“shuddering.” Beyond resistance, Linda uses her silence as an opportunity to listen to others’ listening, a metacognitive practice enabling new forms of listening and selfhood to emerge.
Linda’s listening deliberately creates space for (and affirms) black lives, sounds, and familial relationships, a form of decolonizing listening. In a scene revealing listening’s potential for empathy amid terror, for example, Linda inhabits her brother’s aural experience as Flint forces him to listen while he punishes Linda: “I felt humiliated that my brother should listen to such language as would be addressed only to a slave. Poor boy! He was powerless to defend me; but I saw the tears, which he strove vainly to keep back.”103 In listening to her brother listen, Linda understands how masculinity intersects with race for her brother, who—similar to the young Douglass—experiences his own enslavement in his inability to help his sister. Like her brother and Douglass, Linda refuses to harden her ear against slavery’s violence. In another instance, the Flints place Linda in the position of listening to her own daughter, left alone outside, “crying that weary cry which makes a mother’s heart bleed.” Initially, she feels “obliged to steel [her]self to bear it” to protect them both from worse punishment.104 However, the trauma of hardening her ear and its near-disastrous result—her daughter cries herself to sleep in the mansion’s crawl space and barely escapes a poisonous snake—spur Linda to action. She very deliberately rejects both black listening-as-obedience and the callousness of the slave masters’ listening ear, risking her own life by sending her daughter to her grandmother’s without asking Flint’s permission. By listening to her daughter in the ethically involved manner Douglass fights to maintain, Linda begins to decolonize her listening practice from slavery’s violent and dehumanizing discipline, opening herself to the dangerous vulnerability of love and connection.
The third major geographic shift in Linda’s life—the seven years she spends hidden in her grandmother’s garret, nearly all her young motherhood—mobilizes the trope of the listener to make material the sonic color line’s claustrophobic effects on black subjects and amplify listening as a strategy to survive and resist isolation. Literary critics have analyzed this space—only nine feet long and seven feet wide—as a representation of a grave (social death), a cell (slavery as incarceration), a womb (rebirth), an image of the Middle Passage, a symbol of the restriction on women’s lives (the “confinement” of pregnancy and child-rearing), and a signifier of the African American literary trope of the “tight space” that black people occupy, metaphorically and materially, in U.S. society. Building on Incidents’ critical history, I argue that sensory deprivation factors into all of these prior readings, particularly in the case of sight. An inversion of Douglass’s Aunt Hester scene, here a slave mother, trapped in a darkened crawl space, listens to the sounds of her children laughing and playing to “comfort [her] in [her] despondency.”105 Linda’s cramped space of imprisonment, therefore, also functions as an isolation chamber in which listening remains her primary link to the world.106 While not completely removed, her senses of smell, taste, and touch are severely restricted. For the first few months, Linda cannot see; she knows the passage of time “only by the noises [she] heard; for in [her] small den day and night were all the same.”107 Both before and after she carves out a small peephole in her garret, listening binds Linda to life and provides comfort, even as her heightened aural literacy demands she bear the psychological weight of listening to herself as “noise” and continually strain for the sound of her master’s approach.
The isolation chamber of the garret heightens Linda’s attention to the myriad ways the white listening ear demands that black people listen to themselves as “noise.” Every sound the fugitive Linda makes threatens to reveal her body as out of bonds/bounds; therefore, she turns the listening ear against herself, policing her every movement and suppressing even the subtlest bodily functions. Although there is a certain amount of power and satisfaction gained in being an unseen listener—culling important intelligence, as Linda points out, without need of the eye—being constantly on the ready during “countless” nights filled with intermittent blasts of information devastates her nerves. After years of being “warned to keep extremely quiet,” “even [her] face and tongue stiffened, and [she] lost the power of speech.” When her ability to communicate atrophies, Linda experiences a concomitant loss of self. Although Linda never fully loses her ability to listen, she yearns for its sociality to be unfettered, revelling in moments where her oppressive quietude is broken: “It was also pleasant to me to hear a human voice speaking to me above a whisper.”108 Linda embraces not only the meaning of conversational exchange but also the delightful experience of sound itself, which signifies a material difference between slavery and freedom. The sudden increase in volume provides Linda with a brief blast of freedom, including the agency to make “noise,” the liberty to move one’s body without hypervigilant attention to its every sound, and the ability to have a conversation with a loved one at a desirable volume without constant fear. Linda’s brutal experience in the garret’s isolation chamber calls attention to the sonic restrictions slaves faced within the sonic color line’s circumscription, using the trope of the listener to amplify how slaves must listen through and beyond the listening ear’s deleterious representations of their bodies, voices, and culture as “noise.”
However, rather than understanding Linda’s listening only as reactive practice dealing only with “noise,” Jacobs highlights listening as an active practice of desire, a casting out toward sounds that provide Linda with a certain quality of touch, even love, in her isolation. Rather than withdraw, for example, Linda carefully attends to her children’s sounds, continuously stoking her maternal relationship, however painful: “Season after season, year after year, I peeped at my children’s faces, and heard their sweet voices, with a heart yearning all the while to say, ‘your mother is here.’ ” Linda’s grandmother also frequently brings the children to play within Linda’s earshot, knowing the sounds “comfort [Linda] in her despondency.”109 As Bonenfant’s work on queer listening argues, listening provides comfort and self-recognition because vocal sound, in particular, functions as “a kind of intimate, human-generated touch” that vibrates bodies and caresses the surface of the skin. Bonenfant argues people listen differently to sounds they desire—as opposed to unbidden sounds, such as Flint’s whispers—using the body to “listen ‘out’ for (reaching toward) voices that … will gratify.”110 In Bonenfant’s terms, listening out for her children’s voices allows Linda to feel their presence. Linda listens out for her grandmother, too, who, over the course of Linda’s confinement, develops a wordless code to communicate with her. “She had four places to knock for me to come to the trap-door,” Jacobs writes, “and each place had a different meaning,” an act of vibration creating pleasurable expectation for Linda and maintaining a material link with her family.111 Gradually, the furtive whispers of her grandmother and other family members come to replace Flint’s. Even as it warps her body and silences her voice, the isolation chamber queers Linda’s listening, enabling her to hear beyond the sonic color line’s confines and imagine an alternate relationship to her body’s experiences of love, pain, desire, survival, and motherhood.
The final phase of Linda’s evolving listening practice, the process of liberating herself from a lifetime of the listening ear’s discipline, proves arduous and uneven, even as Linda finds herself on the clamorous streets of Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. Here Jacobs shows listening’s mutability, however stubbornly filtered through the past and ghosted by echoes of former geographies. Once in the North, Linda struggles with feeling psychologically mired in the South; listening functions here as a conduit for wrestling with the emotional consequences of slavery, sexual abuse, and her long period of entrapment. After meeting her first free black acquaintance, the Reverend Jeremiah Durham, Linda realizes how slavery still stigmatizes her in the “free” North. Durham suggests Linda shouldn’t recount her sexual abuse lest it “give some heartless people a pretext for treating [her] with contempt.” The shock of the idea that Northerners might shun her for her master’s licentiousness impacts Linda viscerally. She notes, “The word contempt burned me like coals of fire,” hearkening back to the “scorching” words of Mr. Flint and connecting them to the political economy of gender that would silence her. The realization of a larger system of racialized gender connecting North and South
