'A print.'

'What's a print?' she asked.

She hadn't been on the job very long so I said patiently, 'A print is a blueprint. They're in that cabinet there. You have the key. Will you unlock the cabinet and give me the print-the

blueprint-marked S-14?'

She unlocked the cabinet reluctantly, giving quick side glances at Kelly to see if he'd say anything, and when she saw that S-l4 was marked 'Not to be taken from office,' she turned to Kelly and asked, 'Can he see this?'

My head began heating up again. Kelly looked up and nodded. She took down the print and handed it to me. 'You'll have to look at it here,' she said.

All the leadermen took out prints. I wanted to explain it to her, knowing that she was new on the job. But she had tried my patience, so I said, 'Listen, little girl, don't annoy me this morning.'

She looked inquiringly at Kelly again, but he didn't look up. I walked out with the print. She called, 'Hey!' indecisively, but I didn't look around.

A white helper was soldering a seam in a trunk while a white mechanic looked on. The mechanic and I had been in the department together for the past two years, but we had never spoken. He looked at me as I passed, I looked at him; we kept the record straight. I went up the jack ladder and came out on the third deck again.

There were a lot of women workers on board, mostly white. Whenever I passed the white women looked at me, some curiously, some coyly, some with open hostility. Some just stared with blank hard eyes. Few ever moved aside to let me pass; I just walked around them. On the whole the older women were friendlier than the younger. Now and then some of the young white women gave me an opening to make a pass, but I'd never made one: at first because the coloured workers seemed as intent on protecting the white women from the coloured men as the white men were, probably because they wanted to prove to the white folks they could work with white women without trying to make them; and then, after I'd become a leaderman, because I, like a damn fool, felt a certain responsibility about setting an example. Now I had Alice and the white chicks didn't interest me; I thought Alice was better than any white woman who ever lived.