nearly two centuries ago. But if I do not attend to this, do I render some bit of Bogle organizing disposable? Thus, rendering my own disposable? 

I went to church last weekend. For my grandmother’s 99th birthday. I took communion, as is my habit as a member baptized and confirmed into the Anglican-Episcopalian denomination. I then played with my lil cousins in the Sunday school room which we grew up in. My church is diasporic, and lower-middle income, on the Black East side of Atlanta, and led by a natty-dreadlocked Black American. I’m treated as the best version of me when I’m there, ever since I was six months old. 

Perhaps this is my job as an Electrician – to go back through and sit with, hold space for, the ways in which we are all implicated, and can implicate our work. To work with the energy lost to shame, rewiring what is compostable into our sustainable networks.

All collages made by the author, using still from “Catch a Fire” and family photographs. Do not use or replicate without author’s permission and attribution.