The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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be pinned down to a written, standardized vocabulary created discomfort, which whites resolved by representing nonverbal sound as the instinctual, emotive province of racialized Others. Stereotypical descriptions of black sounds permeated white antebellum writing. Similar to whites’ dismissal of slave songs because they did not conform to European notation, they considered sounds such as screams, grunts, groans, and wails signs of “possession, otherness, and wildness” existing “prior to rationality.”26
Choosing to engage whites’ written words and their cultural weight, Douglass struggled to reconcile the constraining conventions of the sonic color line with a revaluation of nonverbal sound that challenged the sonic boundaries of “blackness.” The Narrative combines oratorical structures such as chiasmus with the masculinist demands of the European genre of autobiography and the currents of radical abolitionist writing, which Alex Black describes as “demand[ing] a reader with an eye for sound.”27 Although representing slavery through nonverbal aural imagery threatened the dominant relationship between “clear” sound and sound logic, abolitionists expected Douglass to perform aural blackness for his white Northern readership, employing emotional forms of address and conventional descriptions of slavery’s nonverbal sounds, particularly because he had “heard clearly (and authentically) the ring of the slave whip and the ‘clank’ of slaves’ chains.”28 In fact, Douglass’s vexation over performing existent aural stereotypes of blackness may account for the modulation of voice some critics hear in the Narrative, especially when compared to the fiery prose of Douglass’s speeches.29
Perhaps as a result of the sonic color line’s pressures, Douglass’s Narrative represents sound sparingly and iconically. Douglass highlights discussions of prominent sounds identified by the sonic color line and represents (mis)perceptions of the listening ear at key points in his life from his literal and figurative births into slavery—effected by the sound of the master’s abuse and the strains of slave songs in the woods—through his young adulthood on various Maryland plantations, where Douglass witnesses emotive outbursts by allegedly reasonable slave masters as well as slaves’ resistance to white supremacist structures equating their sound to nonsense and their listening with unthinking obedience. The Narrative’s second half tracks his experiences working in Baltimore’s shipyards—where he attains written literacy by trading bread to poor white boys in exchange for lessons and becomes “a ready listener” for word of abolition30—and his fight with the slave breaker Covey, a conflict sparked by Douglass’s refusal to perform “black” listening.
“No Words, No Tears, No Prayers”: Douglass and Nonverbal Epistemology
Douglass-as-author challenges the sonic color line and redirects the listening ear by rhetorically inverting dominant associations of nonverbal sound with blackness. At the Narrative’s end, for example, his critique of Southern religion parodies the hymn “Our Heavenly Union,” altering the lyrics to expose hypocritical white Southern preachers via nonverbal imagery; self-proclaimed upstanding Christians become “roaring, ranting, sleek man-thie[ves]” who “roar and scold, and whip, and sting.” Far from utilizing the “sound words” idealized by Douglass’s white contemporaries, Southern preachers devilishly “bleat and baa, dona like goats,” intimidating the weak with a “roar like a Bashan bull” and sounding off like “braying ass[es], of mischief full.” Though they use sound to mask their hypocrisy—no one prays “earlier, later, louder, and longer” than slave-driving reverends, the cruelest masters in Douglass’s Narrative—nonverbal tones betray their true identities.31
Such parody resonates with Douglass’s technique of allowing slaveholders and overseers few transcribed words let alone “sound” ones, another method of defying the sonic color line’s classification of white elites as eloquent orators à la Bingham. Douglass instead reduces their words to an indistinguishable stream of obscenity.32 Despite their genteel titles, Captain Anthony, Mr. Plummer, and Mr. Severe are all “profane swearers,” an aural image belying the refinement associated with elite Southerners (and their accents). Douglass represents Severe as so obscenely true to his name that he literally curses himself to death. His last words, a rhetorical form freighted with significance in Victorian culture, were but “groans, bitter curses, and horrid oaths.”33 The slaves consider his replacement, Mr. Hopkins, a “good overseer” because he was “less cruel, less profane and made less noise than Mr. Severe,” although Douglass’s syntax nonetheless marks him as all three.34 Douglass characterizes Mr. Gore’s cruelty nonverbally, the way he does with his representations of Severe and Hopkins; he “spoke but to command” with a “sharp shrill voice” that “produced horror and trembling in [the] ranks” of slaves. Gore primarily communicates through the whip’s crack and its lash’s sting. Contrary to antebellum idealizations of the word’s visual and logical power, Douglass portrays emotive, nonverbal sound as central to white identity.35
Douglass also resists the sonic color line by challenging existent stereotypes about black listening. Believed not to possess any of the agency associated with “listening” in the dominant culture—the term having descended from the same Germanic root as “lust” (to desire) and “list” (to choose)—slaves were to respond immediately and uniformly to sounds they heard on the plantation. Under constant violent threat, slaves had to visibly perform the subordinate listening practices that constructed and confirmed slavery’s allegedly natural power relationships: “When he [Colonel Lloyd] spoke, a slave must stand, listen, and tremble; and such was literally the case.” Importantly, Douglass’s first act of resistance against Covey is to “make him no answer and stand with [his] clothes on” after Covey orders them removed. The stakes of refusing to listen as a slave were deadly; the Narrative bears witness for Demby, a man shot by Gore for ignoring his orders to come out of a pond. Gore justifies Demby’s murder by telling the master his insubordinate listening “se[t] a dangerous example to the other slaves.”36 Some whites considered black listening practices fundamental enough to slavery’s “rule and order” to kill over, even as Gore’s murderous act protests their allegedly biological nature.
However, the biggest challenge Douglass mounts to the sonic color line comes through recurrent, metonymic scenes of his own listening that reveal the extensive disciplinary practices of the listening ear and their impact on the listening habits of both slaves and their masters. Douglass’s textual representation of himself listening to Aunt Hester’s shrieks amplifies the centrality of race and gender to the marginalization of sonic epistemologies in the nineteenth century. It shows how listening augmented and deepened the processes of subjection usually ascribed to visuality. I further existent critical conversation surrounding Hester’s scream by interrogating if and how Douglass’s aural imagery was heard (and by whom), arguing that Douglass’s Narrative asks, to riff on Elizabeth Alexander riffing on Pat Ward Williams, “Can you be WHITE and (really) LISTEN to this?” or, alternately, “Are you white because of HOW you listen to this?”37
Through another rhetorical reversal, Douglass challenges the sonic color line in the Hester passage by revaluing her scream—an extraverbal sound whites associated with blackness—as a vital site of knowledge production. Locating this sound prominently at the beginning and end of the scene, Douglass positions Hester’s screams as sounds to be listened to for meaning, rather than dismissed as irrational, collateral noise. Building from Alexander’s interpretation of Hester’s screams as an important site of knowledge that (re)births Douglass into acknowledgement of himself as “vulnerable and black,” Fred Moten theorizes the sound as both ontological and epistemological, a “radically exterior aurality” resistant to and disruptive of the Enlightenment’s “overdetermined politics of looking,” whose im/possible commingling of terror and pleasure “open[ed] the way into the knowledge of slavery and the knowledge of freedom.”38 Listening to Hester’s screams enables Douglass’s initial understanding of the conditions of his enslavement while simultaneously fostering resistance. More than involuntary cries of pain, “screams when one was whipped or sold, for example, reminded masters of slaves’ humanity … inanimate objects, they told whip-happy masters, were dumb and silent.”39 Douglass-as-author emphasizes this resistant role by representing Hester’s screams as sonically and syntactically interrupting the scene’s visual imagery: “He [Captain Anthony] commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm red blood (amid heart rending shrieks from her, and horrible oaths from