The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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the sonic restrictions slaves faced within the sonic color line’s circumscription, using the trope of the listener to amplify how slaves must listen through and beyond the listening ear’s deleterious representations of their bodies, voices, and culture as “noise.”
However, rather than understanding Linda’s listening only as reactive practice dealing only with “noise,” Jacobs highlights listening as an active practice of desire, a casting out toward sounds that provide Linda with a certain quality of touch, even love, in her isolation. Rather than withdraw, for example, Linda carefully attends to her children’s sounds, continuously stoking her maternal relationship, however painful: “Season after season, year after year, I peeped at my children’s faces, and heard their sweet voices, with a heart yearning all the while to say, ‘your mother is here.’ ” Linda’s grandmother also frequently brings the children to play within Linda’s earshot, knowing the sounds “comfort [Linda] in her despondency.”109 As Bonenfant’s work on queer listening argues, listening provides comfort and self-recognition because vocal sound, in particular, functions as “a kind of intimate, human-generated touch” that vibrates bodies and caresses the surface of the skin. Bonenfant argues people listen differently to sounds they desire—as opposed to unbidden sounds, such as Flint’s whispers—using the body to “listen ‘out’ for (reaching toward) voices that … will gratify.”110 In Bonenfant’s terms, listening out for her children’s voices allows Linda to feel their presence. Linda listens out for her grandmother, too, who, over the course of Linda’s confinement, develops a wordless code to communicate with her. “She had four places to knock for me to come to the trap-door,” Jacobs writes, “and each place had a different meaning,” an act of vibration creating pleasurable expectation for Linda and maintaining a material link with her family.111 Gradually, the furtive whispers of her grandmother and other family members come to replace Flint’s. Even as it warps her body and silences her voice, the isolation chamber queers Linda’s listening, enabling her to hear beyond the sonic color line’s confines and imagine an alternate relationship to her body’s experiences of love, pain, desire, survival, and motherhood.
The final phase of Linda’s evolving listening practice, the process of liberating herself from a lifetime of the listening ear’s discipline, proves arduous and uneven, even as Linda finds herself on the clamorous streets of Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. Here Jacobs shows listening’s mutability, however stubbornly filtered through the past and ghosted by echoes of former geographies. Once in the North, Linda struggles with feeling psychologically mired in the South; listening functions here as a conduit for wrestling with the emotional consequences of slavery, sexual abuse, and her long period of entrapment. After meeting her first free black acquaintance, the Reverend Jeremiah Durham, Linda realizes how slavery still stigmatizes her in the “free” North. Durham suggests Linda shouldn’t recount her sexual abuse lest it “give some heartless people a pretext for treating [her] with contempt.” The shock of the idea that Northerners might shun her for her master’s licentiousness impacts Linda viscerally. She notes, “The word contempt burned me like coals of fire,” hearkening back to the “scorching” words of Mr. Flint and connecting them to the political economy of gender that would silence her. The realization of a larger system of racialized gender connecting North and South fills Linda with dread, causing her to seek the solitude she had so recently left behind: “I went to my room, glad to shut out the world for awhile.”112 Linda arrives in the North listening out for signs of freedom, connection, and family life but learns that her raced and gendered identity still demands she continue to listen for danger.
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