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The Word, the Sound, and the Listening Ear

Listening to the Sonic Color Line in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents

On July 15, 1836, the Greensborough Patriot published an advertisement seeking information on two runaway slaves. The ad’s writer, a John W. McGehee, asks readers to join him in searching for

two negro men, Solomon and Abram, Solomon is a man twenty years old—black complexion; full face; large mouth; thick lips; coarse voice, large feet; with a burn on his back, received when small—six feet high—well made,—smiles when spoken to—took with him a cloak and frock cloth coat, velvet collar. Abram is about five feet six inches high; black complexion; pert when spoken to; strait[sic], well made man; 26 or 7 years of age; small feet,—fine voice.

Far from unusual, the ad exemplifies the grotesque catalogs commonly printed in Southern newspapers that performatively transformed black subjects into what Hortense Spillers calls “the zero degree of flesh.”1 And one finds several racialized sonic descriptors, tucked away matter-of-factly amongst the litany of white-authored visual stereotypes of “blackness.” Cast by the author as simply another “negro” trait to itemize, sonic qualities such as a “fine voice” were, for mid-nineteenth-century whites, becoming as material and identifiable an element of blackness as the already culturally embedded “black complexion,” “large mouth,” and “thick lips.” A keyword search of the University of North Carolina’s digital archive of runaway slave ads reveals the ubiquity and iterative quality of such descriptions, with “hoarse voice” first appearing in 1777, and “fine voice” in 1783, with a sharp increase in 1811 that rises throughout the 1830s and 1840s. Other key recurrent descriptors include “loud,” “manly,” “strong,” and/or “whiny,” sonic affects amplifying the gendered binary of race for black men as hypermasculine/feminized. The frequency of such ads suggests white people began perceiving a clear (and rather blunt) difference between the timbral qualities of black and white voices in the nineteenth century. The culturally constructed sonic difference not only marked certain tones, grains, and cadences as “black” but also, by the comparison that ghosts these ads, suggests whites sensed their voices as normative and not easily categorizable. White vocal grains, it seems, could span a range of sounds that were neither “coarse” nor as “loud” or “strong” as “fine” black voices, terms that characterize black timbres as excessive, overly corporeal, and readily describable.

In addition to racializing vocal timbre, the Greensborough Patriot outlines distinct, observable differences that whites perceived between black and white listening practices. Whereas whites, by implication, may have any number of reactions to being “spoken to,” McGehee limited Solomon and Abram’s listening stances to visible signals of obeisance: “smiles” and a “pert” snapping to attention. Notably, McGehee’s ad never imagines either Solomon or Abram as speaking first, identifying the breaking of silence as a sonic privilege of whiteness and revealing how slaveholding whites imagined power flowing directly through acts of disciplined listening. White-authored descriptions of their slaves’ racialized and power-laden listening countenances appear frequently and consistently in UNC’s digital archive; recurrent modifiers that appear either before or after the phrase “when spoken to” in runaway slave ads printed between 1792 and 1840 include having “down eyes” or a “downcast look,” being either “slow of speech” or “speaking quick”—the former suggesting modesty in the face of commanding whiteness and the latter displaying rapid deference—or showing a “smiling” or a “pleasant countenance.” Only rarely do slave masters describe slaves as laughing when spoken to, or looking whites “directly in the eye,” signifying a less-than-submissive listening stance and highlighting how whites read pert smiles and downcast eyes as appropriate visual performances of “black” listening.

Mid-nineteenth-century American whites increasingly used auditory information to inform racial ideologies and to construct racialized identities. Visual fragmentations that dissected black people into metonymic corporeal parts such as “wooly hair, nose flat, lips thick,” catalogued in 1854’s widely read The Races of Man, had long signified the allegedly fixed racial differences justifying slavery’s existence.2 However, as Michael Chaney points out, the trajectory of the “dissolution of the eminence of vision” intersected with “an alternate dynamics of race and vision” fostered by new modes of self-representation by free blacks and former slaves.3 Furthermore, as Jonathan Crary argues, the rise of commodity culture and ocular-illusion-as-entertainment (i.e., the panorama and the camera obscura) further destabilized visual epistemologies.4

Sound both defined and performed the tightening barrier whites drew between themselves and black people, expressing the racialized power dynamics and hierarchical relationships of chattel slavery through vocal tones, musical rhythms, and expressed listening practices marked by whites as “black” and therefore of lesser value and potentially dangerous to whiteness and the power structures upholding it. Functioning as a medium, sound enabled race to be felt, experienced, and affected by white Americans as a collection of fixed sonic desires and repulsions that are taken into the body and radiate out from it. White American elites’ use of racialized sonic descriptors drew on a long but spotty history of linking sound to “Otherness” in pre-nineteenth-century America—the “disjointed aural communities” detailed by Richard Cullen Rath in How Early America Sounded that unevenly represented indigenous peoples, Quakers, and African slaves as “howling” outsiders.5 However, the advent of mass print media and popular musical culture enabled white elites to standardize sonic ideas of Otherness on a heretofore-unimagined scale, disciplining readers’ listening practices through detailed accounts of listening experiences written by an increasingly professionalized cadre of reporters and critics. Furthermore, white elite discourse increasingly amplified and Othered “black” sounds at a moment of great anxiety over defining Americanness amid sectional tensions over slavery.

