A Slave's Day
No two slaves' days are alike; what a slave does depends entirely on what she was bought to do. This is the shape a day has rather than its contents.
Waking
Most slaves wake before their owner — someone has to light the fire, make breakfast, and wake him, and in most households that is the same person. In a large house a companion may wake when he does or later; the fire is somebody else's morning.
Hair
Done every day whether she has bathed or not. A working slave wears hers long, pinned and plain; long is the default, and Marka requires it to be liftable. A companion or performer may have hers dressed elaborately, which displays her owner's household rather than any standing of her own. Length is her owner's to decide, and cutting it short is read as circumstance — illness, lice, or correction — with no telling which.
The work
A house slave cleans, cooks, carries, and answers the door; a companion attends; a field slave works the field; a tavern slave serves the room. What is common to all is that the work is real. A household does not keep a slave simply to have one. When he is away the work does not stop; a wife, son, or daughter directs her, or she runs the household herself, and a house that returns to him in order is the whole point of having trained her.
Rest
A slave rests during the day, which is not a privilege granted but an obligation he carries. Exhaustion shows, and a slave visibly worn out has told the street what kind of household she comes from. The household sets how long and how often, and the household is watched. Released to rest, she is not required to hold anything.
Errands
A slave may go out alone; a household could not function otherwise. She does not carry papers — they stay with her owner — and her collar carries what the street needs. Any free person may stop her and ask her something, and she always answers; what a free person cannot do is send her elsewhere, which contradicts her owner's direction. She does not linger. An errand has a beginning and an end.
Eating
She does not begin before her owner does; with guests she begins after them, and when serving she eats after the table is cleared. When he is away for weeks she eats on her own schedule. Most slaves eat at their owner's feet below the table, which is the ordinary arrangement across the Known World; large households keep a slaves' table in the kitchen or hall; a single-slave household often has her beside him, at the table or at his feet as he prefers. With guests she is on the floor, which frees a chair and shows she knows her place; where she cannot sit on the floor she takes a stool, and a guest who took that for a slight would be telling on himself. She eats off a plate with the same cutlery as the house, the same food in a modest household and sometimes separately cooked in a wealthy one. Eating from the floor without a plate is not correction; it is abuse, and the advocacy societies write about it by name. Hand-feeding means what the household puts into it — intimacy, control, or a quiet correction. She does not refuse food her owner offers and may refuse it from anyone else, since a guest is not answerable for her condition. Water is not rationed.
Bathing
Some of the most intimate work a slave does and some of the most ordinary; nothing about a bath is ceremonial. She washes her owner, does his hair, shaves him, and dries him. A razor at a man's throat is the most trust he will ever place in anyone, and it is assigned to a slave he knows, never to a new arrival. She bathes alone unless her owner wants otherwise or she is being prepared for something — daily, every other day, or weekly, depending on the work — and a dirty slave reflects on her owner either way. None of this holds on the Frontier, where a Waendra household bathes in rivers and nobody judges by a city standard.
Her body
Two rules govern it, and they are not the same rule. What she wears, and whether she wears anything, is her owner's choice, in private or in front of others, as everything about her keeping is. What is done to her body is hers alone: no is final and must be honored at once, against a guest, a buyer, and her owner alike. A man who forces himself on her has confessed to everyone who hears of it that he could not obtain willingly what he wanted — the plainest statement of weakness the world recognizes. The distinction is between being seen and being used. This is why inspection at a sale goes to a private room, where she may decline anything past looking, and why a buyer who objects to the arrangement has announced his intent to the whole room. The abolitionists observe that this is the one rule that happens where nobody is standing; see Manumission#What the abolitionists notice.
Evening and sleep
Her day ends when her work does; in a one-slave house she is the last to stop, and a companion's evening is only beginning. Where she sleeps is her owner's choice and varies more than anything else about her keeping: a cage that is both bed and storage, the floor beside the bed, the bed itself in a household where they are close, or the slave quarters of a large house.