The Fugitive Infrastructure of Maroon Geographies

This chapter explores two local moments of flight from policing that occurred more than a century apart in the same location in Montgomery County. The subjects of focus are a group of maroons who confronted the county militia while traveling along a major county road in 1845 and a Black woman named Carolyn Twyman, a resident of Tobytown who refused to sign a ticket and fled from police officers on that same road in 1972 after they stopped her for a routine traffic charge. This chapter draws connections between the politics of these two examples of marronage and argues that such moments of flight from police create openings for reimagining a world beyond police. The chapter further positions Twyman's moment of flight as an extension of the fugitive infrastructure of her neighborhood, where residents organized and sustained life in the face of urban renewal and other constrictions of state governance.