At this key historical threshold, white elites’ published descriptions of the differences between white and black speech, sounds, environments, and musics spread far beyond intimate speech communities, constructing whites’ centrality and dominance as the American citizen-subjects at the very level of perception. Even as the nation appeared to be dissolving in the 1850s, white elites represented a powerful sensory experience of racialized sonic citizenship on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, a phenomenon that certainly contributed to a relatively speedy reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites after the Civil War. Regardless of their regional location or their feelings concerning slavery, many white elites heard themselves as superior citizens, and they listened to themselves and Others through that privileged, circumscribed, and increasingly standardized filter. I call this dominant racialized filter the listening ear. The listening ear was far from the only listening practice enacted by elite whites during this period and certainly not the only form of listening important in identity construction. As I discussed in the introduction, listening is rich in its multiplicity, and a listening subject develops many filters that operate simultaneously; in fact, a listening subject is comprised of auditory information processed through interactive and intersectional psychological filters that include the habits, assumptions, desires, and repulsions shaped by gender, class, national, regional, and linguistic identities. However uneven and diffused, the listening ear’s emergence during this period, and its transmission to listeners across the American racial spectrum, more firmly interwove whiteness with Americanness, both normalizing the dyad at the heart of citizenship privilege and making it a visceral, tangible, lived experience at the level of auditory perception. In this way, a subject can touch and be touched by the abstraction of race in the form of sound waves—vibrations were increasingly of interest to nineteenth-century physicists, particularly Hermann von Helmholtz—and a subject can cast one’s racial identity out into the world through vocal tones, timbres, music making, soundscape design, noise legislation, music consumption—what Daniel Cavicchi calls “audiencing”6—and through publicly enacting shared forms of exclusionary listening. Listening became a key part of understanding one’s place in the American racial system, viscerally connecting slavery’s macropolitics to lived racial etiquette. The uneven process of building racially disciplined listening through the “ ‘micropenalties’ of disciplinary individuation,”7 as understood by Saidiya Hartman, enabled whites to hear whiteness and blackness as palpably distinct experiences of differing texture, value, quality, and importance, forming what I term the sonic color line.

The racializing of listening, its accordant techniques of body discipline, and the sonic color line enabled by and enabling it, form this chapter’s subject. Racialized sonic politics, I argue, profoundly impacted the ability of black people, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and colonized peoples to claim, enact, and sound their rights in American life, with whites representing black people as the least sonically categorizable as human, let alone as potential citizens. Slave owners, in particular, mobilized the sonic color line as an auditory grammar, which they used to discipline slaves to the white-authored subject position of “blackness,” even as the border coalescing between “black” and “white” sounds, musics, and listening practices cast sonic differences as natural, essential, and immutable. Black listening subjects challenged white-constructed racialized listening practices in ways both subtle and overt: by mobilizing divergent forms of listening, by recoding certain sounds and listening practices as “white” in defiance of American cultural norms deeming whiteness unmarked and unrepresentable, and by using their own standards to construct an alternate value system and aesthetics for sounds they deemed “black.” Furthermore, black subjects survived slavery and resisted America’s racial hierarchies by becoming proficient in multiple forms of racialized listening, slipping in and out of various standpoints to evaluate the micropolitics of any given situation. Since critics such as Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Houston Baker Jr., Barbara Johnson, Mae Henderson, and Michael Awkward recalibrated Mikhail Bakhtin to think through African American literary representation, double-voicedness has been a predominant critical understanding of how black-authored literary texts perform cultural work in a white supremacist society, using discursive strategies such as signifying and irony to simultaneously address black and white readers on different registers and giving any one text multiple meanings.8 While, as Dorothy Hale has explored, African American literary critics aligned double-voicedness with W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “doubleconsciousness” in order to theorize black subject formation through linguistic acts, literary critics have yet to fully explore doubled—and perhaps even tripled—listening practices, the sensory framework that enables the encoding and decoding of doubled address. My exploration of how African American writers represented and deconstructed the sonic color line and the listening ear helps us understand not only the mechanics of double-voicedness—how and why racialized American readers differently experience the same passages, speeches, musics, voices, and ambient sounds—but also how black subjects constituted themselves through and between various conflicted listening practices that they navigated, brokered, and challenged.

The sonic color line emerged as a ubiquitous and palpable force of racialization in nineteenth-century America, particularly in two of the most well-known contemporary critiques of slavery and its mutually constitutive social relations, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). While discursive traces of whites’ use of the sonic color line pepper the popular media of the moment, it was first exposed and rebuked in print by Douglass and Jacobs. Particularly when taken together, their work reveals how white masters and mistresses raced and gendered both sound and listening on the plantation, disciplining themselves and their slaves to the listening ear’s perceptual frame. Most importantly, both writers detail their resistance to the listening ear’s depiction of blackness, highlighting listening as a particularly important site of agency for slaves. African Americans worked to decolonize their listening practices from the inception of the sonic color line, and—co-constitutive with Western imperialization, colonization, and enslavement—they countered the listening ear’s pernicious discipline with individual acts of refusal and communal practices strengthening kinship ties across time and space.

Douglass’s emphasis on the divergent listening practices of black and white subjects in his Narrative shows how they shape (and are shaped by) racial ideologies and everyday disciplinary practices, providing hope that whites could reform their listening ear and that black people can decolonize their listening practices. He exposes and resists the sonic color line while arguing for the importance of slaves’ sounds—in particular, women’s screaming and mixed-gender collective singing—as fundamental to understanding the sensory experience of racism, particularly the construction, gendering, and limitations of the white listening ear and the uneven physical and psychological restraints of white-conditioned listening practices. My reading of Douglass presents a new perspective on a thinker long considered a champion of written literacy and interracial communication, one that considers black listeners alongside his well-documented appeal to “ethnosympathetic” whites.9 I show how Douglass also understood that visual and written modes of knowledge, however unstable, enabled whites to increasingly marginalize sound as emotional and unpredictable—qualities associated with blackness (and femaleness)—even as it continued to perform significant racial labor; however, Douglass also took advantage of publication as a venue to challenge whites’ limited perception and affirm black listeners’ knowledge.

Whereas Douglass’s Narrative takes on the aural edge of racism, Jacobs’s Incidents focuses much more on documenting the aural experience of race, particularly for black women rendered doubly subject to white supremacist patriarchy. Douglass explores the divergent interpretations of black and white men as they listen to white men’s physical abuse of black women, but he does not represent black women as listeners. In Douglass’s Narrative, black women sound; in Jacobs’s Incidents they listen too, developing protective strategies that detect potential sexual abuse and violence in sounds far more subtle than screams. Jacobs’s representation of the intertwined relationship between Linda’s external experience of place and her internal auditory voicings of family provides new understandings of how black people crafted selves and re-storied antebellum environments through embodied listening practices.

