The Sonic Color Line. Jennifer Lynn Stoever

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