Douglass's deep suspicion of physical appearance as a key to character is evident in the reservations he expressed regarding Smith's ‘Heads of the Colored People’ articles that he published in his newspaper. Commenting on the portrait of the washerwoman, he implies that Smith's ‘faithful pictures of contented degradation’ might not meet the approval of the woman in question. Douglass hints that Smith would be entirely to blame if ‘he should occasionally get a rap or two over his head with a broom-stick, or a few drops of moderately hot “suds” upon his neatly-attired person’. ‘Look out,’ he concludes with a flourish, ‘look out for “suds” and “broom-sticks!”’

He returned to the subject in a more serious vein the following year. ‘Very little’, he writes, ‘can be learned of the colored people as a whole from merely seeing them in the streets of this or any other city.’ On the basis of such a fleeting acquaintance, one would simply confirm the common view formed after seeing them

If we really want to know about them, he insists, we must ‘see them at their homes, in their places of business, at their churches, and in their literary benevolent societies’.

If Douglass is – perhaps unusually – acutely sensitive to the misleading impression that can be conveyed by one's appearance and conduct in public, he knows that, of all people, blacks cannot escape the tyranny of the gaze. What he suggests is that it should be directed elsewhere. Instead of looking at heads, faces, clothes – the things immediately visible when encountering ‘colored people’ in public – his readers ought to look indoors to the places they live, work, and worship, where one may find ‘order, neatness, and intelligence’ and ‘the marks of material prosperity’ that the ‘rags’ and ‘gaudy trappings’ of the city street obscure.