putterings 206 < 207 > 208 index
every day, and every where; nothing about it
...The northern people fight slavery at a distance: I have to fight it every day, and every where, in all the highways and byways of life. I board with a slaveholder, and am waited on by a slave, and see all the laziness and inefficiency on the part of the whites, and the puttering, do-nothing, sulky habits of the poor blacks. Every thing about slavery is mean, dirty, lazy, hateful, and undignified. There is nothing about it to promote self-respect, or any other noble or virtuous feeling...
—
ex “Gleams of Light” (1845), “Written anonymously by ‘A Citizen of Maryland’ and published in the Boston Liberator on 26 September, 1845”
and included in the section “Douglass and his Contemporary Critics” in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself : Critical Edition, edited by John R. McKivigan, Peter P. Hinks and Heather L. Kaufman (Yale UP, 2016) : 109 : link