In concert, Douglass and Jacobs expose the partiality of white listening practices and the enabling privilege of whites’ purportedly universal interpretations as foundational to white supremacy while simultaneously exploring the sonic color line as a site of possibility, revealing a perceptual gap between black and white audition that harbored life-affirming practices at the microlevel of the senses. Douglass questions the white listening ear’s ability to hear across the color line, while Jacobs seeks refuge in alternative sonic modes of knowing, being, and creating community that challenge the sonic color line at its gendered core. This chapter furthers new critical discussions of the slave narrative and performativity that augment long-standing visual analysis with an exploration of the “slave narrative’s literary capacities for play and complex signification.”10 I argue that, through their respective literary representations of “listening,” Douglass and Jacobs introduced a key trope of African American literature: “the listener.” By close-reading scenes where Douglass and Jacobs represent listening as the dominant sense, I identify a new trope that symbolically disentangles audio and visual experience, demonstrating how sound communicated truths about slavery and resistance that the eye always already distorted.

The Rise of the Sonic Color Line

The sonic color line had two key functions in the mid-nineteenth century. First, it helped white elites impose a racialized order on a sense long thought to be unruly and overly connected to the emotions in Western culture, providing white men, in particular, with a socially acceptable range of sounds associated with dispassionate rationality and efficient necessity to aurally communicate their race and class status. Western culture as expressed in the United States characterized the auditory sense as a wellspring of emotional truth rather than an engine of knowledge production, deeming listening ephemeral and uncontrollable next to vision’s steady gaze. For instance, Mark M. Smith details how abolitionists permeated antislavery articles with aural images of cracking whips and wailing slaves to recreate slavery’s soundscape as an emotional tactic to reach the irrational ears of slave masters.11 Moreover, the sonic color line enabled the dominant white culture to classify particular sounds as identifiably and essentially “black,” fixing race in a sensory domain already branded as emotionally potent and unpredictable. Of course the very process of fixing the racial identity of particular sounds protests too much; whites’ imposition of their racial hierarchies in the sonic realm reveals anxiety about the agency possible for black subjects. Listening remains largely invisible under the gaze, located in a complex entanglement of one’s internal (and internalized) thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Developing a sonic color line—however uneven, ad hoc, and indeterminate—to verify race’s increasingly unreliable visual cues allowed whites to extend both race and racism into the auditory unseen. The sonic color line turned the notion of race inside out; blackness and whiteness could now be lived and experienced from within rather than just externally classified. Tethering both an evolving battery of sounds and a limited range of listening practices to black bodies expanded white racism to include new forms of acoustic disciplining that punished racial transgressions and served as violently coercive psychological conformity.

However, listening’s enabling invisibility also marked the sonic color line’s potential undoing. The singularity of the term “listening” assigns a false simplicity and unity to an act that is not singular but rather represents a potentially vast set of simultaneous and interconnected practices, actions, poses, thoughts, interpretations, and filters; such complexity is precisely why whites sought to narrow its power for black listeners. One’s outward display could easily bely listening’s workings within, as one of Ralph Ellison’s characters, the slave-born grandfather of the protagonist in Invisible Man (1952), would advise: “Overcome ’em [whites] with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”12 The seeming amenability that whites identified as “black” listening in fact masked a wide range of alternate, resistant, and decolonizing listening practices.

White fears of black agency were greatly exacerbated by the emerging scientific discourse that emphasized sound as a form of vibrational “touch.” For white supremacists, these revelations further necessitated some kind of aural barrier between the races. Notoriously promiscuous, sounds mingle with other sounds in one’s encompassing soundscape—sometimes blending, sometimes overpowering, sometimes masking, sometimes rising above—to vibrate inside one’s body. While the vibrational quality of sound and its ability to enact “touching at a distance”13 had been considered by Europeans since at least the seventeenth century, the development of microscopy enabled a closer look into the inner ear; research in the mid-nineteenth century focused on understanding the role of vibration and resonance and their mutual penetration of the ear canal. Marchese Alfonso Corti, an Italian specialist in the new field of anatomy, first drew the hair cells of the inner and outer ear in 1851, cells that resonate with and amplify incoming sound vibrations (outer) and transform vibrations into electric signals in the cochlea (inner). In short, listening became increasingly, thrillingly, and uncomfortably material and erotic, as the notion of being touched by sound vibrations seemed suddenly more concrete and less metaphoric. Arising at the same time, the sonic color line attempted to control the dangerous potential of cross-racial aural traffic—particularly of hybridity, characterized as contamination, and pleasure, deemed aberrant—by providing whites a schematic of disciplined interpretations, predetermined affects, hierarchical logics, and clear racial distinctions for incoming vibrations. However, far from sealing off white desire for transracial crossings and their taboos, the sonic color line affectively delineated the “black” and “white” borders of such encounters.

Simultaneously, Helmholtz began developing his theories of resonance, leading to understandings of pitch, frequency, and timbre that drew explicitly on racialized ideas of musical sound. According to historian of science David Pantalony, “Musical culture was central to German science in the nineteenth century; it inspired inquiry, formed social cohesion and stimulated collaboration between scientists, musicians, and instrument makers,” and Helmholtz was an “exemplar” of musical influence.14 As I discuss in chapter 2, distinctions between forms of European music took on racial overtones in addition to national ones, with Italian music’s so-called overly emotional and gestural sonics taking on qualities the sonic color line associated with blackness, particularly irrationality; white Americans increasingly racialized classical music as “white” during the 1850s in the quest to distinguish a distinctly American popular culture, particularly through the visit of white Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind and the Northern tour of black American opera singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield. New avenues of acoustic experimentation did not just explain musical phenomena but rather flowed from musical training and its influence on nineteenth-century thought. Veit Erlmann notes that Helmholtz “frequently and early on in his career used hearing and music to elaborate key aspects of his theory of knowledge.”15 Unfortunately, there is little existent research on the relationship between nineteenth-century racial science and the growing field of acoustics. However, the rise of the sonic color line alongside the Western scientific “reform of acoustics” suggests that racial science did not need to say anything directly about racial categorization of vocal tone if the very impetus to name and explore the notion of timbre arose from the influence of racially classified music as well as the hyperclassification of difference. The piano, for example, was Helmholtz’s conceptual model for the inner ear, where every one of Corti’s newly discovered hairs individually corresponded to specific frequencies and would vibrate when struck, just like a piano wire. Helmholtz’s theory allowed for the separation of sounds in the ear, even if they are perceived simultaneously. Timbre, the notion that sounds have a peculiar, difficult-to-identify quality that distinguishes the musical tone between instruments producing the same note at the same pitch, then also enables a key tenet of the sonic color line—that men and women of different races have essentially different and discernable vocal tones. Helmholtz’s idea regarding separated receptors for various timbres further extends the sonic color line into the realm of the biological, suggesting that listening operates through a hardwired physical form of sonic segregation.

