The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Читать онлайн книгу.
Mr. Flint’s affections. Mrs. Flint chooses to torment rather than help Linda, creeping to her at night to “test” her by whispering into her ear while she sleeps, allegedly to ferret out Linda’s “true” response to Flint. By forcing her tongue, lips, and breath into Linda’s ear, Mrs. Flint terrorizes Linda à la Mr. Flint to seize racialized power over her, performing her own desire for Linda’s sexual submission by ventriloquizing the voice of the white patriarchy. By exposing Mrs. Flint’s dominating listening practices and their kinship to patriarchy, Jacobs exposes the seams of “true womanhood.” While Child’s introduction frames Incidents as Jacobs’s attempt to regender herself as a “lady” by confessing to the “delicate” ears of white Northern readers, Jacobs’s narrative instead challenges the listening ear as a paradigm, revealing gendered assumptions about listening as they are crosscut by the sonic color line. Through the character of Mrs. Flint, Jacobs “ungenders” Southern white women by exposing the notion of “delicate ears” as a deliberate artifice that shields white women from black women’s suffering and enacts racialized subjugation.99
Jacobs represents Mrs. Flint’s manifestation of the dominant white listening ear as a “petty [and] tyrannical” instrument of what Hartman delineates as “everyday subjection,” one that manifests a particularly insidious flexibility in its constant vigilance for new aural markers of black Otherness to extend the sonic color line’s reach.100 In close quarters occupied by black and white bodies, visual distinctions alone could not guard against intimate exchange. Here whites used the sonic color line to maintain distance through aural performances of racialized power relations, segregating blackness from whiteness without physical separation. Mrs. Flint’s listening ear fluctuates rapidly between radical hardness and a heightened sensitivity to racial difference in the smallest everyday detail. She persistently marks sounds produced by black bodies as noise: sound that does not belong, sound that is out of place, sound that must be continually policed. Mrs. Flint, for example, beats Linda because the sound of her new winter shoes “grated harshly on her refined nerves.”101 Jealous of the sexual attention forced on Linda by her husband and threatened by Linda’s love for her free grandmother—provider of the shoes—Mrs. Flint amplifies the small squeak to an epically “horrid noise.” She perceives the creaking shoes as signaling the threat of the hypersexual black female body in her primary arena of power as the (re)producer of legitimate offspring and heirs. To reassert her authority, Mrs. Flint forces Linda to remove the shoes and, quite literally, toe her sonic color line through miles of biting cold snow. The listening ear enabled whites to experience a different world within the same spaces they occupied with black people, one protected by its deliberate imperceptibility even as white listeners meted out punishments large and small for trespasses of the sonic color line.
By representing the world-within-a-world of the racialized listening ear alongside depictions of resistant listening by slaves, Jacobs shows readers how black subjects began to decolonize their listening practices even under white surveillance. By manipulating her masters’ expectations of how she will listen, for example, Linda sometimes turns her proscribed listening position into a mode of resistance without overtly transgressing the sonic color-line—sometimes “listen[ing] with silent contempt” and at other times concealing the knowledge of her pregnancy by remaining silent—allowing her some psychological disassociation from Flint’s abuse and a modicum of control over her body. Kevin Quashie argues for “the sovereignty of quiet” in black culture and history in his book of the same name, noting how “the expressiveness of silence is often aware of an audience, a watcher or a listener whose presence is the reason for the withholding—it is an expressiveness which is intent and even defiant.”102 By strategically concealing anger and fear, Linda’s silences refuse the Flints’ pleasure at her “shuddering.” Beyond resistance, Linda uses her silence as an opportunity to listen to others’ listening, a metacognitive practice enabling new forms of listening and selfhood to emerge.
Linda’s listening deliberately creates space for (and affirms) black lives, sounds, and familial relationships, a form of decolonizing listening. In a scene revealing listening’s potential for empathy amid terror, for example, Linda inhabits her brother’s aural experience as Flint forces him to listen while he punishes Linda: “I felt humiliated that my brother should listen to such language as would be addressed only to a slave. Poor boy! He was powerless to defend me; but I saw the tears, which he strove vainly to keep back.”103 In listening to her brother listen, Linda understands how masculinity intersects with race for her brother, who—similar to the young Douglass—experiences his own enslavement in his inability to help his sister. Like her brother and Douglass, Linda refuses to harden her ear against slavery’s violence. In another instance, the Flints place Linda in the position of listening to her own daughter, left alone outside, “crying that weary cry which makes a mother’s heart bleed.” Initially, she feels “obliged to steel [her]self to bear it” to protect them both from worse punishment.104 However, the trauma of hardening her ear and its near-disastrous result—her daughter cries herself to sleep in the mansion’s crawl space and barely escapes a poisonous snake—spur Linda to action. She very deliberately rejects both black listening-as-obedience and the callousness of the slave masters’ listening ear, risking her own life by sending her daughter to her grandmother’s without asking Flint’s permission. By listening to her daughter in the ethically involved manner Douglass fights to maintain, Linda begins to decolonize her listening practice from slavery’s violent and dehumanizing discipline, opening herself to the dangerous vulnerability of love and connection.
The third major geographic shift in Linda’s life—the seven years she spends hidden in her grandmother’s garret, nearly all her young motherhood—mobilizes the trope of the listener to make material the sonic color line’s claustrophobic effects on black subjects and amplify listening as a strategy to survive and resist isolation. Literary critics have analyzed this space—only nine feet long and seven feet wide—as a representation of a grave (social death), a cell (slavery as incarceration), a womb (rebirth), an image of the Middle Passage, a symbol of the restriction on women’s lives (the “confinement” of pregnancy and child-rearing), and a signifier of the African American literary trope of the “tight space” that black people occupy, metaphorically and materially, in U.S. society. Building on Incidents’ critical history, I argue that sensory deprivation factors into all of these prior readings, particularly in the case of sight. An inversion of Douglass’s Aunt Hester scene, here a slave mother, trapped in a darkened crawl space, listens to the sounds of her children laughing and playing to “comfort [her] in [her] despondency.”105 Linda’s cramped space of imprisonment, therefore, also functions as an isolation chamber in which listening remains her primary link to the world.106 While not completely removed, her senses of smell, taste, and touch are severely restricted. For the first few months, Linda cannot see; she knows the passage of time “only by the noises [she] heard; for in [her] small den day and night were all the same.”107 Both before and after she carves out a small peephole in her garret, listening binds Linda to life and provides comfort, even as her heightened aural literacy demands she bear the psychological weight of listening to herself as “noise” and continually strain for the sound of her master’s approach.
The isolation chamber of the garret heightens Linda’s attention to the myriad ways the white listening ear demands that black people listen to themselves as “noise.” Every sound the fugitive Linda makes threatens to reveal her body as out of bonds/bounds; therefore, she turns the listening ear against herself, policing her every movement and suppressing even the subtlest bodily functions. Although there is a certain amount of power and satisfaction gained in being an unseen listener—culling important intelligence, as Linda points out, without need of the eye—being constantly on the ready during “countless” nights filled with intermittent blasts of information devastates her nerves. After years of being “warned to keep extremely quiet,” “even [her] face and tongue stiffened, and [she] lost the power of speech.” When her ability to communicate atrophies, Linda experiences a concomitant loss of self. Although Linda never fully loses her ability to listen, she yearns for its sociality to be unfettered, revelling in moments where her oppressive quietude is broken: “It was also pleasant to me to hear a human voice speaking to me above a whisper.”108 Linda embraces not only the meaning of conversational exchange but also the delightful experience of sound itself, which signifies a material difference between