The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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and ephemeral, here and then gone. Through her auditory imagination, Linda resists slavery’s fungibility and erasure. Linda internalizes not only the sound of her mother’s voice but also the sonic experience of being parented by her, in discipline and in comfort, and she evokes this memory when she seeks motivation or a model for her own parenting. Jacobs shares the knowledge and actions produced through Linda’s (re)enactment of her mother’s sonic legacy without exposing its specific content, an act of agency in the face of her undoubtedly and uncomfortably curious white readership.
A second evocation of the trope of the listener, this time in reference to her father’s vocal timbre, amplifies the specificity of Linda’s auditory imagination and its ability to hear histories deliberately squelched by the white listening ear. Her father’s faded grave, marked only by a small wooden board with writing “nearly obliterated,” contrasts with her sharp memory of his voice: “I passed the wreck of the old meeting house, where, before Nat Turner’s time, the slaves had been allowed to meet for worship, I seemed to hear my father’s voice come from it, bidding me not to tarry till I reached freedom or the grave. I rushed on with renovated hopes.”76 Linda projects the sound of her father’s voice onto the plantation’s built environment as a reminder of its bloody history and of slaves’ claims to it. She also connects his voice to slaves’ resistance. Although Linda’s recollection genders resistance—her mother associated with comfort and her father with overt rebellion—that both of them speak to her in rapid succession foreshadows how Linda eventually combines these strategies. Her auditory imagination provides her with the knowledge that her dream was once theirs too.
In carefully attending to the sound of her dead parents’ voices, Linda’s auditory imagination both re-stories the plantation landscape with her ancestors’ presence and constructs subversive narratives that defy the sonic color line’s constricting definitions of black sonic subjectivity. Cavicchi argues for the importance of the auditory imagination in the antebellum period as a narrative force. In particular, “soundless ‘interior’ hearing,” of the type experienced by Linda Brent, “became an important factor in conversion stories, often acting as the catalyst for the dramatic ‘turning’ that precipitated being ‘born again.’ Sounds of thunder, bells, and birds were all carefully examined for evidence of either God’s grace or Satan’s temptation.”77 Jacobs, in fact, does not describe Brent as remembering voices; rather she “seemed to hear” the interior sounds rise from external objects such as the wreckage of the worship house.78 Linda also hears the sounds of her living-but-absent children’s voices as tones that bind her to life and spur her to risk everything to secure their freedom. Jacobs’s use of the trope of the listener powerfully connects Linda’s decision to escape slavery with popular cultural narratives of religious conversion.
Linda also cultivates her auditory imagination as a method of narrating the events of her life when no other means are available. An unacknowledged precursor to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which the thwarted female protagonist unlooses her visual imagination upon the wallpaper’s whorls when forbidden from writing, Incidents depicts Linda using environmental sounds as emotional touchstones. Jacobs, for instance, invests the sound of Linda’s grandmother’s gate with her feelings. After her master threatens her with rape, Linda visits her grandmother for solace. Finding her angry and disapproving due to the Mistresses’ lies, a devastated Linda describes, “With what feelings did I now close that little gate, which I used to open with such an eager hand in my childhood! It closed upon me with a sound I never heard before.”79 Here the trope of the listener again marks the gendered passage through the “bloodstained gate of slavery,” for Linda the indescribable sound of a literal gate closing upon her physical safety, sexual agency, and dreams of a loving domestic life. Furthermore, as a slave mother-to-be, Linda realizes her limited control—if any—over her children’s future. Jacobs embeds Linda’s horrific realization in the sentence’s very syntax; as a child, Linda eagerly opened the gate, but now the gate “closed upon [her].” The gate remains visually familiar but sounds with a new pitch, re-storying the built environment with the utter transformation of Linda’s world. Jacobs revisits the gate later on, mobilizing its sound to mark another sorrowful threshold: Linda’s loss of her daughter to servitude. From her attic cell, Linda listens to the sounds of her daughter leaving her grandmother’s house to become her father’s family servant: “I heard the gate close after her with such feelings as only a slave mother can experience.”80 In Linda’s auditory imagination, the gate’s click sounds out the distance between herself and her white Northern abolitionist readership, women who claimed sisterhood with black women without attempting to understand the pervasive impact the lack of freedom over one’s body has for slave women, down to the very level of sensory perception.
Jacobs further explores the differences between white listening practices and those developed by slaves, using rich description to detail the white supremacist assumptions enabled by and encoded in the sonic color line, revealing them as specific sonic symbols of American patriarchy and white supremacy rather than universal affective experiences. The most powerful example occurs when Linda, crouched in her darkened attic cell, overhears a performance of the conventionally sentimental popular song “Home Sweet Home” and uses her auditory imagination to challenge the nostalgic idealization of the white woman as wife and mother to the nation. The breakaway hit from the 1829 opera Clari, Maid of Milan and arguably the nineteenth century’s most popular song, “Home Sweet Home” was most famous for its refrain “ ‘Mid pleasures and palaces though I may roam, / Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”81 Given the song’s brisk sales—and the copious “Home Sweet Home!” needlepoints adorning American homes—Jacobs’s readers would have been familiar with its lyrics, melody, and overdetermined cultural meanings that helped shape evolving ideas of middle-class domesticity. While Douglass asks his white readers to imagine the sound of the singing of a “man cast away on a desolate island” as representative of slavery’s isolation, Jacobs presents her readership with the imaginative listening practices of a slave mother cast away in an isolation chamber, eavesdropping on white American middle-class culture.
1854 sheet music from Samuel Owen’s arrangement of “Jenny Lind’s ‘Home Sweet Home,’ ” one of countless versions sold in the mid-nineteenth century reinforcing normative white domesticity.
As she listens as a slave mother, Linda’s auditory imagination unravels the foundations of the song until they no longer “seem like music,” stripping away its European musical trappings and the listening ear’s dominant cultural associations. Jacobs positions Brent as an invisible interloper overhearing a song whose strains are clearly not meant to serenade the ears of a slave mother with no legal right to herself, let alone her children. Linda remembers sitting and
thinking of my children, when I heard a low strain of music. A band of serenaders were under the window playing “Home Sweet Home.” I listened until the sounds did not seem like music, but like the moaning of children. It seemed as if my heart would burst. I rose from my sitting posture, and knelt. A streak of moonlight was on the floor before me, and in the midst of it appeared the forms of my two children.… I felt certain something had happened to my little ones.82
For Brent, there is no place that is home; the song’s conventional sentimentality remains inaccessible, and its sound brings pain and foreboding. Reversing white descriptions of black music as “noise”—and nodding to Douglass’s “if not in the word, in the sound” epistemology—Brent listens to “Home Sweet Home” by breaking it down to the sounds she hears constituting it: “the moaning of children.” Moaning, a sound Moten argues “renders mourning wordless … releasing more than what is bound up in the presence of the word,”83 strips away the lyrics of the song and unlocks its suppressed suffering. The moaning Brent hears reclaims “Home Sweet Home” as specifically for her. Heard through a slave mother’s auditory imagination, “Home Sweet Home” brings not aural assurances of domestic bliss, but rather sonic reminders of the painful toll slavery exacted upon children forced to follow the “condition of the mother.” The challenge that Linda Brent’s auditory imagination presents to the dominant cultural narratives about sound structured by the sonic color