Thus strengthened, however indirectly, through racial science, the sonic color line enabled white elites to tighten slavery’s strictures as rising protest destabilized the institution. Mark M. Smith contends that many whites began to question the dominance of sight in racial discourse in the 1850s, after generations of sexual predation by slave masters gave rise to increasing numbers of “visually white slaves.” Fears of being unable to reliably see “blackness” in the “one drop rule” society they had set up led white Southerners to construct essential racial difference beyond the visual.16 Furthermore, as Spillers argues, “it is, perhaps, not by chance that the laws regarding slavery appear to crystallize in the precise moment when agitation against the arrangement becomes articulate in certain European and New World communities.”17 Most obviously, the fight over slavery in America’s newly conquered Western territory polarized the country and heightened what Smith dubs “aural sectionalism” between abolitionists and slaveholders. However, even though “Northerners and Southerners heard one another in profoundly and emotionally divisive ways,”18 they increasingly developed similar listening practices when it came to race. For example, implementing the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which demanded all escaped slaves be returned to their masters wherever captured, accelerated the sonic color line’s development and extended its reach to the Northern states. On penalty of fines up to 1,000 dollars and six months’ imprisonment, every white Northern citizen was legally mandated to report fugitives to the authorities, “after notice or knowledge of the fact that such person was a fugitive.”19 Because “there was not much that could be done to identify such slaves by sight alone,” other socially constructed sensory indicators of racial identity became salient, especially culturally identified aural markers of slavery such as “slow speech, accent, dialect, stuttering.”20 These aural markers located slavery within the fugitive body rather than in the institution that produced and conditioned such differences.

Alongside scientific pronouncements and legal compulsions, the ideological foundations of nineteenth-century oratory culture helped define and spread the sonic color line, further stressing the relationship between aurality and rationality. Douglass felt the tension between the two all too well; his narrative is rife with references to Caleb Bingham’s 1797 primer The Columbian Orator, a popular text that helped define American social standards for sound in the arena of public speaking and beyond. Douglass first purchased the Orator at age twelve, after illicitly learning to read. While largely a collection of famous speeches, the Orator opens with “General Instructions on Speaking,” an essay providing theoretical and practical pointers to aspiring orators. Confirming the rationale behind abolitionists’ use of sound as emotional appeal while discouraging its unseemly deployment, Bingham’s rules claim that “the influence of sounds, either to raise or allay our passions is evident from music. And certainly the harmony of a fine discourse, well and gracefully pronounced, is as capable of moving us, if not in a way so violent and ecstatic, yet not less powerful, and more agreeable to our rational faculties.”21 By declaring the “influence of sounds” separable from their meaning as “fine discourse,” the Orator firmly knits aurality to “passion” rather than the “rational faculties.” Bingham also expresses an idea key to the formation of the sonic color line and the listening ear, that music and speech are fluid parts of an increasingly organized theory of sounding in which various aural technologies work together to produce the controlled “harmony” of rationality. In attuning the evolving listening ear to recognize and seek out “harmony” in both music and speech, Bingham classified any “violent, “ecstatic,” and excessively emotional sounds as threats to the social order.

Championing the sound of restraint, a cultural construct the post-Enlightenment mind-body split associated with whiteness and intellect, the Orator harmonizes a modulated “clear” sound with verbal clarity. Because sound can rather unpredictably “raise or allay” emotion, it necessitated a grammar that quelled its potential for excess, aligning it with white bourgeois ideals of “harmony,” itself a culturally specific sonic symbol of order, a musical “conciliator of sounds.”22 Bingham’s use of “ecstatic” is especially telling; its etymology stems from a Greek root meaning “to put out of place,” connoting sound’s ability to unseat rationality.23 It also alludes to the sonic color line, as antebellum whites often used “ecstatic” to describe what they considered the irrationality and excess of black speech, music, and worship.24 Bingham pronounced “a calm and sedate voice is generally best; as a moderate sound is more pleasing to the ear, especially when clear and distinct.”25

White elites identified blackness, on the other hand, almost entirely with emotion and corporeality. In an increasingly print-oriented culture, sounds unable to be pinned down to a written, standardized vocabulary created discomfort, which whites resolved by representing nonverbal sound as the instinctual, emotive province of racialized Others. Stereotypical descriptions of black sounds permeated white antebellum writing. Similar to whites’ dismissal of slave songs because they did not conform to European notation, they considered sounds such as screams, grunts, groans, and wails signs of “possession, otherness, and wildness” existing “prior to rationality.”26

Choosing to engage whites’ written words and their cultural weight, Douglass struggled to reconcile the constraining conventions of the sonic color line with a revaluation of nonverbal sound that challenged the sonic boundaries of “blackness.” The Narrative combines oratorical structures such as chiasmus with the masculinist demands of the European genre of autobiography and the currents of radical abolitionist writing, which Alex Black describes as “demand[ing] a reader with an eye for sound.”27 Although representing slavery through nonverbal aural imagery threatened the dominant relationship between “clear” sound and sound logic, abolitionists expected Douglass to perform aural blackness for his white Northern readership, employing emotional forms of address and conventional descriptions of slavery’s nonverbal sounds, particularly because he had “heard clearly (and authentically) the ring of the slave whip and the ‘clank’ of slaves’ chains.”28 In fact, Douglass’s vexation over performing existent aural stereotypes of blackness may account for the modulation of voice some critics hear in the Narrative, especially when compared to the fiery prose of Douglass’s speeches.29

Perhaps as a result of the sonic color line’s pressures, Douglass’s Narrative represents sound sparingly and iconically. Douglass highlights discussions of prominent sounds identified by the sonic color line and represents (mis)perceptions of the listening ear at key points in his life from his literal and figurative births into slavery—effected by the sound of the master’s abuse and the strains of slave songs in the woods—through his young adulthood on various Maryland plantations, where Douglass witnesses emotive outbursts by allegedly reasonable slave masters as well as slaves’ resistance to white supremacist structures equating their sound to nonsense and their listening with unthinking obedience. The Narrative’s second half tracks his experiences working in Baltimore’s shipyards—where he attains written literacy by trading bread to poor white boys in exchange for lessons and becomes “a ready listener” for word of abolition30—and his fight with the slave breaker Covey, a conflict sparked by Douglass’s refusal to perform “black” listening.

