The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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played by Anthony’s whip.
Given the existent associations of nonverbal sound with blackness, femaleness, and animalism in nineteenth-century Western culture, the fact that Douglass hears Hester’s scream carrying the remotest hint of meaning and agency resists the sonic color line by listening differently. However, both Hester’s agency and Douglass’s resistance to sonic racial norms have often gone unheard in critical conversations about Douglass’s limited representation of Hester as “inarticulate.” Critics inadvertently silence her anew by disallowing the possibility that her screams carry meaning. David Messmer, otherwise attuned to the Narrative’s aurality, represents Hester’s screams as “inarticulate sound” produced by Captain Anthony that “perpetuates the racist concept that slaves were discursively inferior.”41 However, reading Hester’s scream only as absence limits meaning to the spoken word, foreclosing the possibility of tonal and/or extraverbal communication. In explicitly challenging the gender hierarchies Douglass enacts—male as powerful (whether as abuser or as narrator) and woman as victim—critics implicitly concede to the dominant social codes separating the logical (white, masculine) word from the emotional (black, feminine) sound and sound from knowledge production. After all, no sound is intrinsically “inarticulate”; the sonic color line’s socially and historically contingent aural value systems enable whites to label black sound in this way.
Through the tropic figure of Douglass-as-listener, Douglass-as-author amplifies Hester’s screams as his aural and ontological gateway to slavery, a form of knowledge obscured by reigning visual epistemologies but enhanced by the sonic color line. Subtly reminding readers that the dawn of the “age of reason” was concurrent with (and dependent upon) slavery, Hester’s screams “awake[n] [him] at the dawn of day,” imagery that satirizes (and racializes) the visual iconography of the European Enlightenment. In Douglass’s schema, sight and light do not produce the knowledge necessary for enslaved subjects’ survival but rather sound and darkness. He finally becomes “so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight [of Anthony whipping Hester], that [he] hid himself in a closet and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over.”42 Only in the closet’s darkness, with the bloody tableau removed from his immediate sight, can Douglass hear alternatives in the layered, indeterminate sound of Hester’s scream, which allows him to construct “armor which can take him out of the closet.”43
Paradoxically, Douglass’s armor comes not from hardening his ears but from retaining a radical openness to Hester’s cries despite their psychological and emotional toll. Mobilizing limited agency within the confines of enforced listening, Douglass fights the logic of slavery that transforms spectacular violence into routine occurrence. He does not become habituated to Hester’s abuse; the screams remain acutely “heart-rending” (a term Douglass uses twice) every time he hears them.44 Synonymous with involvement for Douglass, the act of listening helps construct the Narrative’s ethical framework. Despite being young, terrified, and subordinated, Douglass charges his six-year-old self with an ethics of listening as both “witness and participant” in Hester’s torture, precisely the moral enmeshment that the white-produced sonic color line disavowed and sought to discipline out of black and white listening.45 The sonic color line relies on the terror produced by the sonics of white supremacy to produce “black listening” as detached, immediate obedience. Unable (and unwilling) to buffer his ears from Hester’s pain—an aural metaphor for rape and a metonym for slavery itself—Douglass represents his younger incarnation as both subject to sonic terror and a defiant subject produced by it.
Douglass-as-author’s representation of himself as an ethical listener functions in sharp contrast to the master’s muted emotional reaction to Hester’s scream, identifying palpable racial differences in listening, not as immutable biological truths but as accrued habits conditioned by the sonic color line and its performative violences. Captain Anthony’s listening, for example, oscillates between a titillating sensitivity to “noise” and a willful unhearing. At first, he hungrily attunes his ear to Hester’s shriek, imagining himself producing it for his sexual and psychological consumption. An aural fetish for power and sexual violence, Hester’s screams stand in for the moans of sexual activity she has refused him while he manifests his control over her at the level of the unseen. To amplify his power, Anthony blocks out anything else Hester says: “No words, no tears, no prayers from his gory victim, seemed to move his heart from its iron purpose.”46 Douglass’s repetitive syntax mimics Anthony’s “iron” ear, which hears only “no … no … no” in place of Hester’s flood of “words … tears … [and] prayers,” echoing her refusals. While some read this line as evidence of Hester’s lack of impact,47 the fact that Anthony remains unmoved says nothing about the eloquence of Hester’s pleas, instead speaking volumes about the narratives white men constructed to absorb and silence such sounds and, in turn, about the ways in which white men as subjects are produced through the sonic color line’s aural justifications. By evoking Hester’s words rather than quoting them, Douglass represents the process through which the master’s ear translates human sound into black noise, satirizing the Victorian belief that sound is a direct, universal emotional pathway and challenging his white Northern readers to hear more than absence between those lines.48
However, as much as Douglass’s image is about control, it also concerns Hester’s aural resistance and the methods Anthony uses to suppress it. As Jon Cruz finds, “Far too many of the accounts of owners and overseers that describe black noise also contain a deeper unraveling of noise—an unraveling toward the irrepressible acknowledgement of meaningful emotions.”49 Although “he would whip her to make her scream,” once Hester’s screams escaped his desire—becoming too loud, too pained, too emotive—Captain Anthony would “whip her to make her hush,” smothering her voice and the “irrepressible acknowledgement” of her humanity that it briefly evoked.50
By opening his Narrative with the multiple meanings made from a sound both desired and suppressed by whites as racialized noise, Douglass resists the raced and gendered performances listening whites expected from black subjects, while simultaneously exposing how elite white men, in particular, come to know their power and experience their privilege through listening. Detailing Hester’s scream through his listening experience proves Douglass’s “most effective discursive resistance to slavery while a slave depends upon his aural abilities rather than his skills as a literate subject,”51 while broadening the limited understanding of “aural abilities” as only concerned with the making of (musical) sound and not with the aural literacy that shapes its production and interpretation. I define aural literacy as the ability to accrue knowledge by listening and engaging with the world through making and perceiving sound.52
Douglass’s representations of listening within a written text contests the artificial and imbalanced dichotomy between orality and literacy and the inherent ocularcentrism embedded within it that privileges the allegedly silent written word. The hybrid forms of aural literacy within the texts I read in this chapter show us that oral and aural ways of knowing the world do not simply disappear or dissolve into written discourse; according to Joseph Roach, orality and literacy are co-constitutive, interactive categories rather than mutually exclusive moments in an evolutionary model of culture.53 Literary representations of aural literacy amplify the fact that listening continues to be an important epistemology in a society that an overwhelming number of scholars argue has given itself over almost completely to the eye. By placing Douglass-as-child inside the darkened closet, Douglass-as-writer enacts listening as a literary trope of decolonization, one that explicitly challenges the dominance of slavery’s spectacular visuality. Douglass does not define listening as an unconscious, universal, biological given but rather as a socially constructed and embodied act of aural literacy: an intellectual, physical, and emotional openness to sound that shapes and is shaped by one’s subject position. Listening operates simultaneously in the Narrative as a site of meaning and as ethical involvement. When listening, Douglass intimates, one always has some skin in the game.
Subsequent iterations of Douglass-as-listener reinforce the act of listening as a racially dichotomous and mutually exclusive experience both structured by and structuring everyday life on the plantation. Unlike visual spectacles, which can dissipate when removed from view, the aural imagery of Hester’s scream leaves echoes and traces that reverberate in Douglass’s memory and bleed throughout the Narrative.