After learning to calk, I sought my own employment, made my own contracts, and collected my own earnings; giving Master Hugh no trouble in any part of the transactions to which I was a party.
From his autobiography, this passage details Douglass's growing independence and agency as he began to manage his own labor and earnings while still enslaved.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.
This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.