“No Words, No Tears, No Prayers”: Douglass and Nonverbal Epistemology

Douglass-as-author challenges the sonic color line and redirects the listening ear by rhetorically inverting dominant associations of nonverbal sound with blackness. At the Narrative’s end, for example, his critique of Southern religion parodies the hymn “Our Heavenly Union,” altering the lyrics to expose hypocritical white Southern preachers via nonverbal imagery; self-proclaimed upstanding Christians become “roaring, ranting, sleek man-thie[ves]” who “roar and scold, and whip, and sting.” Far from utilizing the “sound words” idealized by Douglass’s white contemporaries, Southern preachers devilishly “bleat and baa, dona like goats,” intimidating the weak with a “roar like a Bashan bull” and sounding off like “braying ass[es], of mischief full.” Though they use sound to mask their hypocrisy—no one prays “earlier, later, louder, and longer” than slave-driving reverends, the cruelest masters in Douglass’s Narrative—nonverbal tones betray their true identities.31

Such parody resonates with Douglass’s technique of allowing slaveholders and overseers few transcribed words let alone “sound” ones, another method of defying the sonic color line’s classification of white elites as eloquent orators à la Bingham. Douglass instead reduces their words to an indistinguishable stream of obscenity.32 Despite their genteel titles, Captain Anthony, Mr. Plummer, and Mr. Severe are all “profane swearers,” an aural image belying the refinement associated with elite Southerners (and their accents). Douglass represents Severe as so obscenely true to his name that he literally curses himself to death. His last words, a rhetorical form freighted with significance in Victorian culture, were but “groans, bitter curses, and horrid oaths.”33 The slaves consider his replacement, Mr. Hopkins, a “good overseer” because he was “less cruel, less profane and made less noise than Mr. Severe,” although Douglass’s syntax nonetheless marks him as all three.34 Douglass characterizes Mr. Gore’s cruelty nonverbally, the way he does with his representations of Severe and Hopkins; he “spoke but to command” with a “sharp shrill voice” that “produced horror and trembling in [the] ranks” of slaves. Gore primarily communicates through the whip’s crack and its lash’s sting. Contrary to antebellum idealizations of the word’s visual and logical power, Douglass portrays emotive, nonverbal sound as central to white identity.35

Douglass also resists the sonic color line by challenging existent stereotypes about black listening. Believed not to possess any of the agency associated with “listening” in the dominant culture—the term having descended from the same Germanic root as “lust” (to desire) and “list” (to choose)—slaves were to respond immediately and uniformly to sounds they heard on the plantation. Under constant violent threat, slaves had to visibly perform the subordinate listening practices that constructed and confirmed slavery’s allegedly natural power relationships: “When he [Colonel Lloyd] spoke, a slave must stand, listen, and tremble; and such was literally the case.” Importantly, Douglass’s first act of resistance against Covey is to “make him no answer and stand with [his] clothes on” after Covey orders them removed. The stakes of refusing to listen as a slave were deadly; the Narrative bears witness for Demby, a man shot by Gore for ignoring his orders to come out of a pond. Gore justifies Demby’s murder by telling the master his insubordinate listening “se[t] a dangerous example to the other slaves.”36 Some whites considered black listening practices fundamental enough to slavery’s “rule and order” to kill over, even as Gore’s murderous act protests their allegedly biological nature.

However, the biggest challenge Douglass mounts to the sonic color line comes through recurrent, metonymic scenes of his own listening that reveal the extensive disciplinary practices of the listening ear and their impact on the listening habits of both slaves and their masters. Douglass’s textual representation of himself listening to Aunt Hester’s shrieks amplifies the centrality of race and gender to the marginalization of sonic epistemologies in the nineteenth century. It shows how listening augmented and deepened the processes of subjection usually ascribed to visuality. I further existent critical conversation surrounding Hester’s scream by interrogating if and how Douglass’s aural imagery was heard (and by whom), arguing that Douglass’s Narrative asks, to riff on Elizabeth Alexander riffing on Pat Ward Williams, “Can you be WHITE and (really) LISTEN to this?” or, alternately, “Are you white because of HOW you listen to this?”37

Through another rhetorical reversal, Douglass challenges the sonic color line in the Hester passage by revaluing her scream—an extraverbal sound whites associated with blackness—as a vital site of knowledge production. Locating this sound prominently at the beginning and end of the scene, Douglass positions Hester’s screams as sounds to be listened to for meaning, rather than dismissed as irrational, collateral noise. Building from Alexander’s interpretation of Hester’s screams as an important site of knowledge that (re)births Douglass into acknowledgement of himself as “vulnerable and black,” Fred Moten theorizes the sound as both ontological and epistemological, a “radically exterior aurality” resistant to and disruptive of the Enlightenment’s “overdetermined politics of looking,” whose im/possible commingling of terror and pleasure “open[ed] the way into the knowledge of slavery and the knowledge of freedom.”38 Listening to Hester’s screams enables Douglass’s initial understanding of the conditions of his enslavement while simultaneously fostering resistance. More than involuntary cries of pain, “screams when one was whipped or sold, for example, reminded masters of slaves’ humanity … inanimate objects, they told whip-happy masters, were dumb and silent.”39 Douglass-as-author emphasizes this resistant role by representing Hester’s screams as sonically and syntactically interrupting the scene’s visual imagery: “He [Captain Anthony] commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm red blood (amid heart rending shrieks from her, and horrible oaths from him) came dripping to the floor.”40 By placing Hester’s screams in a parenthetical interjection, Douglass amplifies their resistant knowledge by emphasizing Hester’s authorship, over and above the role played by Anthony’s whip.

