are my child,” replied our father. “and when I call you, you should come immediately, if you have to pass through fire and water.”
Poor Willie! He was now to learn his first lesson of obedience to a master.86
Witnessing Willie choose between the listening ear’s demand that he court his father’s reproach—devastating their familial relationship and acknowledging its tenuousness—or risk physical punishment by ignoring his mistress teaches Linda the relationship between listening and power. Not only does she observe Willie concede to whites’ primary authority, but she also sees how the listening ear and its power to enforce listening as obedience uncomfortably link the roles of master and father. Willie’s experience influences Linda to reject listening as obedience; as Stephanie Li notes, Linda “avoids creating the double-bind that entraps her brother,” never calling her children to her nor demanding public displays of love.87 In contrast, Linda spends time listening to her children, coming to know and love them through this practice.
The second listening experience marking the abrupt end to Linda’s girlhood occurs the night she earwitnesses Mr. Flint beating a slave, an act of violence and aural terrorism that reveals the limits of language and further conditions her gendered relationship to the master’s power and the sonic color line. Signifying on the imagery of the Hester scene in Douglass’s Narrative, Jacobs’s Incidents de-emphasizes violence’s spectacular qualities, embedding it into a larger economy of gendered violence. “I shall never forget that night,” Linda recalls. “Never before, in my life, had I heard hundreds of blows fall, in succession, on a human being. His piteous groans, and his ‘O pray don’t, Massa’ rang in my ear for months afterward.”88 Unlike Douglass’s graphic audiovisual description, Jacobs’s representation of the unnamed man’s beating is almost completely aural, an editorial choice that depicts heard violence as itself terrorism rather than merely its by-product. Her use of “never before” signifies how such aural terrorism creates a new understanding of her subject position and hints that this will not be the last time she hears such sounds; the usual rhetorical companion, “never again,” never comes. Jacobs asserts the slave’s humanity before she describes his “piteous groans,” and she reduces the master to the metonymic rise and fall of the whip, using this machinelike sound to reveal him—rather than the slave he beats—as inhuman. Whereas the interchange between Douglass’s Aunt Hester and his master possesses a disturbingly personal and erotic intensity, Jacobs’s scene casts violence as rote and institutional. Not that the master’s abuse remains free of desire, as the relentless rising and falling of the whip alludes; Flint beats the man because the man has (rightly) accused him of fathering his wife’s child. While Douglass represents Hester only through her screams, Jacobs relates the slave’s linguistic and extralinguistic pleas; however, rather than humanizing him further, as so many of Douglass’s critics argued a transcription of Hester’s words would have accomplished, the man’s cry “O pray don’t, Massa” works to the contrary. Andrew Levy explains how the word “Massa” functions as a strategic rhetorical appeal to the “power of deference” to stop the attack, as well as a calculated literary technique to enhance the “expressive appeal” of Jacobs’s text to her white Northern readers.89 Without foreclosing these possibilities, I suggest the scene affirms Douglass’s conclusion that words alone will not stop the master’s whip, while also considering how words themselves, in certain contexts, can lead to further enslavement by verbally performing the sonic color line.
In another key shift from Douglass’s iconic imagery, Jacobs avoids linking the male slave’s screams to black musical culture, instead representing song as an excruciatingly brief exercise of agency—how the slaves might hear it—rather than reaching across the sonic color line to challenge the listening ear’s misrepresentations. In Jacobs’s depictions of slaves singing at Johnkannaus and a Methodist town meeting, she highlights their experience of choosing when and how to use their voices in a manner pleasing to themselves.90 Both the singing and its attendant listening experiences provided slaves with fleeting feelings akin to freedom, producing powerful affects that operated neither as false balm nor empty diversion but rather as a crucial exercise of will and imagination. Jacobs invites the possibility of enjoyment through song, one that Douglass’s representation forecloses: “If you were to hear them at such times, you might think they were happy. But can that hour of singing and shouting sustain them through the dreary week, toiling without wages, under constant dread of the lash?”91 By representing a very limited, momentary pleasure in “singing and shouting,” Jacobs resists dominant abolitionist articulations of common humanity between black and white people through images of pain and suffering while suggesting that sounds produced within the sonic color line’s bounds have power, meaning, and value. In the word and the sound then, singing provided slaves a communal experience of vibrational, emotional, and psychological possibility—however temporary and transient—outside of bondage and the listening ear’s binaristic logic. Jacobs’s imagery intimates that if slaves, whenever possible, attuned themselves to the truth and value expressed through their own voices, they would increasingly be able to hear it as well. By listening differently to their singing—what I identify as decolonizing listening—they would strengthen their auditory imaginations and redirect their listening practices away from the listening ear’s obliteration.
To deconstruct the listening ear and to underscore the boundary she redraws between slaves’ cries of pain and shouts of song, Jacobs embeds the sounds of screams within slavery’s larger sonic economy of sexual violence, an institutional soundscape naturalized by the sonic color line as business as usual. Challenging her white Northern readership to hear slaves’ suppressed screams-within-screams—and perhaps rattling black readers into the radical openness of Douglass’s listening practices—Jacobs counters the screams’ physical dissipation by using aural imagery to reveal the interconnection between slavery’s violences and their lingering systemic, terror-inducing, and often silent resonances, particularly for the sold-away and the dying. In Jacobs’s sonic economy, the screams of the man Flint beats perform as an audible herald and spectacular mask for its quieter but no less brutal expressions. Following the incident, Linda describes how whispered speculations arise amongst the slave community as they look to his wife’s fair newborn child; the couple’s quarrelling reverberates across the quarters. However, all these sounds abruptly cease when Flint sells both man and woman away. Not only does Flint profit from his cruelty, but he also “had the satisfaction of knowing they were out of sight and hearing.”92 Flint engineers the sights and soundscape of the plantation to satisfy his own sensory desires and to uphold his self-image, remixing screams with silence in order to retain his power and standing. As the slave trader leads the mother of Flint’s child away, she yells, “You promised to treat me well,” breaking the master’s silence and publicly revealing the open secret of his abuse and paternity. Flint counters by blaming her because she refused to collude with his sonic and sexual designs: “You have let your tongue run too far, damn you!” Together, the screams of the whipped would-be father and the protests of the sold-away mother reverberate and bleed together in the narrative’s soundscape as Jacobs ends the chapter with a vignette relating the aural torture of another young slave mother by her mistress, who shouts obscenities into her ear as she lies dying from a difficult birth of “a child nearly white.”93 Jacobs’s aural imagery connects sounds that the listening ear deems isolated institutional by-products, exposing them as constitutive of the gendered violence at the heart of the slave economy. Neither necessary aural collateral damage nor raw material for redemption, the sounds of men and women screaming reveal both public pain and secreted social and familial relations. Related just pages before Flint’s first attempt at rape, Linda’s memory of these screams and their suppression foreshadows—presounds?—the aural abuse Linda will experience when the master and mistress initiate her into the plantation’s sexual economy. Here, too, Jacobs resists the listening ear’s perception of slavery by deliberately mingling two sounds the sonic color line would separate, slaves’ screams and the master’s and mistress’s abusive whispers.
Paradoxically an aural contrast and an analogue to slaves’ screams, the master’s whispers terrorize and discipline Linda to slave womanhood—the third major listening event marking the end of her childhood—and the obedient
