The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