Given the existent associations of nonverbal sound with blackness, femaleness, and animalism in nineteenth-century Western culture, the fact that Douglass hears Hester’s scream carrying the remotest hint of meaning and agency resists the sonic color line by listening differently. However, both Hester’s agency and Douglass’s resistance to sonic racial norms have often gone unheard in critical conversations about Douglass’s limited representation of Hester as “inarticulate.” Critics inadvertently silence her anew by disallowing the possibility that her screams carry meaning. David Messmer, otherwise attuned to the Narrative’s aurality, represents Hester’s screams as “inarticulate sound” produced by Captain Anthony that “perpetuates the racist concept that slaves were discursively inferior.”41 However, reading Hester’s scream only as absence limits meaning to the spoken word, foreclosing the possibility of tonal and/or extraverbal communication. In explicitly challenging the gender hierarchies Douglass enacts—male as powerful (whether as abuser or as narrator) and woman as victim—critics implicitly concede to the dominant social codes separating the logical (white, masculine) word from the emotional (black, feminine) sound and sound from knowledge production. After all, no sound is intrinsically “inarticulate”; the sonic color line’s socially and historically contingent aural value systems enable whites to label black sound in this way.

Through the tropic figure of Douglass-as-listener, Douglass-as-author amplifies Hester’s screams as his aural and ontological gateway to slavery, a form of knowledge obscured by reigning visual epistemologies but enhanced by the sonic color line. Subtly reminding readers that the dawn of the “age of reason” was concurrent with (and dependent upon) slavery, Hester’s screams “awake[n] [him] at the dawn of day,” imagery that satirizes (and racializes) the visual iconography of the European Enlightenment. In Douglass’s schema, sight and light do not produce the knowledge necessary for enslaved subjects’ survival but rather sound and darkness. He finally becomes “so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight [of Anthony whipping Hester], that [he] hid himself in a closet and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over.”42 Only in the closet’s darkness, with the bloody tableau removed from his immediate sight, can Douglass hear alternatives in the layered, indeterminate sound of Hester’s scream, which allows him to construct “armor which can take him out of the closet.”43

Paradoxically, Douglass’s armor comes not from hardening his ears but from retaining a radical openness to Hester’s cries despite their psychological and emotional toll. Mobilizing limited agency within the confines of enforced listening, Douglass fights the logic of slavery that transforms spectacular violence into routine occurrence. He does not become habituated to Hester’s abuse; the screams remain acutely “heart-rending” (a term Douglass uses twice) every time he hears them.44 Synonymous with involvement for Douglass, the act of listening helps construct the Narrative’s ethical framework. Despite being young, terrified, and subordinated, Douglass charges his six-year-old self with an ethics of listening as both “witness and participant” in Hester’s torture, precisely the moral enmeshment that the white-produced sonic color line disavowed and sought to discipline out of black and white listening.45 The sonic color line relies on the terror produced by the sonics of white supremacy to produce “black listening” as detached, immediate obedience. Unable (and unwilling) to buffer his ears from Hester’s pain—an aural metaphor for rape and a metonym for slavery itself—Douglass represents his younger incarnation as both subject to sonic terror and a defiant subject produced by it.

Douglass-as-author’s representation of himself as an ethical listener functions in sharp contrast to the master’s muted emotional reaction to Hester’s scream, identifying palpable racial differences in listening, not as immutable biological truths but as accrued habits conditioned by the sonic color line and its performative violences. Captain Anthony’s listening, for example, oscillates between a titillating sensitivity to “noise” and a willful unhearing. At first, he hungrily attunes his ear to Hester’s shriek, imagining himself producing it for his sexual and psychological consumption. An aural fetish for power and sexual violence, Hester’s screams stand in for the moans of sexual activity she has refused him while he manifests his control over her at the level of the unseen. To amplify his power, Anthony blocks out anything else Hester says: “No words, no tears, no prayers from his gory victim, seemed to move his heart from its iron purpose.”46 Douglass’s repetitive syntax mimics Anthony’s “iron” ear, which hears only “no … no … no” in place of Hester’s flood of “words … tears … [and] prayers,” echoing her refusals. While some read this line as evidence of Hester’s lack of impact,47 the fact that Anthony remains unmoved says nothing about the eloquence of Hester’s pleas, instead speaking volumes about the narratives white men constructed to absorb and silence such sounds and, in turn, about the ways in which white men as subjects are produced through the sonic color line’s aural justifications. By evoking Hester’s words rather than quoting them, Douglass represents the process through which the master’s ear translates human sound into black noise, satirizing the Victorian belief that sound is a direct, universal emotional pathway and challenging his white Northern readers to hear more than absence between those lines.48

However, as much as Douglass’s image is about control, it also concerns Hester’s aural resistance and the methods Anthony uses to suppress it. As Jon Cruz finds, “Far too many of the accounts of owners and overseers that describe black noise also contain a deeper unraveling of noise—an unraveling toward the irrepressible acknowledgement of meaningful emotions.”49 Although “he would whip her to make her scream,” once Hester’s screams escaped his desire—becoming too loud, too pained, too emotive—Captain Anthony would “whip her to make her hush,” smothering her voice and the “irrepressible acknowledgement” of her humanity that it briefly evoked.50

By opening his Narrative with the multiple meanings made from a sound both desired and suppressed by whites as racialized noise, Douglass resists the raced and gendered performances listening whites expected from black subjects, while simultaneously exposing how elite white men, in particular, come to know their power and experience their privilege through listening. Detailing Hester’s scream through his listening experience proves Douglass’s “most effective discursive resistance to slavery while a slave depends upon his aural abilities rather than his skills as a literate subject,”51 while broadening the limited understanding of “aural abilities” as only concerned with the making of (musical) sound and not with the aural literacy that shapes its production and interpretation. I define aural literacy as the ability to accrue knowledge by listening and engaging with the world through making and perceiving sound.52

Douglass’s representations of listening within a written text contests the artificial and imbalanced dichotomy between orality and literacy and the inherent ocularcentrism embedded within it that privileges the allegedly silent written word. The hybrid forms of aural literacy within the texts I read in this chapter show us that oral and aural ways of knowing the world do not simply disappear or dissolve into written discourse; according to Joseph Roach, orality and literacy are co-constitutive, interactive categories rather than mutually exclusive moments in an evolutionary model of culture.53 Literary representations of aural literacy amplify the fact that listening continues to be an important epistemology in a society that an overwhelming number of scholars argue has given itself over almost completely to the eye. By placing Douglass-as-child inside the darkened closet, Douglass-as-writer enacts listening as a literary trope of decolonization, one that explicitly challenges the dominance of slavery’s spectacular visuality. Douglass does not define listening as an unconscious, universal, biological given but rather as a socially constructed and embodied act of aural literacy: an intellectual, physical, and emotional openness to sound that shapes and is shaped by one’s subject position. Listening operates simultaneously in the Narrative as a site of meaning and as ethical involvement. When listening, Douglass intimates, one always has some skin in the game.

