Out of the Great Dismal Swamp, a huge morass of swampland straddling the Virginia and North Carolina eastern seaboard, there emerged a distinct culture of enslaved insurgency and fugitive subversion. Maroons who fled enslavement and resettled in wilderness spaces utilized the deep interior swamps to establish permanent, multigenerational autonomous communities. Historian Kathryn Benjamin Golden reveals for the first time the role of Black women in these maroon communities and locates them in the forests, swamps, and records where they have previously evaded detection and attention.

This Insurgent Ground centers the Black women who aided, supported, led, and nurtured maroon movements in the Great Dismal Swamp as they collaborated with enslaved people in rebellion. Throughout the region, Black women resisted the injustices of reproductive violence, sexual assault, and desecrated motherhoods. Acting as agents of counterintelligence, participants in defensive violence and militant strategy, and mothers and providers of alternative autonomous communities, these women dared to redirect and repossess their energies and their bodies in absolute defiance of the very economic workings of slavery and in refusal of borders, bondage, confinement, and capture.