its sound to mark another sorrowful threshold: Linda’s loss of her daughter to servitude. From her attic cell, Linda listens to the sounds of her daughter leaving her grandmother’s house to become her father’s family servant: “I heard the gate close after her with such feelings as only a slave mother can experience.”80 In Linda’s auditory imagination, the gate’s click sounds out the distance between herself and her white Northern abolitionist readership, women who claimed sisterhood with black women without attempting to understand the pervasive impact the lack of freedom over one’s body has for slave women, down to the very level of sensory perception.
Jacobs further explores the differences between white listening practices and those developed by slaves, using rich description to detail the white supremacist assumptions enabled by and encoded in the sonic color line, revealing them as specific sonic symbols of American patriarchy and white supremacy rather than universal affective experiences. The most powerful example occurs when Linda, crouched in her darkened attic cell, overhears a performance of the conventionally sentimental popular song “Home Sweet Home” and uses her auditory imagination to challenge the nostalgic idealization of the white woman as wife and mother to the nation. The breakaway hit from the 1829 opera Clari, Maid of Milan and arguably the nineteenth century’s most popular song, “Home Sweet Home” was most famous for its refrain “ ‘Mid pleasures and palaces though I may roam, / Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”81 Given the song’s brisk sales—and the copious “Home Sweet Home!” needlepoints adorning American homes—Jacobs’s readers would have been familiar with its lyrics, melody, and overdetermined cultural meanings that helped shape evolving ideas of middle-class domesticity. While Douglass asks his white readers to imagine the sound of the singing of a “man cast away on a desolate island” as representative of slavery’s isolation, Jacobs presents her readership with the imaginative listening practices of a slave mother cast away in an isolation chamber, eavesdropping on white American middle-class culture.
1854 sheet music from Samuel Owen’s arrangement of “Jenny Lind’s ‘Home Sweet Home,’ ” one of countless versions sold in the mid-nineteenth century reinforcing normative white domesticity.
As she listens as a slave mother, Linda’s auditory imagination unravels the foundations of the song until they no longer “seem like music,” stripping away its European musical trappings and the listening ear’s dominant cultural associations. Jacobs positions Brent as an invisible interloper overhearing a song whose strains are clearly not meant to serenade the ears of a slave mother with no legal right to herself, let alone her children. Linda remembers sitting and
thinking of my children, when I heard a low strain of music. A band of serenaders were under the window playing “Home Sweet Home.” I listened until the sounds did not seem like music, but like the moaning of children. It seemed as if my heart would burst. I rose from my sitting posture, and knelt. A streak of moonlight was on the floor before me, and in the midst of it appeared the forms of my two children.… I felt certain something had happened to my little ones.82
For Brent, there is no place that is home; the song’s conventional sentimentality remains inaccessible, and its sound brings pain and foreboding. Reversing white descriptions of black music as “noise”—and nodding to Douglass’s “if not in the word, in the sound” epistemology—Brent listens to “Home Sweet Home” by breaking it down to the sounds she hears constituting it: “the moaning of children.” Moaning, a sound Moten argues “renders mourning wordless … releasing more than what is bound up in the presence of the word,”83 strips away the lyrics of the song and unlocks its suppressed suffering. The moaning Brent hears reclaims “Home Sweet Home” as specifically for her. Heard through a slave mother’s auditory imagination, “Home Sweet Home” brings not aural assurances of domestic bliss, but rather sonic reminders of the painful toll slavery exacted upon children forced to follow the “condition of the mother.” The challenge that Linda Brent’s auditory imagination presents to the dominant cultural narratives about sound structured by the sonic color line and racialized by the listening ear amplifies listening’s potential as a resistant practice for slaves, offering a method of strengthening family bonds and histories in the face of an institution bent on destroying both at once and a perceptual framework enabling a limited experience of agency over themselves and their environment.
“Joy and Sadness in the Sound”: Listening as Epistemology
Jacobs’s self-reflexive representation of Linda Brent’s evolving listening experiences evinces the sonic color line’s presence and makes palpable the terrible resonance of the listening ear on slaves’ self-perceptions and apprehensions. By tracking Linda’s listening practices through changes in age, geography, and social status, Jacobs constructs listening not as a fixed biological trait but as a flexible process capable of change (albeit with great effort); Jacobs imparts this lesson to white and black readers. Listening practices may seem natural and immutable, but as Pauline Oliveros would later argue, listening is actually “a process developing from instantaneous survival reactions to ideas that drive consciousness. The listening process continues throughout one’s lifetime.”84 Jacobs represents listening as a responsive and evolving mode of learning for slaves in particular, crucial to self-understanding, accruing knowledge over time and remaining vigilantly attentive to imminent danger. For slaves, Jacobs indicates, matters of survival intertwine intimately with “ideas that drive consciousness,” and the episteme of listening equips Linda with some sustenance and protection, as well as her capacity to imagine a life and identity outside of “slave.” Incidents represents Linda’s practiced ability to perceive echoes of the past in the present—knowledge key to her survival—but also tracks how her ear adapts to new ideas, locations, and iterations of the sonic color line. Four distinct moments and geographies shape Linda’s auditory experience and demand new modes of listening: her childhood with her family at her first mistress’s home, her girlhood on the Flints’ plantation, her young motherhood in the “loophole of retreat” in her grandmother’s attic, and her time as a fugitive in the urban North.
In Linda’s childhood, listening emerges as a key way to obtain truths, however painful, despite the sonic color line’s narrowed definition of black listening abilities. Raised in “fortunate circumstances,” Linda doesn’t learn she is a slave until age six, upon her mother’s death, when she listens to her friends and family unfold her family’s genealogy. Although she describes her mistress as “kind”—she teaches Linda to read, does not beat her, and allows her to remain with her grandmother—Linda finds herself no less in slavery’s clutches. Through listening, she learns whom to listen to and whom to regard with distrust. Upon death, Linda’s mistress does not free her as promised but arbitrarily bequeaths her to a five-year-old niece. Thus disciplined to listen to the promises (and interpret the kindnesses) of white people with skepticism, Linda quickly understands that words can be twisted, promises broken, and sworn oaths denied, even as some words whites speak become ironclad truths with great consequences for her and her family. Finally, as I have mentioned, the comforting exchanges she has with her mother, father, and grandmother during this time help shape her aural literacy and auditory imagination while enabling lasting aural bonds.
When twelve-year-old Linda arrives at the Flints’, her listening practices shift dramatically upon encountering the listening ear of her new master and mistress, both of whom unsparingly discipline her via aural terrorism. They forcibly attune her to the aural markers of slavery’s raced and gendered power relations: the equation of slave listening with obedience, the master’s deliberately “cold words and cold treatment,” the spectacular sounds of violence, the master’s sexually abusive whispers, and the controlling power of silence.85 Almost immediately, Linda learns the obedient listening expected of slaves by observing her brother Willie’s conundrum when his father and his new mistress simultaneously demand his attention. She describes how he
hesitated between the two; being perplexed to know which had the strongest claim upon his obedience. He finally
