ot 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
c