Hamilton Elzie Waters carried two Certificates of Freedom out of Maryland — one for himself, one for his mother, Lovey Waters — in 1832 by one account, 1835 by another. He had already gone partially blind, one local history says, "possibly due to injuries received during punishment after being caught with a book." Free, he and Lovey reached Ithaca, New York, where he married Lucinda; the family moved to Michigan, then Erie, Pennsylvania, soon after their daughter Elizabeth's 1838 birth. In Erie, Waters worked decades as the town's crier and lamplighter, owned his own home, and — cleaning the clothes of runaways sheltered at the Vosburgh brothers' barber shop — routed escapees toward a Lake Erie skiff crossing at Four Mile Creek. He never made a record. What survived him was a sound: the plantation songs he sang on his rounds, carried forward by his grandson, Harry T. Burleigh.