He had armed my love of liberty with a lash and a driver, far more efficient than any I had before known; and, while he derived all the benefits of slaveholding by the arrangement, without its evils, I endured all the evils of being a slave, and yet suffered all the care and anxiety of a responsible freeman.
From his autobiography, Douglass reflects on the paradoxical burden of his arrangement to hire his own time, which gave him responsibility without true freedom.
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I wished it was possible I could remain small all my life, knowing that the sooner I grew large the shorter would be my time to remain with them.
I looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my mother.
Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.