The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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at once and a perceptual framework enabling a limited experience of agency over themselves and their environment.
“Joy and Sadness in the Sound”: Listening as Epistemology
Jacobs’s self-reflexive representation of Linda Brent’s evolving listening experiences evinces the sonic color line’s presence and makes palpable the terrible resonance of the listening ear on slaves’ self-perceptions and apprehensions. By tracking Linda’s listening practices through changes in age, geography, and social status, Jacobs constructs listening not as a fixed biological trait but as a flexible process capable of change (albeit with great effort); Jacobs imparts this lesson to white and black readers. Listening practices may seem natural and immutable, but as Pauline Oliveros would later argue, listening is actually “a process developing from instantaneous survival reactions to ideas that drive consciousness. The listening process continues throughout one’s lifetime.”84 Jacobs represents listening as a responsive and evolving mode of learning for slaves in particular, crucial to self-understanding, accruing knowledge over time and remaining vigilantly attentive to imminent danger. For slaves, Jacobs indicates, matters of survival intertwine intimately with “ideas that drive consciousness,” and the episteme of listening equips Linda with some sustenance and protection, as well as her capacity to imagine a life and identity outside of “slave.” Incidents represents Linda’s practiced ability to perceive echoes of the past in the present—knowledge key to her survival—but also tracks how her ear adapts to new ideas, locations, and iterations of the sonic color line. Four distinct moments and geographies shape Linda’s auditory experience and demand new modes of listening: her childhood with her family at her first mistress’s home, her girlhood on the Flints’ plantation, her young motherhood in the “loophole of retreat” in her grandmother’s attic, and her time as a fugitive in the urban North.
In Linda’s childhood, listening emerges as a key way to obtain truths, however painful, despite the sonic color line’s narrowed definition of black listening abilities. Raised in “fortunate circumstances,” Linda doesn’t learn she is a slave until age six, upon her mother’s death, when she listens to her friends and family unfold her family’s genealogy. Although she describes her mistress as “kind”—she teaches Linda to read, does not beat her, and allows her to remain with her grandmother—Linda finds herself no less in slavery’s clutches. Through listening, she learns whom to listen to and whom to regard with distrust. Upon death, Linda’s mistress does not free her as promised but arbitrarily bequeaths her to a five-year-old niece. Thus disciplined to listen to the promises (and interpret the kindnesses) of white people with skepticism, Linda quickly understands that words can be twisted, promises broken, and sworn oaths denied, even as some words whites speak become ironclad truths with great consequences for her and her family. Finally, as I have mentioned, the comforting exchanges she has with her mother, father, and grandmother during this time help shape her aural literacy and auditory imagination while enabling lasting aural bonds.
When twelve-year-old Linda arrives at the Flints’, her listening practices shift dramatically upon encountering the listening ear of her new master and mistress, both of whom unsparingly discipline her via aural terrorism. They forcibly attune her to the aural markers of slavery’s raced and gendered power relations: the equation of slave listening with obedience, the master’s deliberately “cold words and cold treatment,” the spectacular sounds of violence, the master’s sexually abusive whispers, and the controlling power of silence.85 Almost immediately, Linda learns the obedient listening expected of slaves by observing her brother Willie’s conundrum when his father and his new mistress simultaneously demand his attention. She describes how he
hesitated between the two; being perplexed to know which had the strongest claim upon his obedience. He finally concluded to go to his mistress. When my father reproved him for it, he said, “You both called me, and I didn’t know which I ought to go to first.”
“You are my child,” replied our father. “and when I call you, you should come immediately, if you have to pass through fire and water.”
Poor Willie! He was now to learn his first lesson of obedience to a master.86
Witnessing Willie choose between the listening ear’s demand that he court his father’s reproach—devastating their familial relationship and acknowledging its tenuousness—or risk physical punishment by ignoring his mistress teaches Linda the relationship between listening and power. Not only does she observe Willie concede to whites’ primary authority, but she also sees how the listening ear and its power to enforce listening as obedience uncomfortably link the roles of master and father. Willie’s experience influences Linda to reject listening as obedience; as Stephanie Li notes, Linda “avoids creating the double-bind that entraps her brother,” never calling her children to her nor demanding public displays of love.87 In contrast, Linda spends time listening to her children, coming to know and love them through this practice.
The second listening experience marking the abrupt end to Linda’s girlhood occurs the night she earwitnesses Mr. Flint beating a slave, an act of violence and aural terrorism that reveals the limits of language and further conditions her gendered relationship to the master’s power and the sonic color line. Signifying on the imagery of the Hester scene in Douglass’s Narrative, Jacobs’s Incidents de-emphasizes violence’s spectacular qualities, embedding it into a larger economy of gendered violence. “I shall never forget that night,” Linda recalls. “Never before, in my life, had I heard hundreds of blows fall, in succession, on a human being. His piteous groans, and his ‘O pray don’t, Massa’ rang in my ear for months afterward.”88 Unlike Douglass’s graphic audiovisual description, Jacobs’s representation of the unnamed man’s beating is almost completely aural, an editorial choice that depicts heard violence as itself terrorism rather than merely its by-product. Her use of “never before” signifies how such aural terrorism creates a new understanding of her subject position and hints that this will not be the last time she hears such sounds; the usual rhetorical companion, “never again,” never comes. Jacobs asserts the slave’s humanity before she describes his “piteous groans,” and she reduces the master to the metonymic rise and fall of the whip, using this machinelike sound to reveal him—rather than the slave he beats—as inhuman. Whereas the interchange between Douglass’s Aunt Hester and his master possesses a disturbingly personal and erotic intensity, Jacobs’s scene casts violence as rote and institutional. Not that the master’s abuse remains free of desire, as the relentless rising and falling of the whip alludes; Flint beats the man because the man has (rightly) accused him of fathering his wife’s child. While Douglass represents Hester only through her screams, Jacobs relates the slave’s linguistic and extralinguistic pleas; however, rather than humanizing him further, as so many of Douglass’s critics argued a transcription of Hester’s words would have accomplished, the man’s cry “O pray don’t, Massa” works to the contrary. Andrew Levy explains how the word “Massa” functions as a strategic rhetorical appeal to the “power of deference” to stop the attack, as well as a calculated literary technique to enhance the “expressive appeal” of Jacobs’s text to her white Northern readers.89 Without foreclosing these possibilities, I suggest the scene affirms Douglass’s conclusion that words alone will not stop the master’s whip, while also considering how words themselves, in certain contexts, can lead to further enslavement by verbally performing the sonic color line.
In another key shift from Douglass’s iconic imagery, Jacobs avoids linking the male slave’s screams to black musical culture, instead representing song as an excruciatingly brief exercise of agency—how the slaves might hear it—rather than reaching across the sonic color line to challenge the listening ear’s misrepresentations. In Jacobs’s depictions of slaves singing at Johnkannaus and a Methodist town meeting, she highlights their experience of choosing when and how to use their voices in a manner pleasing to themselves.90 Both the singing and its attendant listening experiences provided slaves with fleeting feelings akin to freedom, producing powerful affects that operated neither as false balm nor empty diversion but rather as a crucial exercise of will and imagination. Jacobs invites the possibility of enjoyment through song, one that Douglass’s representation forecloses: “If you were to hear them at such times, you might think they were happy. But can that hour of singing and shouting sustain them through the dreary week, toiling