The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