The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