line, but some slaves sought agency through alternative sensory modes of communication, information gathering, and self-expression. In defiance of the white elite listening ear that defined black listening as biologically determined obedience and nonverbal communication as repugnant, Jacobs mobilizes the trope of the listener to reveal the complexity of black listening practices and revalue the written word as only one form of literacy among others.
In addition to providing crucial information for everyday survival, Linda’s skilled aural literacy equips her with an important site of imagination in defiance of the sonic color line’s historical erasure of the sounds of black family presence and its classification of black listeners as reacting solely—and simply—to immediate external stimuli. Jacobs depicts Brent’s vibrant auditory imagination as peopled with the voices of family members past and present, remembered sounds that strengthen her forcibly ruptured familial bonds while spurring her to take the necessary actions to free herself and her children. In Listening and Voice, phenomenologist Don Idhe describes the auditory imagination as a “mode of experience [wherein] lies the full range from sedimented memories to wildest fancy” that interweaves imagined sound with perceived sound and forms “an almost continuous aspect of self-presence” through the expressions of one’s inner voice. Idhe argues that Western scholarship has severely neglected the auditory imagination because Enlightenment ideologies assume thought to be a disembodied activity rather than one experienced through and activated by the body.71 In contrast, Jacobs’s literary representation of Linda’s auditory imagination relates the power of embodied knowledge as personal and social resistance, as Linda experiences the remembered voices of her family members as interwoven with the sights and sounds of slaves’ collective historical memory of their enslavement. She experiences copresence not only in the context of her own voice but also through the voices of family members—dead and living—that challenge the social death of slavery’s official narratives declaring black slaves as without history, culture, and family.
Triggered by visits to sites important to the history of her family’s enslavement, Linda’s vivid auditory imagination enables her to re-story a landscape with events all but erased by acts of white supremacy. I borrow the term “re-story” from Neil Campbell, who extended Gary Nabhan’s concept to the contested landscapes of contemporary Western American literature. Without eliding its specificity, I find the term useful to understanding how Jacobs depicts Linda’s ability to layer African American histories, memories, and counternarratives onto the Southern plantation, a space physically and narratively dominated by whites.72 Using her auditory imagination, Linda re-stories this seemingly serene landscape with memories of her family’s presence that whites have deliberately suppressed and erased. For example, when Linda visits her mother’s grave on the eve of her decision to run away, she ruminates on the cloying sense of “death-like stillness” that marks its sacredness to her and the profound loss represented by unmarked graves: people silenced in both life and death, forced to the outskirts of their communities and removed from official narratives of American history, culture, and identity. But Linda’s mother does not remain silent; Jacobs writes, “I received my mother’s blessing when she died, and in many an hour of tribulation I had seemed to hear her voice, sometimes chiding me, sometimes whispering loving words into my wounded heart.”73 As discussed earlier, nineteenth-century American culture considered a person’s last words important (and quite revealing of character). Here Jacobs evokes the Victorian sentimental practice of listening for a loved one’s last words but emphasizes the materiality of her mother’s voice and its ability to console Linda far into the unseen future. While Blackford interprets Linda’s memory as a projection of her conflicted feelings regarding the remaining female figures in her life, namely Mrs. Flint and her grandmother Marthy’s “double power to abuse and nourish,” I counter that Linda’s specific evocation of her mother’s sound must be heard and respected, particularly because voices possess unique links to memories of individual people.74 Slavery’s power dynamics sought to lump slaves together as an indistinguishable mass, a practice Hartman calls “fungibility.”75 Forbidden to keep written or material items of remembrance such as letters, family Bibles, locks of hair, jewelry, or other treasured heirlooms, slaves held on to and rehearsed their loved ones’ heard memories, challenging dominant depictions of sound—and slave families—as amorphous and ephemeral, here and then gone. Through her auditory imagination, Linda resists slavery’s fungibility and erasure. Linda internalizes not only the sound of her mother’s voice but also the sonic experience of being parented by her, in discipline and in comfort, and she evokes this memory when she seeks motivation or a model for her own parenting. Jacobs shares the knowledge and actions produced through Linda’s (re)enactment of her mother’s sonic legacy without exposing its specific content, an act of agency in the face of her undoubtedly and uncomfortably curious white readership.
A second evocation of the trope of the listener, this time in reference to her father’s vocal timbre, amplifies the specificity of Linda’s auditory imagination and its ability to hear histories deliberately squelched by the white listening ear. Her father’s faded grave, marked only by a small wooden board with writing “nearly obliterated,” contrasts with her sharp memory of his voice: “I passed the wreck of the old meeting house, where, before Nat Turner’s time, the slaves had been allowed to meet for worship, I seemed to hear my father’s voice come from it, bidding me not to tarry till I reached freedom or the grave. I rushed on with renovated hopes.”76 Linda projects the sound of her father’s voice onto the plantation’s built environment as a reminder of its bloody history and of slaves’ claims to it. She also connects his voice to slaves’ resistance. Although Linda’s recollection genders resistance—her mother associated with comfort and her father with overt rebellion—that both of them speak to her in rapid succession foreshadows how Linda eventually combines these strategies. Her auditory imagination provides her with the knowledge that her dream was once theirs too.
In carefully attending to the sound of her dead parents’ voices, Linda’s auditory imagination both re-stories the plantation landscape with her ancestors’ presence and constructs subversive narratives that defy the sonic color line’s constricting definitions of black sonic subjectivity. Cavicchi argues for the importance of the auditory imagination in the antebellum period as a narrative force. In particular, “soundless ‘interior’ hearing,” of the type experienced by Linda Brent, “became an important factor in conversion stories, often acting as the catalyst for the dramatic ‘turning’ that precipitated being ‘born again.’ Sounds of thunder, bells, and birds were all carefully examined for evidence of either God’s grace or Satan’s temptation.”77 Jacobs, in fact, does not describe Brent as remembering voices; rather she “seemed to hear” the interior sounds rise from external objects such as the wreckage of the worship house.78 Linda also hears the sounds of her living-but-absent children’s voices as tones that bind her to life and spur her to risk everything to secure their freedom. Jacobs’s use of the trope of the listener powerfully connects Linda’s decision to escape slavery with popular cultural narratives of religious conversion.
Linda also cultivates her auditory imagination as a method of narrating the events of her life when no other means are available. An unacknowledged precursor to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which the thwarted female protagonist unlooses her visual imagination upon the wallpaper’s whorls when forbidden from writing, Incidents depicts Linda using environmental sounds as emotional touchstones. Jacobs, for instance, invests the sound of Linda’s grandmother’s gate with her feelings. After her master threatens her with rape, Linda visits her grandmother for solace. Finding her angry and disapproving due to the Mistresses’ lies, a devastated Linda describes, “With what feelings did I now close that little gate, which I used to open with such an eager hand in my childhood! It closed upon me with a sound I never heard before.”79 Here the trope of the listener again marks the gendered passage through the “bloodstained gate of slavery,” for Linda the indescribable sound of a literal gate closing upon her physical safety, sexual agency, and dreams of a loving domestic life. Furthermore, as a slave mother-to-be, Linda realizes her limited control—if any—over her children’s future. Jacobs embeds Linda’s horrific realization in the sentence’s very syntax; as a child, Linda eagerly opened the gate, but now the gate “closed
