The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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on both slavery and the fight against it.
“In the Sound”: Listening to Slaves Sing
Although a qualitatively different aural image from Hester’s cries of pain, the Great House Farm sequence immediately following evokes the trope of the listener to reveal how the tones of slave song also sound out the “soul-killing effects of slavery.”54 Douglass-as-protagonist joins his fellow slaves in permeating the woods with musical projections of presence, and Douglass-as-author plays with the racialized assumptions of the elite white listening ear that slave songs were a meaningless collection of “wild notes” signifying contentment.55 Given his white reader’s likely assumption that these tones, however “wild,” expressed less pain and violence than Hester’s shrieks, Douglass’s meditation on the memory of singing and listening to these songs recasts his vulnerability to sound as a willful openness to both the everyday pain of slavery as well as the knowledge produced “if not in the word, in the sound.”56
However, while Douglass’s representation of listening to Aunt Hester utilizes spatial proximity to create a sense of uncomfortable intimacy among differently raced listeners and readers interrogating the supposed universality of sounded pain, the trope of listening in the slave song sequence relies on time to effect distance, this time questioning the sonic color line’s representation of musical sound. For Douglass-as-protagonist, the experience of listening to his voice join fellow slaves in song complements and echoes Hester’s expressions of pain and resistance. Unlike his childhood memory of the scream, the slave songs Douglass exhumes refuse to remain in the past, creating a dissonant aural effect. Remembering the songs years later—yet crying fresh tears—Douglass-as-author represents his experience of listening as doubled, enabling him to examine himself “within the circle” of slavery while simultaneously questioning how his interpellation into an American identity—however uneven, partial, and limited—impacts his sensory perception of the past and present.57 Does becoming free and “American” mean becoming attuned to the increasingly rigid contours of the white supremacist sonic color line that tunes out the cultural production of slaves as senseless noise? Douglass admonishes his readers that the “mere hearing” of the slave songs should automatically “impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery,” especially according to dominant norms about sound’s emotional impact; however, his doubled listening experience enables an understanding of how the sonic color line has already primed white Northern ears to hear “the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness.”58 The proximity of the slave song passage to the Hester scene connects the erotic sensitivity and obdurate tuning out of the Southern master’s ear with white Northerners’ inability to hear slave songs as anything but plantation fantasy and/or amusical gibberish. Interrogating the universality of musical value forwarded by Western culture, Douglass notes how slave songs were dismissed as “apparently incoherent,” “unmeaning jargon” by cultural outsiders trained to consider sound as superfluous or secondary to meaning.59 While Douglass highlights his own ability to cross the encircling confines of the sonic color line and maintain a dual listening practice, he also seriously questions whether traffic across the sonic color line can flow in the other direction.
Douglass not only models the complex, self-reflective fluidity of his own listening practices but also calls upon the trope of the listener to expose the mutability of the sonic color line, challenging his white readership to listen beyond their racialized expectations and desires. His double-voiced text hails his white Northern readers as listeners, using aural imagery to evoke their spatial, ideological, and perceptual distance from slaves and amplify their potentially surprising and discomfiting connections with the sensibilities of white Southern elites. Douglass urges his white Northern readers to place themselves “deep in the pine woods … in silence,” quieting their racially conditioned reactions so that the slaves’ songs may breach the listening ear’s distorting filter.60 Douglass charges white readers with an ethical responsibility to hear African American cultural production with alternate assumptions about value, agency, and meaning, particularly regarding the relationship between the written word and nonverbal sound laid out by texts such as The Columbian Orator. Only then may they hear black voices in sonic resistance to the system denying them personhood, “every tone a testimony against slavery.”61 Exceedingly aware that sound is always already enmeshed in the sonic color line and skeptical of sentimental appeals to sound as truth, Douglass’s aural imagery issues a challenge to dominant notions of truth produced and disseminated through the listening ear. The Narrative both manipulates and resists the sonic color line, denaturalizing the racialized listening practices of both blacks and whites, exposing them as one of slavery’s habituating violences.
The musical imagery of Douglass’s Narrative has been read predominately as hearkening to the potential connections to be made through cross-racial listening, what Jon Cruz calls “ethnosympathy.”62 However, as Carla Kaplan finds, African American literature “often seeks to dramatize its lack of listeners” and the impossibility of reaching competent, let alone ideal, readers.63 In fact, Douglass closes the slave song passage with the “singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island,” an aural image likening enslavement to the isolation of being perpetually without a listener or interpretive community.64 Even as Douglass’s work appeals to the power of sound for legal, political, literary, and ontological representation of slaves’ experiences, his doubled ears hear the dehumanizing physical violence of Hester’s beatings in both the slave songs and in the deleterious interpretive violence performed by white listeners who ignore, misunderstand, dismiss, and/or (mis)interpret black cultural production for their own ends.
However, Douglass’s challenge to the sonic color line stops short of fully examining gendered oppression. In fact, by privileging and universalizing male sonic experience, Douglass affixes a gendered meaning to the sounds that is uncomfortably aligned with dominant nineteenth-century modes of understanding sexual difference. Douglass casts the collective singing of the slaves as, at heart, an expression of the individual masculine proclivity to create expressive culture out of the experience of social death, while Hester’s individual screams represent a collective expression of pain, suffering, and resistance. Although these sonic labors are intimately intertwined, their sources remain distinct; Douglass represents the female scream as raw material to be transduced into masculine song. Such a gendered division of sonic labor comes about not only because Douglass works within dominant American ideas connecting women to emotional expression and men to artistic production but also because he depicts the acts of listening to these sounds—however diverse—as a form of congress between men: between Douglass and his master in the Aunt Hester scene and between Douglass and an imagined white male abolitionist reader in the case of slave singing. The biggest silence in the Narrative is not the lack of Hester’s words, but rather Douglass’s failure to represent Hester as a listener, her embodied ear understanding and representing her own screams and intervening in the masculine power relationships formed over her bloody body and through her voice’s strained grain. His Narrative also remains silent on how the slave singers use listening to connect through—and in spite of—their profound isolation.
Refining the “Listening Ear”: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Whereas Douglass evokes the trope of listening only a few times in his Narrative, Harriet Jacobs represents the pervasiveness of listening in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, exploring it as both an intimate vehicle for oppression and a covert method of resisting slavery’s unrelenting isolation. A first-person narrative told through the perspective of Jacobs’s pseudonymous persona Linda Brent, Incidents intertwines the stories of Brent’s harrowing fight against physical and sexual abuse and her protracted struggle for freedom for herself and her children.65 While Jacobs mobilizes many of the generic conventions of the slave narrative, she concerns herself less with revealing the salacious and violent events of slavery for her white Northern readership and much more with communicating how Linda Brent perceives slavery’s traumas, particularly how she listens to them. In detailing Brent and her family’s sonic understanding of their experiences as slaves, Jacobs emphasizes aurality as an indispensable mode of literacy, imagination, and memory, both personal and historical. Open to pleasure in spite of continuous exposure to pain, Brent’s embodied listening recognizes sound’s fundamental importance to slavery’s power relationships. Laying important groundwork toward what later emerges as decolonizing