The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
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images of pain and suffering while suggesting that sounds produced within the sonic color line’s bounds have power, meaning, and value. In the word and the sound then, singing provided slaves a communal experience of vibrational, emotional, and psychological possibility—however temporary and transient—outside of bondage and the listening ear’s binaristic logic. Jacobs’s imagery intimates that if slaves, whenever possible, attuned themselves to the truth and value expressed through their own voices, they would increasingly be able to hear it as well. By listening differently to their singing—what I identify as decolonizing listening—they would strengthen their auditory imaginations and redirect their listening practices away from the listening ear’s obliteration.
To deconstruct the listening ear and to underscore the boundary she redraws between slaves’ cries of pain and shouts of song, Jacobs embeds the sounds of screams within slavery’s larger sonic economy of sexual violence, an institutional soundscape naturalized by the sonic color line as business as usual. Challenging her white Northern readership to hear slaves’ suppressed screams-within-screams—and perhaps rattling black readers into the radical openness of Douglass’s listening practices—Jacobs counters the screams’ physical dissipation by using aural imagery to reveal the interconnection between slavery’s violences and their lingering systemic, terror-inducing, and often silent resonances, particularly for the sold-away and the dying. In Jacobs’s sonic economy, the screams of the man Flint beats perform as an audible herald and spectacular mask for its quieter but no less brutal expressions. Following the incident, Linda describes how whispered speculations arise amongst the slave community as they look to his wife’s fair newborn child; the couple’s quarrelling reverberates across the quarters. However, all these sounds abruptly cease when Flint sells both man and woman away. Not only does Flint profit from his cruelty, but he also “had the satisfaction of knowing they were out of sight and hearing.”92 Flint engineers the sights and soundscape of the plantation to satisfy his own sensory desires and to uphold his self-image, remixing screams with silence in order to retain his power and standing. As the slave trader leads the mother of Flint’s child away, she yells, “You promised to treat me well,” breaking the master’s silence and publicly revealing the open secret of his abuse and paternity. Flint counters by blaming her because she refused to collude with his sonic and sexual designs: “You have let your tongue run too far, damn you!” Together, the screams of the whipped would-be father and the protests of the sold-away mother reverberate and bleed together in the narrative’s soundscape as Jacobs ends the chapter with a vignette relating the aural torture of another young slave mother by her mistress, who shouts obscenities into her ear as she lies dying from a difficult birth of “a child nearly white.”93 Jacobs’s aural imagery connects sounds that the listening ear deems isolated institutional by-products, exposing them as constitutive of the gendered violence at the heart of the slave economy. Neither necessary aural collateral damage nor raw material for redemption, the sounds of men and women screaming reveal both public pain and secreted social and familial relations. Related just pages before Flint’s first attempt at rape, Linda’s memory of these screams and their suppression foreshadows—presounds?—the aural abuse Linda will experience when the master and mistress initiate her into the plantation’s sexual economy. Here, too, Jacobs resists the listening ear’s perception of slavery by deliberately mingling two sounds the sonic color line would separate, slaves’ screams and the master’s and mistress’s abusive whispers.
Paradoxically an aural contrast and an analogue to slaves’ screams, the master’s whispers terrorize and discipline Linda to slave womanhood—the third major listening event marking the end of her childhood—and the obedient listening demanded by her prurient master and the sonic color line writ large. Without denying the importance of screams, Jacobs insists slavery’s most devastating sounds were its least audible: the hushed—and pervasive—whispers of rape and sexual abuse that envelop young women in rage, shame, depression, and fear, sounds rarely amplified in nineteenth-century society. Her editor, abolitionist Lydia Marie Child, worried that “many will accuse [Jacobs] of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public,” and Jacobs herself declared it “would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history.”94 However, in recreating the master’s whispers, she breaks the protective silence surrounding sex slavery and its impact on black women, revealing the “character of men living among them.” From Flint’s first visceral assault with “stinging, scorching words, words that scathed ear and brain like fire,” everything in Brent’s life changes, from her feeling of security, to her relationship with her grandmother, to her sense of herself as a woman.95 I disagree with Li that Brent defers to “describing her master’s abuse as an attack of language” in an attempt to avoid “representing his body as danger to her sexual virtue.”96 Vocal cord vibrations are material representations. Jacobs’s descriptions do not replicate the master’s language; rather, he attacks her with sounds, physical vibrations emanating from his body and violating hers. The combined /s/ sounds of “stinging,” “scorching,” and “scathed,” for example, mimic Flint’s whispers, while the image of fire suggests the heat of her master’s breath forcing itself into her ear canal and sound’s metaphoric ability to burn the foundations of her life to cinders. Rather than avoiding a scandalizing discussion of rape, this scene uses sound and listening to represent rape itself, including the life-altering trauma Linda experiences afterward.
In Linda’s account, slaveholding whites enact an aural terrorism in order to discipline black women’s listening practices, altering their minds, bodies, behavior, and well-being. Answering the silence of Douglass’s Narrative regarding Hester’s listening experiences—perhaps Hester screamed so loudly to drown out the master’s “horrid oaths” forced into her ear—Linda relates how slave girls are “reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers.”97 Revealing how sexual violence drives so many of slavery’s horrors, Linda’s evocative image aligns the serpentine sonic boom of the master’s whip with the vibrational undulations of his tongue in her ear—and both with his phallus (and its successive generations). Another of Jacobs’s deft sonic connections, the linkage of whip and whisper provides a stark contrast with the discourse of Victorian innocence and “true womanhood.” In such a dangerous atmosphere, Jacobs shows the importance of slaves’ precise listening practices for survival.
Just as Jacobs makes explicit how Linda’s slave masters’ enforcement of the sonic color line disciplined her, she also conveys how engagement with the listening ear’s racialized perspective filters Mistress Flint’s listening across the sonic color line, a process leading to further abuse of black women. Jacobs explains:
White daughters early hear their parents quarrelling about some female slave. Their curiosity is excited, and they soon learn the cause. They are attended by the young slave girls whom their father has corrupted, and they hear such talk as should never meet youthful ears, or any other ears. They know that the women slaves are subject to their father’s authority in all things; and in some cases they exercise the same authority over the male slaves.98
The quarrelling tone, in particular, shunts the white girls’ initial “youthful” “curiosity” toward an admiration (and for some a replication) of white patriarchal power, a sonic experience that prompts them to hear their racialized difference from the black girls who “attend” them, silencing fledgling possibilities for gendered solidarity. The moment when white girls’ ears become attuned to their fathers’ power—and, by extension, their own—functions as the flip side to the “bloodstained gate” of slavery described by both Douglass and Jacobs.
Jacobs’s representation of the tortuous relationship between Linda and Mrs. Flint exemplifies how the listening ear operates at the intersection of gender and race. When Mr. Flint begins abusing Linda, she comes to Mrs. Flint expecting refuge and sympathy. However, Mrs. Flint continues to turn a cold ear to Linda’s woes even as she extracts lurid information about her husband, exerting racial and sexual authority over Linda and blaming her for inciting Mr. Flint’s lust. Mrs. Flint wields listening as a medium of domination, extracting Linda’s story in what amounts to a public inquisition rather than an intimate confession; after asking Linda to swear on a Bible, she “order[s]” her to speak. Meeting Mrs. Flint’s listening ear with her own skillful aural literacy, Linda quickly realizes