If the runaways of American literature seek autonomy and self-ownership, Chamoiseau’s maroon enters a “Great Woods” where distinctions between past and present, human and animal, Old World and New dissolve. Deep time makes a mockery of the plantations’ blinkered order; under the ancient canopy, the master’s stride falters and the voices of African hunters and Amerindian priests resound from the depths of unrecorded millenniums.