Subsequent iterations of Douglass-as-listener reinforce the act of listening as a racially dichotomous and mutually exclusive experience both structured by and structuring everyday life on the plantation. Unlike visual spectacles, which can dissipate when removed from view, the aural imagery of Hester’s scream leaves echoes and traces that reverberate in Douglass’s memory and bleed throughout the Narrative. His iconic description of the multiple racialized experiences of listening to slaves sing, in particular, explores the impact of the sonic color line on both slavery and the fight against it.

“In the Sound”: Listening to Slaves Sing

Although a qualitatively different aural image from Hester’s cries of pain, the Great House Farm sequence immediately following evokes the trope of the listener to reveal how the tones of slave song also sound out the “soul-killing effects of slavery.”54 Douglass-as-protagonist joins his fellow slaves in permeating the woods with musical projections of presence, and Douglass-as-author plays with the racialized assumptions of the elite white listening ear that slave songs were a meaningless collection of “wild notes” signifying contentment.55 Given his white reader’s likely assumption that these tones, however “wild,” expressed less pain and violence than Hester’s shrieks, Douglass’s meditation on the memory of singing and listening to these songs recasts his vulnerability to sound as a willful openness to both the everyday pain of slavery as well as the knowledge produced “if not in the word, in the sound.”56

However, while Douglass’s representation of listening to Aunt Hester utilizes spatial proximity to create a sense of uncomfortable intimacy among differently raced listeners and readers interrogating the supposed universality of sounded pain, the trope of listening in the slave song sequence relies on time to effect distance, this time questioning the sonic color line’s representation of musical sound. For Douglass-as-protagonist, the experience of listening to his voice join fellow slaves in song complements and echoes Hester’s expressions of pain and resistance. Unlike his childhood memory of the scream, the slave songs Douglass exhumes refuse to remain in the past, creating a dissonant aural effect. Remembering the songs years later—yet crying fresh tears—Douglass-as-author represents his experience of listening as doubled, enabling him to examine himself “within the circle” of slavery while simultaneously questioning how his interpellation into an American identity—however uneven, partial, and limited—impacts his sensory perception of the past and present.57 Does becoming free and “American” mean becoming attuned to the increasingly rigid contours of the white supremacist sonic color line that tunes out the cultural production of slaves as senseless noise? Douglass admonishes his readers that the “mere hearing” of the slave songs should automatically “impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery,” especially according to dominant norms about sound’s emotional impact; however, his doubled listening experience enables an understanding of how the sonic color line has already primed white Northern ears to hear “the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness.”58 The proximity of the slave song passage to the Hester scene connects the erotic sensitivity and obdurate tuning out of the Southern master’s ear with white Northerners’ inability to hear slave songs as anything but plantation fantasy and/or amusical gibberish. Interrogating the universality of musical value forwarded by Western culture, Douglass notes how slave songs were dismissed as “apparently incoherent,” “unmeaning jargon” by cultural outsiders trained to consider sound as superfluous or secondary to meaning.59 While Douglass highlights his own ability to cross the encircling confines of the sonic color line and maintain a dual listening practice, he also seriously questions whether traffic across the sonic color line can flow in the other direction.

Douglass not only models the complex, self-reflective fluidity of his own listening practices but also calls upon the trope of the listener to expose the mutability of the sonic color line, challenging his white readership to listen beyond their racialized expectations and desires. His double-voiced text hails his white Northern readers as listeners, using aural imagery to evoke their spatial, ideological, and perceptual distance from slaves and amplify their potentially surprising and discomfiting connections with the sensibilities of white Southern elites. Douglass urges his white Northern readers to place themselves “deep in the pine woods … in silence,” quieting their racially conditioned reactions so that the slaves’ songs may breach the listening ear’s distorting filter.60 Douglass charges white readers with an ethical responsibility to hear African American cultural production with alternate assumptions about value, agency, and meaning, particularly regarding the relationship between the written word and nonverbal sound laid out by texts such as The Columbian Orator. Only then may they hear black voices in sonic resistance to the system denying them personhood, “every tone a testimony against slavery.”61 Exceedingly aware that sound is always already enmeshed in the sonic color line and skeptical of sentimental appeals to sound as truth, Douglass’s aural imagery issues a challenge to dominant notions of truth produced and disseminated through the listening ear. The Narrative both manipulates and resists the sonic color line, denaturalizing the racialized listening practices of both blacks and whites, exposing them as one of slavery’s habituating violences.

The musical imagery of Douglass’s Narrative has been read predominately as hearkening to the potential connections to be made through cross-racial listening, what Jon Cruz calls “ethnosympathy.”62 However, as Carla Kaplan finds, African American literature “often seeks to dramatize its lack of listeners” and the impossibility of reaching competent, let alone ideal, readers.63 In fact, Douglass closes the slave song passage with the “singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island,” an aural image likening enslavement to the isolation of being perpetually without a listener or interpretive community.64 Even as Douglass’s work appeals to the power of sound for legal, political, literary, and ontological representation of slaves’ experiences, his doubled ears hear the dehumanizing physical violence of Hester’s beatings in both the slave songs and in the deleterious interpretive violence performed by white listeners who ignore, misunderstand, dismiss, and/or (mis)interpret black cultural production for their own ends.

