The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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the ubiquity and iterative quality of such descriptions, with “hoarse voice” first appearing in 1777, and “fine voice” in 1783, with a sharp increase in 1811 that rises throughout the 1830s and 1840s. Other key recurrent descriptors include “loud,” “manly,” “strong,” and/or “whiny,” sonic affects amplifying the gendered binary of race for black men as hypermasculine/feminized. The frequency of such ads suggests white people began perceiving a clear (and rather blunt) difference between the timbral qualities of black and white voices in the nineteenth century. The culturally constructed sonic difference not only marked certain tones, grains, and cadences as “black” but also, by the comparison that ghosts these ads, suggests whites sensed their voices as normative and not easily categorizable. White vocal grains, it seems, could span a range of sounds that were neither “coarse” nor as “loud” or “strong” as “fine” black voices, terms that characterize black timbres as excessive, overly corporeal, and readily describable.
In addition to racializing vocal timbre, the Greensborough Patriot outlines distinct, observable differences that whites perceived between black and white listening practices. Whereas whites, by implication, may have any number of reactions to being “spoken to,” McGehee limited Solomon and Abram’s listening stances to visible signals of obeisance: “smiles” and a “pert” snapping to attention. Notably, McGehee’s ad never imagines either Solomon or Abram as speaking first, identifying the breaking of silence as a sonic privilege of whiteness and revealing how slaveholding whites imagined power flowing directly through acts of disciplined listening. White-authored descriptions of their slaves’ racialized and power-laden listening countenances appear frequently and consistently in UNC’s digital archive; recurrent modifiers that appear either before or after the phrase “when spoken to” in runaway slave ads printed between 1792 and 1840 include having “down eyes” or a “downcast look,” being either “slow of speech” or “speaking quick”—the former suggesting modesty in the face of commanding whiteness and the latter displaying rapid deference—or showing a “smiling” or a “pleasant countenance.” Only rarely do slave masters describe slaves as laughing when spoken to, or looking whites “directly in the eye,” signifying a less-than-submissive listening stance and highlighting how whites read pert smiles and downcast eyes as appropriate visual performances of “black” listening.
Mid-nineteenth-century American whites increasingly used auditory information to inform racial ideologies and to construct racialized identities. Visual fragmentations that dissected black people into metonymic corporeal parts such as “wooly hair, nose flat, lips thick,” catalogued in 1854’s widely read The Races of Man, had long signified the allegedly fixed racial differences justifying slavery’s existence.2 However, as Michael Chaney points out, the trajectory of the “dissolution of the eminence of vision” intersected with “an alternate dynamics of race and vision” fostered by new modes of self-representation by free blacks and former slaves.3 Furthermore, as Jonathan Crary argues, the rise of commodity culture and ocular-illusion-as-entertainment (i.e., the panorama and the camera obscura) further destabilized visual epistemologies.4
Sound both defined and performed the tightening barrier whites drew between themselves and black people, expressing the racialized power dynamics and hierarchical relationships of chattel slavery through vocal tones, musical rhythms, and expressed listening practices marked by whites as “black” and therefore of lesser value and potentially dangerous to whiteness and the power structures upholding it. Functioning as a medium, sound enabled race to be felt, experienced, and affected by white Americans as a collection of fixed sonic desires and repulsions that are taken into the body and radiate out from it. White American elites’ use of racialized sonic descriptors drew on a long but spotty history of linking sound to “Otherness” in pre-nineteenth-century America—the “disjointed aural communities” detailed by Richard Cullen Rath in How Early America Sounded that unevenly represented indigenous peoples, Quakers, and African slaves as “howling” outsiders.5 However, the advent of mass print media and popular musical culture enabled white elites to standardize sonic ideas of Otherness on a heretofore-unimagined scale, disciplining readers’ listening practices through detailed accounts of listening experiences written by an increasingly professionalized cadre of reporters and critics. Furthermore, white elite discourse increasingly amplified and Othered “black” sounds at a moment of great anxiety over defining Americanness amid sectional tensions over slavery.
At this key historical threshold, white elites’ published descriptions of the differences between white and black speech, sounds, environments, and musics spread far beyond intimate speech communities, constructing whites’ centrality and dominance as the American citizen-subjects at the very level of perception. Even as the nation appeared to be dissolving in the 1850s, white elites represented a powerful sensory experience of racialized sonic citizenship on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, a phenomenon that certainly contributed to a relatively speedy reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites after the Civil War. Regardless of their regional location or their feelings concerning slavery, many white elites heard themselves as superior citizens, and they listened to themselves and Others through that privileged, circumscribed, and increasingly standardized filter. I call this dominant racialized filter the listening ear. The listening ear was far from the only listening practice enacted by elite whites during this period and certainly not the only form of listening important in identity construction. As I discussed in the introduction, listening is rich in its multiplicity, and a listening subject develops many filters that operate simultaneously; in fact, a listening subject is comprised of auditory information processed through interactive and intersectional psychological filters that include the habits, assumptions, desires, and repulsions shaped by gender, class, national, regional, and linguistic identities. However uneven and diffused, the listening ear’s emergence during this period, and its transmission to listeners across the American racial spectrum, more firmly interwove whiteness with Americanness, both normalizing the dyad at the heart of citizenship privilege and making it a visceral, tangible, lived experience at the level of auditory perception. In this way, a subject can touch and be touched by the abstraction of race in the form of sound waves—vibrations were increasingly of interest to nineteenth-century physicists, particularly Hermann von Helmholtz—and a subject can cast one’s racial identity out into the world through vocal tones, timbres, music making, soundscape design, noise legislation, music consumption—what Daniel Cavicchi calls “audiencing”6—and through publicly enacting shared forms of exclusionary listening. Listening became a key part of understanding one’s place in the American racial system, viscerally connecting slavery’s macropolitics to lived racial etiquette. The uneven process of building racially disciplined listening through the “ ‘micropenalties’ of disciplinary individuation,”7 as understood by Saidiya Hartman, enabled whites to hear whiteness and blackness as palpably distinct experiences of differing texture, value, quality, and importance, forming what I term the sonic color line.
The racializing of listening, its accordant techniques of body discipline, and the sonic color line enabled by and enabling it, form this chapter’s subject. Racialized sonic politics, I argue, profoundly impacted the ability of black people, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and colonized peoples to claim, enact, and sound their rights in American life, with whites representing black people as the least sonically categorizable as human, let alone as potential citizens. Slave owners, in particular, mobilized the sonic color line as an auditory grammar, which they used to discipline slaves to the white-authored subject position of “blackness,” even as the border coalescing between “black” and “white” sounds, musics, and listening practices cast sonic differences as natural, essential, and immutable. Black listening subjects challenged white-constructed racialized listening practices in ways both subtle and overt: by mobilizing divergent forms of listening, by recoding certain sounds and listening practices as “white” in defiance of American cultural norms deeming whiteness unmarked and unrepresentable, and by using their own standards to construct an alternate value system and aesthetics for sounds they deemed “black.” Furthermore, black subjects survived slavery and resisted America’s racial hierarchies by becoming proficient in multiple forms of racialized listening, slipping in and out of various standpoints to evaluate the micropolitics of any given situation. Since critics such as Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Houston Baker Jr., Barbara Johnson, Mae Henderson, and