Etiquette For Mistresses Quotes

There was no etiquette guide in the universe that told you how to handle waking up in a house you'd fled from as a teenager with your estranged sister in one room accross the hall and your husband's pregnant teenage mistress in the other.

I’m glad you could make it,” she quipped, her voice not quite as steady as she wished. “When you issue an invitation to your bedroom, it’s common practice to make sure the door is unlocked,” he returned without a pause. He looked beyond her and said, “It’s also common to wait until your partner’s here before you start getting the sheets hot.” [...] “Sorry,” she quipped lightly, “I’m not familiar with the etiquette required of a mistress. Next time I’ll make sure that you’re in the bed before I throw hot coals at it.

If you desire to withdraw before the party breaks up, take "French leave"—that is, go quietly out without disturbing any one, and without saluting even the mistress of the house, unless you can do so without attracting attention.

Much to the slaveholders' delight, the degradation of slave life increased the social distance between plantation slaves and urban free people of color. Nothing seemed to be further from the cosmopolitan world of New Orleans and the other Gulf ports than the narrow alternatives of the plantation, with its isolation, machine-like regimentation, and harsh discipline. As free people of color strove to establish themselves in the urban marketplace and master the etiquette of a multilingual society, they drew back from the horrors of plantation life and from the men and women forced to live that nightmare. The repulsion may have been mutual. Plantation slaves, many of them newly arrived Africans, little appreciated the intricacies of urban life and had neither the desire nor the ability to meet its complex conventions. Rather than embrace European-American standards, planation slaves sought to escape them. Their cultural practices pointed toward Africa - as did their filed teeth and tribal markings. While free people of color embraced Christianity and identified with the Catholic Church, the trappings of the white man's religions were not to be found in the quarter. Planters, ever eager to divide the black majority, labored to enlarge differences between city-bound free people of color and plantation slaves. Rewarding with freedom those men and women who displayed the physical and cultural attributes of European Americans fit their purpose exactly, as did employing free colored militiamen against maroons or feting white gentlemen and colored ladies at quadroon balls. It was no accident that the privileges afforded to free people of color expanded when the danger of slave rebellion was greatest. Nor was it mysterious that the free colored population grew physically lighter as the slave population - much of it just arrived from Africa - grew darker. But somatic coding was just one means of dividing slave and free blacks. Every time black militiamen took to the field against the maroons or a young white gentlemen took a colored mistress, the distance between slaves and free people of color widened.