“When we reached the river there were many canoes busy putting the people across, besides the ferry boat was in use to ferry vehicles over the stream.  The ex-slaves were crying and praying and telling how good granny had been to all of them and explaining how they knew she had gone straight to Heaven, because she was so kind—­and a Christian.  There were not nearly enough boats to take the crowd across if they crossed back and forth all day, so my mother, Eliza, improvised a boat or ‘gunnel’, as the craft was called, by placing a wooden soap box on top of a long pole, then she pulled off her shoes and, taking two of us small children in her arms, she paddled with her feet and put us safely across the stream.  We crossed directly above Iaka, Livingston county, three miles below Grand River.

“At the burying ground a great crowd had assembled from the neighborhood across the river and there were more songs and prayers and much weeping.  The casket was let down into the grave without the lid being put on and everybody walked up and looked into the grave at the face of the dead woman.  They called it the ‘last look’ and everybody dropped flowers on Mistress Hester as they passed by.  A man then went down and nailed on the lid and the earth was thrown in with shovels.  The ex-slaves filled in the grave, taking turns with the shovel.  Some of the men had worked at the smelting furnaces so long that their hands were twisted and hardened from contact with the heat.  Their shoulders were warped and their bodies twisted but they were strong as iron men from their years of toil.  When the funeral was over mother put us across the river on the gunnel and we went home, all missing Mistress Hester.

“My cousin worked at Princeton, Kentucky, making shoes.  He had never been notified that he was free by the kind emancipation Mrs. Hester had given to her slaves, and he came loaded with money to give to his white folks.  Mistress Lorainne told him it was his own money to keep or to use, as he had been a free man several months.

“As our people, white and black and Indians, sat talking they related how they had been warned of approaching trouble.  Jack said the dogs had been howling around the place for many nights and that always presaged a death in the family.  Jack had been compelled to take off his shoes and turn them soles up near the hearth to prevent the howling of the dogs.  Uncle Robert told how he believed some of Mistress Hester’s enemies had planted a shrub near her door and planted it with a curse so that when the shrub bloomed the old woman passed away.  Then another man told how a friend had been seen carrying a spade into his cousin’s cabin and the cousin had said, ’Daniel, what foh you brung that weapon into by [TR:  my?] cabin?  That very spade will dig my grave,’ and sure enough the cousin had died and the same spade had been used in digging his grave.