e with a necklace of teeth, a ring through her nose, tropic
breezes playing on that velvet skin. (Please, I know naught of
Trinidad or its customs and am only guessing.) And here stood Ida,
thumping, thumping on the ironing press, nine hours, lacking ten
minutes, a day, on the sixth floor of a laundry in Harlem, that we in
Manhattan might be more civilized.

Once she told me she had lost fifteen pounds in this country. "How?"

"Ah, child," she said, "it's tha mother sickness. Don't you ever know
it? Back home in Trinidad are my mother, my father, my two little
boys. Oh, tha sickness to see them! But what is one to do when you
marry a poor man? He must come to this country to find work, and then,
after a while, I must come, too."

Behind Ida stood two other colored girls, and at the end press a white
girl who started the day after I did. She stayed only five days, and
left in disgust--told me she'd never seen such hard work. Beyond the
last press were the curtain frames and the large, round padded table
for ironing fancy table linen by hand. Then began the lunch tables.

Behind the row of presses by the windows stood the hand ironers who
did the fancy work. First came Ella, neat, old, gray-haired, fearfully
thin, wrinkled, with a dab of red rouge on each cheek. After all, one
really cannot be old if one dabs on rouge before coming to work all
day in a laundry. Ella had hand ironed all her life. She had been ten
years in her last job, but the place changed hands. She liked
ironing, she said. Ella never talked to anybody, even at lunch time.

Behind Ella ironed Anna Golden, black, who wore striped silk
stockings. She always had a bad cold. Most of the girls had colds most
of the time--from the steam, they said. Anna had spent two dollars on
medicine that week, which left her fourteen dollars. Anna was the one
person to use an electric iron. It had newly been installed. The
others heated their irons over gas flames. Every so often Miss Cross
would call out, "I smell gas!" So did everybody else. After Anna,
Lucile, blackest of all and a widow. And then--Mrs. Reilly.

Mrs. Reilly and Hattie were the characters of the sixth floor. Mrs.
Reilly was old and fat and Irish. She had stood up hand ironing so
long the part of her from the waist up seemed to have settled down
into her hips. Eleven years had Mrs. Reilly ironed in our laundry. She
was the one pieceworker in the building. In summer she could make from
twenty to twen