The sonic color line emerged as a ubiquitous and palpable force of racialization in nineteenth-century America, particularly in two of the most well-known contemporary critiques of slavery and its mutually constitutive social relations, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). While discursive traces of whites’ use of the sonic color line pepper the popular media of the moment, it was first exposed and rebuked in print by Douglass and Jacobs. Particularly when taken together, their work reveals how white masters and mistresses raced and gendered both sound and listening on the plantation, disciplining themselves and their slaves to the listening ear’s perceptual frame. Most importantly, both writers detail their resistance to the listening ear’s depiction of blackness, highlighting listening as a particularly important site of agency for slaves. African Americans worked to decolonize their listening practices from the inception of the sonic color line, and—co-constitutive with Western imperialization, colonization, and enslavement—they countered the listening ear’s pernicious discipline with individual acts of refusal and communal practices strengthening kinship ties across time and space.
Douglass’s emphasis on the divergent listening practices of black and white subjects in his Narrative shows how they shape (and are shaped by) racial ideologies and everyday disciplinary practices, providing hope that whites could reform their listening ear and that black people can decolonize their listening practices. He exposes and resists the sonic color line while arguing for the importance of slaves’ sounds—in particular, women’s screaming and mixed-gender collective singing—as fundamental to understanding the sensory experience of racism, particularly the construction, gendering, and limitations of the white listening ear and the uneven physical and psychological restraints of white-conditioned listening practices. My reading of Douglass presents a new perspective on a thinker long considered a champion of written literacy and interracial communication, one that considers black listeners alongside his well-documented appeal to “ethnosympathetic” whites.9 I show how Douglass also understood that visual and written modes of knowledge, however unstable, enabled whites to increasingly marginalize sound as emotional and unpredictable—qualities associated with blackness (and femaleness)—even as it continued to perform significant racial labor; however, Douglass also took advantage of publication as a venue to challenge whites’ limited perception and affirm black listeners’ knowledge.
Whereas Douglass’s Narrative takes on the aural edge of racism, Jacobs’s Incidents focuses much more on documenting the aural experience of race, particularly for black women rendered doubly subject to white supremacist patriarchy. Douglass explores the divergent interpretations of black and white men as they listen to white men’s physical abuse of black women, but he does not represent black women as listeners. In Douglass’s Narrative, black women sound; in Jacobs’s Incidents they listen too, developing protective strategies that detect potential sexual abuse and violence in sounds far more subtle than screams. Jacobs’s representation of the intertwined relationship between Linda’s external experience of place and her internal auditory voicings of family provides new understandings of how black people crafted selves and re-storied antebellum environments through embodied listening practices.
In concert, Douglass and Jacobs expose the partiality of white listening practices and the enabling privilege of whites’ purportedly universal interpretations as foundational to white supremacy while simultaneously exploring the sonic color line as a site of possibility, revealing a perceptual gap between black and white audition that harbored life-affirming practices at the microlevel of the senses. Douglass questions the white listening ear’s ability to hear across the color line, while Jacobs seeks refuge in alternative sonic modes of knowing, being, and creating community that challenge the sonic color line at its gendered core. This chapter furthers new critical discussions of the slave narrative and performativity that augment long-standing visual analysis with an exploration of the “slave narrative’s literary capacities for play and complex signification.”10 I argue that, through their respective literary representations of “listening,” Douglass and Jacobs introduced a key trope of African American literature: “the listener.” By close-reading scenes where Douglass and Jacobs represent listening as the dominant sense, I identify a new trope that symbolically disentangles audio and visual experience, demonstrating how sound communicated truths about slavery and resistance that the eye always already distorted.
The Rise of the Sonic Color Line
The sonic color line had two key functions in the mid-nineteenth century. First, it helped white elites impose a racialized order on a sense long thought to be unruly and overly connected to the emotions in Western culture, providing white men, in particular, with a socially acceptable range of sounds associated with dispassionate rationality and efficient necessity to aurally communicate their race and class status. Western culture as expressed in the United States characterized the auditory sense as a wellspring of emotional truth rather than an engine of knowledge production, deeming listening ephemeral and uncontrollable next to vision’s steady gaze. For instance, Mark M. Smith details how abolitionists permeated antislavery articles with aural images of cracking whips and wailing slaves to recreate slavery’s soundscape as an emotional tactic to reach the irrational ears of slave masters.11 Moreover, the sonic color line enabled the dominant white culture to classify particular sounds as identifiably and essentially “black,” fixing race in a sensory domain already branded as emotionally potent and unpredictable. Of course the very process of fixing the racial identity of particular sounds protests too much; whites’ imposition of their racial hierarchies in the sonic realm reveals anxiety about the agency possible for black subjects. Listening remains largely invisible under the gaze, located in a complex entanglement of one’s internal (and internalized) thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Developing a sonic color line—however uneven, ad hoc, and indeterminate—to verify race’s increasingly unreliable visual cues allowed whites to extend both race and racism into the auditory unseen. The sonic color line turned the notion of race inside out; blackness and whiteness could now be lived and experienced from within rather than just externally classified. Tethering both an evolving battery of sounds and a limited range of listening practices to black bodies expanded white racism to include new forms of acoustic disciplining that punished racial transgressions and served as violently coercive psychological conformity.
However, listening’s enabling invisibility also marked the sonic color line’s potential undoing. The singularity of the term “listening” assigns a false simplicity and unity to an act that is not singular but rather represents a potentially vast set of simultaneous and interconnected practices, actions, poses, thoughts, interpretations, and filters; such complexity is precisely why whites sought to narrow its power for black listeners. One’s outward display could easily bely listening’s workings within, as one of Ralph Ellison’s characters, the slave-born grandfather of the protagonist in Invisible Man (1952), would advise: “Overcome ’em [whites] with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”12 The seeming amenability that whites identified as “black” listening in fact masked a wide range of alternate, resistant, and decolonizing listening practices.
White fears of black agency were greatly exacerbated by the emerging scientific discourse that emphasized