She remembered joining the "white folks" methodist church in old Cambridge and going to church on Sundays and sitting in the Gallery, which was the place reserved for colored people in that particular place.
On Sunday morning Aunt Cindy got "happy" at the services and began to throw herself about and shout; the white folks on the seats below hurried to get out from under the edge of the balcony for fear Aunt Cindy would lose her balance and fall over the railing to the floor below.
Isabelle is a Firm Believer in "hants."
When she was a girl the adjoining plantation was owned by her master's brother-in-law, and on this plantation was the big old tobacco factory where the tobacco raised on several neighboring plantations was priced and hung. The negroes on her master's place said this factory was "hanted." None of them would go near this factory after nightfall, for "when the nights were still and the moon was full, you could hear the ting, ting, ting, of the lever all night long and voices of the slaves crying out and complaining, and you knew there wasn't anybody there at all, jest hants."
Isabelle was a mid-wife by profession after the war, and tells this as one of her experiences.
She was caring for a lady that had just had her second child; they lived in a cottage with a full basement under it.
The father was to take full care of the other child, a little boy, at night, and they were to sleep in the basement. The father and little son tried to sleep in the basement for two or three nights, but the father could not sleep. Something bothered him as if restless spirits were abroad. One morning Isabelle said she was standing by the door when she heard a voice, low and vibrant, saying, "No sleep here. Can't sleep here." No one was there but her and the mother and the two little children, so, of course, she knew it was "hants". This was proved to her satisfaction a few months later. The skeleton of a man was found under the basement floor.
[Henry Dant]
Interview with Henry Dant,
Hannibal, Missouri.
Henry Says He's 105
Henry Dant, now living with his daughter on Davis Street in Hannibal, was born in slavery on the farm of Judge Daniel Kendrick, south of Monroe City in Ralls County. He is about one hundred and five years old, in possession of all his faculties and is able to move around the house. He seemed to have only hazy recollections, and it was difficult to keep him from wandering from the subject. The following is the story that he told: