It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel explores the stories of black slaves, maroons, and runaways whose existence is only revealed through traces in North America’s collective archive.

This photography project utilizes archival fragments, historical ephemera, and my images to expand narratives about the Black experience and our connection to the North American landscape. This work has been guided by local historical archives of runaway slave ads, lynching news articles, Black folklore, and other location-specific historical events.

Maroons were enslaved people who had escaped their captors but did not flee to the North. Instead, they chose to create a life in hard-to-access swamps or in the wild spaces between plantations. The survival strategies and techniques the maroons used to survive in the ungoverned space between plantations can be considered “freedom practices.” Through these recently reclaimed threads of stories, we can radically re-envision Black people’s connection to the American landscape. This practice included practical strategies and strategies that relied on religion and the supernatural.

This project starts in the hidden world of the southern borderland of the US and gives voice to maroons who lived in the margins of plantations in the 18th century and reached across time to present-day counties surrounding New Bern, NC, established in 1710. Historically, the port city of New Bern's location on the coast made it a hub for the historic trade of human beings. This region, rich with critical historical moments, is highly relevant as one of the earliest colonized spaces in the United States.