However, Douglass’s challenge to the sonic color line stops short of fully examining gendered oppression. In fact, by privileging and universalizing male sonic experience, Douglass affixes a gendered meaning to the sounds that is uncomfortably aligned with dominant nineteenth-century modes of understanding sexual difference. Douglass casts the collective singing of the slaves as, at heart, an expression of the individual masculine proclivity to create expressive culture out of the experience of social death, while Hester’s individual screams represent a collective expression of pain, suffering, and resistance. Although these sonic labors are intimately intertwined, their sources remain distinct; Douglass represents the female scream as raw material to be transduced into masculine song. Such a gendered division of sonic labor comes about not only because Douglass works within dominant American ideas connecting women to emotional expression and men to artistic production but also because he depicts the acts of listening to these sounds—however diverse—as a form of congress between men: between Douglass and his master in the Aunt Hester scene and between Douglass and an imagined white male abolitionist reader in the case of slave singing. The biggest silence in the Narrative is not the lack of Hester’s words, but rather Douglass’s failure to represent Hester as a listener, her embodied ear understanding and representing her own screams and intervening in the masculine power relationships formed over her bloody body and through her voice’s strained grain. His Narrative also remains silent on how the slave singers use listening to connect through—and in spite of—their profound isolation.

Refining the “Listening Ear”: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Whereas Douglass evokes the trope of listening only a few times in his Narrative, Harriet Jacobs represents the pervasiveness of listening in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, exploring it as both an intimate vehicle for oppression and a covert method of resisting slavery’s unrelenting isolation. A first-person narrative told through the perspective of Jacobs’s pseudonymous persona Linda Brent, Incidents intertwines the stories of Brent’s harrowing fight against physical and sexual abuse and her protracted struggle for freedom for herself and her children.65 While Jacobs mobilizes many of the generic conventions of the slave narrative, she concerns herself less with revealing the salacious and violent events of slavery for her white Northern readership and much more with communicating how Linda Brent perceives slavery’s traumas, particularly how she listens to them. In detailing Brent and her family’s sonic understanding of their experiences as slaves, Jacobs emphasizes aurality as an indispensable mode of literacy, imagination, and memory, both personal and historical. Open to pleasure in spite of continuous exposure to pain, Brent’s embodied listening recognizes sound’s fundamental importance to slavery’s power relationships. Laying important groundwork toward what later emerges as decolonizing listening in the work of Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Ann Petry, Jacobs also reveals listening as a fundamental epistemology crucial not only for ensuring slaves’ 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 items of remembrance such as letters, family Bibles, locks of hair, jewelry, or other treasured heirlooms, slaves held on to and rehearsed their loved ones’ heard memories, challenging dominant depictions of sound—and slave families—as amorphous 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 line and racialized by the listening ear amplifies listening’s potential as a resistant practice for slaves, offering a method of strengthening family bonds and histories in the face of an institution bent on destroying both 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 without wages, under constant dread of the lash?”91 By representing a very limited, momentary pleasure in “singing and shouting,” Jacobs resists dominant abolitionist articulations of common humanity between black and white people through 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 that Mrs. Flint only approximates sympathy for her ordeal; her extraverbal sounds express primarily self-concern. Rather than hearing a plea for help, Mrs. Flint interprets Linda’s words as evidence of a rivalry for 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 slavery and freedom. The sudden increase in volume provides Linda with a brief blast of freedom, including the agency to make “noise,” the liberty to move one’s body without hypervigilant attention to its every sound, and the ability to have a conversation with a loved one at a desirable volume without constant fear. Linda’s brutal experience in the garret’s isolation chamber calls attention to the sonic restrictions slaves faced within the sonic color line’s circumscription, using the trope of the listener to amplify how slaves must listen through and beyond the listening ear’s deleterious representations of their bodies, voices, and culture as “noise.”

However, rather than understanding Linda’s listening only as reactive practice dealing only with “noise,” Jacobs highlights listening as an active practice of desire, a casting out toward sounds that provide Linda with a certain quality of touch, even love, in her isolation. Rather than withdraw, for example, Linda carefully attends to her children’s sounds, continuously stoking her maternal relationship, however painful: “Season after season, year after year, I peeped at my children’s faces, and heard their sweet voices, with a heart yearning all the while to say, ‘your mother is here.’ ” Linda’s grandmother also frequently brings the children to play within Linda’s earshot, knowing the sounds “comfort [Linda] in her despondency.”109 As Bonenfant’s work on queer listening argues, listening provides comfort and self-recognition because vocal sound, in particular, functions as “a kind of intimate, human-generated touch” that vibrates bodies and caresses the surface of the skin. Bonenfant argues people listen differently to sounds they desire—as opposed to unbidden sounds, such as Flint’s whispers—using the body to “listen ‘out’ for (reaching toward) voices that … will gratify.”110 In Bonenfant’s terms, listening out for her children’s voices allows Linda to feel their presence. Linda listens out for her grandmother, too, who, over the course of Linda’s confinement, develops a wordless code to communicate with her. “She had four places to knock for me to come to the trap-door,” Jacobs writes, “and each place had a different meaning,” an act of vibration creating pleasurable expectation for Linda and maintaining a material link with her family.111 Gradually, the furtive whispers of her grandmother and other family members come to replace Flint’s. Even as it warps her body and silences her voice, the isolation chamber queers Linda’s listening, enabling her to hear beyond the sonic color line’s confines and imagine an alternate relationship to her body’s experiences of love, pain, desire, survival, and motherhood.

The final phase of Linda’s evolving listening practice, the process of liberating herself from a lifetime of the listening ear’s discipline, proves arduous and uneven, even as Linda finds herself on the clamorous streets of Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. Here Jacobs shows listening’s mutability, however stubbornly filtered through the past and ghosted by echoes of former geographies. Once in the North, Linda struggles with feeling psychologically mired in the South; listening functions here as a conduit for wrestling with the emotional consequences of slavery, sexual abuse, and her long period of entrapment. After meeting her first free black acquaintance, the Reverend Jeremiah Durham, Linda realizes how slavery still stigmatizes her in the “free” North. Durham suggests Linda shouldn’t recount her sexual abuse lest it “give some heartless people a pretext for treating [her] with contempt.” The shock of the idea that Northerners might shun her for her master’s licentiousness impacts Linda viscerally. She notes, “The word contempt burned me like coals of fire,” hearkening back to the “scorching” words of Mr. Flint and connecting them to the political economy of gender that would silence her. The realization of a larger system of racialized gender connecting North and South fills Linda with dread, causing her to seek the solitude she had so recently left behind: “I went to my room, glad to shut out the world for awhile.”112 Linda arrives in the North listening out for signs of freedom, connection, and family life but learns that her raced and gendered identity still demands she continue to listen for danger.