The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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survival but also for enabling an evolving understanding of one’s self. I close-read Jacobs’s Incidents somewhat against the grain as both a literary and a theoretical text, exploring how she mobilizes the trope of the listener to posit the importance of aural literacy in everyday life. I also articulate how Brent’s listening practice—a form of queered listening Yvon Bonenfant calls “listening out,” an “unusual reaching” toward others66—evolves through four key periods in her life: girlhood, young womanhood, entrapment in the garret, and her eventual freedom.
Jacobs’s story emphasizes the diversity, contingency, and mutability of listening while also charting her own difficulty in reshaping her embodied praxis. Like Douglass, Brent spends her early childhood away from slavery’s immediate horrors; her grandmother, a free woman, raises her after her enslaved parents’ deaths. Also like Douglass’s, her initiation into slavery’s gendered economy occurs through listening, although it is not the experience of listening to a slave’s scream that marks her as a gendered subject, but rather the moment she has to endure “foul words” whispered into her fifteen-year-old ear by her sexually abusive master, the aptly named Dr. Flint. As Jacobs bluntly states, “Slavery is terrible for men, but it is far more terrible for women.”67 Refusing to accede to the master’s relentless advances even as she recognizes his aural abuses as a constituent part of a female slave’s life—“I shuddered, but I was constrained to listen,” Linda describes68—she eventually takes a white lover, Mr. Sands, to spite Flint and exact some control over her body and her desire. She has two children with Sands while remaining subject to her master’s rage and her mistress’s jealousy. When Flint refuses to let Sands buy their children and threatens their sale, Linda goes into hiding in her grandmother’s garret. Nine feet long, seven feet wide, and only three feet tall, this tight space hides Linda for seven years. Battling atrophy and illness, Linda listens hungrily for her children’s voices, overhears valuable information from the street, and uses her listening practices to retain familial connections. Linda eventually ends up a fugitive in New York, where she works as a nurse to a wealthy white family, saving money to free her children and build a family home. Incidents ends with Linda and her children struggling against new oppressions, ostensibly free but wrestling with Northern racism; slavery, white supremacy, and the vagaries of the dominant white listening ear exert a discomfiting influence on her perceptions long after her escape.
“It Was Not Long before We Heard the Tramp of Feet and the Sound of Voices”: Aural Literacy and the Auditory Imagination
Without dismissing the eventual necessity of written literacy, Jacobs’s Incidents identifies aural literacy and auditory imagination as crucial skill sets slaves attain as a consequence of enslavement. Both can be honed as potential sites of freedom and resistance that evade the sonic color line and the listening ear, even as they ultimately trade upon and operate within these disciplinary forces. While Jacobs avoids pitting aurality against written literacy, she expresses much more skepticism than Douglass regarding America’s dominant cultural narrative equating written literacy with freedom. Jacobs has a “troubled relationship with language,” Holly Blackford writes, which is “associated with patriarchy, rape, violation, and abolitionist appropriation.”69 Initially, Linda’s ability to read further enslaves her, as Dr. Flint sends her sexually abusive notes and demands written responses. For these reasons, Jacobs instead concentrates on articulating the literacies that slaves already possess, especially their ability to glean important, lifesaving knowledge from the minutest of auditory details. Through the cultivation of a sophisticated aural literacy that detected discrepancies in listening practices—that those on top of the power structure labeled particular sounds as “black” and interpreted them as markedly different from sounds deemed “white” (read: normal, human)—slaves accrued knowledge, prevented punishment, fostered resistance, preserved memories, and constructed cultural identity.70 Linda’s son, for example, hears a wayward cough stray from Linda’s attic hiding place, and even though years have passed and he has no idea of her location, he immediately recognizes the sound. For years afterward and without mentioning his suspicions to anyone, he protects his mother by steering whites and neighborhood children away from that side of the house. As Jacobs highlights, whites may have kept slaves from the written word under threat of extreme corporeal punishment and defined their sonic profiles by enforcing the sonic color line, but some slaves sought agency through alternative sensory modes of communication, information gathering, and self-expression. In defiance of the white elite listening ear that defined black listening as biologically determined obedience and nonverbal communication as repugnant, Jacobs mobilizes the trope of the listener to reveal the complexity of black listening practices and revalue the written word as only one form of literacy among others.
In addition to providing crucial information for everyday survival, Linda’s skilled aural literacy equips her with an important site of imagination in defiance of the sonic color line’s historical erasure of the sounds of black family presence and its classification of black listeners as reacting solely—and simply—to immediate external stimuli. Jacobs depicts Brent’s vibrant auditory imagination as peopled with the voices of family members past and present, remembered sounds that strengthen her forcibly ruptured familial bonds while spurring her to take the necessary actions to free herself and her children. In Listening and Voice, phenomenologist Don Idhe describes the auditory imagination as a “mode of experience [wherein] lies the full range from sedimented memories to wildest fancy” that interweaves imagined sound with perceived sound and forms “an almost continuous aspect of self-presence” through the expressions of one’s inner voice. Idhe argues that Western scholarship has severely neglected the auditory imagination because Enlightenment ideologies assume thought to be a disembodied activity rather than one experienced through and activated by the body.71 In contrast, Jacobs’s literary representation of Linda’s auditory imagination relates the power of embodied knowledge as personal and social resistance, as Linda experiences the remembered voices of her family members as interwoven with the sights and sounds of slaves’ collective historical memory of their enslavement. She experiences copresence not only in the context of her own voice but also through the voices of family members—dead and living—that challenge the social death of slavery’s official narratives declaring black slaves as without history, culture, and family.
Triggered by visits to sites important to the history of her family’s enslavement, Linda’s vivid auditory imagination enables her to re-story a landscape with events all but erased by acts of white supremacy. I borrow the term “re-story” from Neil Campbell, who extended Gary Nabhan’s concept to the contested landscapes of contemporary Western American literature. Without eliding its specificity, I find the term useful to understanding how Jacobs depicts Linda’s ability to layer African American histories, memories, and counternarratives onto the Southern plantation, a space physically and narratively dominated by whites.72 Using her auditory imagination, Linda re-stories this seemingly serene landscape with memories of her family’s presence that whites have deliberately suppressed and erased. For example, when Linda visits her mother’s grave on the eve of her decision to run away, she ruminates on the cloying sense of “death-like stillness” that marks its sacredness to her and the profound loss represented by unmarked graves: people silenced in both life and death, forced to the outskirts of their communities and removed from official narratives of American history, culture, and identity. But Linda’s mother does not remain silent; Jacobs writes, “I received my mother’s blessing when she died, and in many an hour of tribulation I had seemed to hear her voice, sometimes chiding me, sometimes whispering loving words into my wounded heart.”73 As discussed earlier, nineteenth-century American culture considered a person’s last words important (and quite revealing of character). Here Jacobs evokes the Victorian sentimental practice of listening for a loved one’s last words but emphasizes the materiality of her mother’s voice and its ability to console Linda far into the unseen future. While Blackford interprets Linda’s memory as a projection of her conflicted feelings regarding the remaining female figures in her life, namely Mrs. Flint and her grandmother Marthy’s “double power to abuse and nourish,” I counter that Linda’s specific evocation of her mother’s sound must be heard and respected, particularly because voices possess unique links to memories of individual people.74 Slavery’s power dynamics sought to lump slaves together as an indistinguishable mass, a practice Hartman calls “fungibility.”75 Forbidden to keep written or material