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
