Daily Gazette & Comet [Baton Rouge , LA], March 27, 1860
The death of Aunt Cicily, well known to all the market people for her faithful, honest and upright conduct, called out between three and four hundred of her colored friends and fellow-servants to attend her funeral on Sunday last. We do not recollect ever to have witnessed a larger or more orderly procession on a similar occasion. Over the grave, George Menard made an honest, sincere and effective prayer, after which one of the old fashioned Methodist hymns was sung by the company concluding the ceremony in an impressive manner. What a contrast this! Aunt Cicily was a slave (conventionally speaking), but had her friends about her to minister to her wants in the hour of affliction, and the children of her Mistress and their friends were by her, weeping at the parting hour. On the other hand, how many poor and friendless souls starving in the pinching squalidness of extreme poverty, died that day in the hells and hidden corners of the great city who were carried away to death unnamed and unknown in what is vulgarly called “free society.”