notions of truth produced and disseminated through the listening ear. The Narrative both manipulates and resists the sonic color line, denaturalizing the racialized listening practices of both blacks and whites, exposing them as one of slavery’s habituating violences.
The musical imagery of Douglass’s Narrative has been read predominately as hearkening to the potential connections to be made through cross-racial listening, what Jon Cruz calls “ethnosympathy.”62 However, as Carla Kaplan finds, African American literature “often seeks to dramatize its lack of listeners” and the impossibility of reaching competent, let alone ideal, readers.63 In fact, Douglass closes the slave song passage with the “singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island,” an aural image likening enslavement to the isolation of being perpetually without a listener or interpretive community.64 Even as Douglass’s work appeals to the power of sound for legal, political, literary, and ontological representation of slaves’ experiences, his doubled ears hear the dehumanizing physical violence of Hester’s beatings in both the slave songs and in the deleterious interpretive violence performed by white listeners who ignore, misunderstand, dismiss, and/or (mis)interpret black cultural production for their own ends.
However, Douglass’s challenge to the sonic color line stops short of fully examining gendered oppression. In fact, by privileging and universalizing male sonic experience, Douglass affixes a gendered meaning to the sounds that is uncomfortably aligned with dominant nineteenth-century modes of understanding sexual difference. Douglass casts the collective singing of the slaves as, at heart, an expression of the individual masculine proclivity to create expressive culture out of the experience of social death, while Hester’s individual screams represent a collective expression of pain, suffering, and resistance. Although these sonic labors are intimately intertwined, their sources remain distinct; Douglass represents the female scream as raw material to be transduced into masculine song. Such a gendered division of sonic labor comes about not only because Douglass works within dominant American ideas connecting women to emotional expression and men to artistic production but also because he depicts the acts of listening to these sounds—however diverse—as a form of congress between men: between Douglass and his master in the Aunt Hester scene and between Douglass and an imagined white male abolitionist reader in the case of slave singing. The biggest silence in the Narrative is not the lack of Hester’s words, but rather Douglass’s failure to represent Hester as a listener, her embodied ear understanding and representing her own screams and intervening in the masculine power relationships formed over her bloody body and through her voice’s strained grain. His Narrative also remains silent on how the slave singers use listening to connect through—and in spite of—their profound isolation.
Refining the “Listening Ear”: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Whereas Douglass evokes the trope of listening only a few times in his Narrative, Harriet Jacobs represents the pervasiveness of listening in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, exploring it as both an intimate vehicle for oppression and a covert method of resisting slavery’s unrelenting isolation. A first-person narrative told through the perspective of Jacobs’s pseudonymous persona Linda Brent, Incidents intertwines the stories of Brent’s harrowing fight against physical and sexual abuse and her protracted struggle for freedom for herself and her children.65 While Jacobs mobilizes many of the generic conventions of the slave narrative, she concerns herself less with revealing the salacious and violent events of slavery for her white Northern readership and much more with communicating how Linda Brent perceives slavery’s traumas, particularly how she listens to them. In detailing Brent and her family’s sonic understanding of their experiences as slaves, Jacobs emphasizes aurality as an indispensable mode of literacy, imagination, and memory, both personal and historical. Open to pleasure in spite of continuous exposure to pain, Brent’s embodied listening recognizes sound’s fundamental importance to slavery’s power relationships. Laying important groundwork toward what later emerges as decolonizing listening in the work of Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Ann Petry, Jacobs also reveals listening as a fundamental epistemology crucial not only for ensuring slaves’ survival but also for enabling an evolving understanding of one’s self. I close-read Jacobs’s Incidents somewhat against the grain as both a literary and a theoretical text, exploring how she mobilizes the trope of the listener to posit the importance of aural literacy in everyday life. I also articulate how Brent’s listening practice—a form of queered listening Yvon Bonenfant calls “listening out,” an “unusual reaching” toward others66—evolves through four key periods in her life: girlhood, young womanhood, entrapment in the garret, and her eventual freedom.
Jacobs’s story emphasizes the diversity, contingency, and mutability of listening while also charting her own difficulty in reshaping her embodied praxis. Like Douglass, Brent spends her early childhood away from slavery’s immediate horrors; her grandmother, a free woman, raises her after her enslaved parents’ deaths. Also like Douglass’s, her initiation into slavery’s gendered economy occurs through listening, although it is not the experience of listening to a slave’s scream that marks her as a gendered subject, but rather the moment she has to endure “foul words” whispered into her fifteen-year-old ear by her sexually abusive master, the aptly named Dr. Flint. As Jacobs bluntly states, “Slavery is terrible for men, but it is far more terrible for women.”67 Refusing to accede to the master’s relentless advances even as she recognizes his aural abuses as a constituent part of a female slave’s life—“I shuddered, but I was constrained to listen,” Linda describes68—she eventually takes a white lover, Mr. Sands, to spite Flint and exact some control over her body and her desire. She has two children with Sands while remaining subject to her master’s rage and her mistress’s jealousy. When Flint refuses to let Sands buy their children and threatens their sale, Linda goes into hiding in her grandmother’s garret. Nine feet long, seven feet wide, and only three feet tall, this tight space hides Linda for seven years. Battling atrophy and illness, Linda listens hungrily for her children’s voices, overhears valuable information from the street, and uses her listening practices to retain familial connections. Linda eventually ends up a fugitive in New York, where she works as a nurse to a wealthy white family, saving money to free her children and build a family home. Incidents ends with Linda and her children struggling against new oppressions, ostensibly free but wrestling with Northern racism; slavery, white supremacy, and the vagaries of the dominant white listening ear exert a discomfiting influence on her perceptions long after her escape.
“It Was Not Long before We Heard the Tramp of Feet and the Sound of Voices”: Aural Literacy and the Auditory Imagination
Without dismissing the eventual necessity of written literacy, Jacobs’s Incidents identifies aural literacy and auditory imagination as crucial skill sets slaves attain as a consequence of enslavement. Both can be honed as potential sites of freedom and resistance that evade the sonic color line and the listening ear, even as they ultimately trade upon and operate within these disciplinary forces. While Jacobs avoids pitting aurality against written literacy, she expresses much more skepticism than Douglass regarding America’s dominant cultural narrative equating written literacy with freedom. Jacobs has a “troubled relationship with language,” Holly Blackford writes, which is “associated with patriarchy, rape, violation, and abolitionist appropriation.”69 Initially, Linda’s ability to read further enslaves her, as Dr. Flint sends her sexually abusive notes and demands written responses. For these reasons, Jacobs instead concentrates on articulating the literacies that slaves already possess, especially their ability to glean important, lifesaving knowledge from the minutest of auditory details. Through the cultivation of a sophisticated aural literacy that detected discrepancies in listening practices—that those on top of the power structure labeled particular sounds as “black” and interpreted them as markedly different from sounds deemed “white” (read: normal, human)—slaves accrued knowledge, prevented punishment, fostered resistance, preserved memories, and constructed cultural identity.70 Linda’s son, for example, hears a wayward cough stray from Linda’s attic hiding place, and even though years have passed and he has no idea of her location, he immediately recognizes the sound. For years afterward and without mentioning his suspicions to anyone, he protects his mother by steering whites and neighborhood children away from
