Captain Cudjoe

Cudjoe — the Akan day-name Kojo, a boy born on Monday — rose from the Maroon settlements of Jamaica's interior; by tradition a son of Naquan, who had led the self-liberated out of Sutton's estate, though the contemporary accounts say he took the Leeward command in 1720 by combat. His dates, his parentage, and his kinships — Accompong his brother, Nanny his sister — are the tradition's to keep, and the record marks them so.

What is documented is the war. Through the First Maroon War the Leeward Maroons of the Cockpit Country made the limestone hills unconquerable: ambush from the heights, the abeng horn's coded cries, camouflage the redcoats never learned to read. A decade of British expeditions failed against him — in 1735 his fighters took a barracks — until the empire did what empires do when they cannot win: it treated.

On the first of March 1739, at Petty River Bottom under the cotton tree, Colonel John Guthrie signed for the Crown. The record carries the treaty whole. It recognized the Maroons' freedom, granted some fifteen hundred acres and internal self-rule under Cudjoe and his named successors — and it bound them, in the hard clauses, to accept resident white superintendents, to return future runaways for reward, and to help put down rebellions of the enslaved, as they later did. Freedom for his own, purchased at a price levied on others still in chains: that is the whole truth, and history has weighed it ever since. Cudjoe's Town became Trelawny Town under the governor's name.

Edward Long saw him lead a martial display for the governor at Montego Bay in 1764; Thistlewood's diary that year records him lately dead. Every sixth of January, Accompong Town marches to the Kindah tree with abeng and drum to keep his day. Honored be Cudjoe of the Leeward Maroons, who won his people's freedom in the hills and signed its terrible price in the valley — the record keeps both.