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The contours of the sonic color-line: slavery, segregation, and the cultural politics of listening
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The contours of the sonic color-line: slavery, segregation, and the cultural politics of listening
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THE CONTOURS OF THE SONIC COLOR-LINE: SLAVERY, SEGREGATION, AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF LISTENING by Jennifer Lynn Stoever A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY) August 2007 Copyright 2007 Jennifer Lynn Stoever ii Dedication To Grandma Maryanne, who is still with me, even on the toughest of days. I miss you. To Charlie Ackerman, who makes the toughest of days feel joyful. You’re my favorite. iii Acknowledgements First, I thank my committee and mentors; chair Carla Kaplan, Judith Jackson Fossett, Fred Moten, and Joanna Demers for modeling amazing scholarship, ceaselessly supporting and inspiring my work, tirelessly wrestling with my words, and always asking the hard questions. You mean the world to me. The Department of American Studies & Ethnicity has been my lifeline while at USC. I particularly thank Cynthia Young (now at Boston College), Sarah Banet-Weiser, George Sanchez, Ruthie Gilmore, Lanita Jacobs-Huey, my dear friend Karen Tongson, and my first advisor Viet Nguyen, who recognized my madness had an interdisciplinary method. I also thank Sharon Sekhon and my cohort—ASE’s first— for their support, feedback, and friendship: Hillary Jenks, reina alejandra prado, Laura Barraclough, Cam Vu, Michan Connor, and Karen Yonemoto. I am also grateful for the incisive editorial skills of English colleagues Andy Hakim and Marci McMahon. While working on this project, administrative assistants Sandra Jones, Kitty Lai, Sonia Rodriguez, and Flora Ruiz have helped me out of more jams than I can count. Much of the writing for my dissertation was completed during a 2005-2006 predoctoral fellowship at the Frederick Douglass Institute of African and African American Studies at the University of Rochester. While weathering my first winter, iv I was grateful for the mentorship of Jeffrey Tucker and Anthea Butler and the encouragement of Fred Harris, Larry Hudson, John Michael, Victoria Wolcott, Cilas Kemendijo, and Jesse Moore. FDI’s Administrative Assistant, Ghislaine Radegonde-Eison, was a friend and a lifesaver. FDI Fellows Niambi Carter, Stephanie Li, and Millery Polyné were true colleagues. Thank you for reading drafts, lifting spirits, and inspiring my scholarship. Thank you to Tony Schwartz and his assistant Forrest Gray, who answered my e- mails with tireless patience and sent me a wonderful package of archival materials that were essential to writing this project. I am also grateful for motivation and feedback from two brilliant dissertation groups: the “Dissertation Mavens,” Bridget Hoida Mulholland and Cara Cardinale Fidler, and “Jesse’s Girls,” Patricia Literte, Zöe Corwin, Rozana Carducci, and Melissa Contreras-McGavin. I am especially indebted to my close writing partners—those folks who I have sat side-by-side with for days on end—Fiorella Cotrina, Melissa Contreras-McGavin, and my anytime-anywhere, page-a-day partner Priscilla Peña Ovalle. My undergraduate mentors at UC Riverside are the reason I even considered graduate school. I especially thank Katherine Kinney—my first Professor of African American literature—for writing “Come to office hours!” on my paper many years v ago and continuing to inspire me long after. I also value the continued support of Emory Elliot and Marguerite Waller. I also wish to acknowledge my former high school students, who inspired me to follow my dreams. In addition, I have been blessed with the lifelong friendship of Sarah Parry, esq.; I am utterly grateful for her companionship on this long journey. Finally, my heart belongs to my family—especially my mom Linda, dad Jeff, and sister Jaclyn—and my partner Charlie Ackerman. Thank you for your love and generous understanding, especially when writing forced me to miss out on so much. vi Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract vii Introduction 1 “It Thrills With its Wail of Sorrow”: Introducing the Sonic-Color L ine Chapter One: 50 “If Not in the Word, In the Sound”: Listening as Technology and Epistemology in the Genre of the Slave Narrative Chapter Two: 111 “Hunger in those Sounds” Apprehending the Sonic Color-line in Early Richard Wright Chapter Three: 183 Echoes in ‘a Vacuum Unheard’: Listening, Segregation, and Distortion in Ann Petry and W.E.B. Du Bois Chapter Four: 252 “New York, on the other side, that is”: Tony Schwartz and the “Noise” of Segregation in Nueva York List of Works Cited 317 vii Abstract The Contours of the Sonic Color-line: Slavery, Segregation, and the Cultural Politics of Listening, is a literary, historical, and theoretical examination of the ways in which sound and listening functioned to produce social and racial difference during two significant, interconnected moments in American racial formation: late antebellum slavery in the mid-nineteenth century and the late Jim Crow era in the mid-twentieth. The literary and aural texts I examine—slave narratives and social realist works— explicitly responded to and intervened in racial discourse during these periods, representing the uneven power dynamics of U.S. white supremacy in order to dismantle them. In Contours, I argue that two of the most powerful dimensions of these counternarratives of race have heretofore been overlooked: the way in which they represent racism as operating in multiple sensory modalities—especially sound—as well as their use of aural imagery to challenge the dominance of visual discourses of race stemming from the Enlightenment. The notion of the visible color-line, made famous by W.E.B. Du Bois, is imbricated with its aural echo, what I term the “sonic color-line.” Through theoretical analysis, close reading, and archival research, I reveal the “sonic color-line” in American culture, an interpretive site where racial difference is produced and policed through the ear. To examine its historical presence, I focus my inquiry on textual soundscapes—the acoustic spaces created by representations of viii ambient sound, music, speech, and noise—and depictions of listening within a range of African-American cultural production from Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Folkways recording artist Tony Schwartz. Through contextualized “close listenings,” I show how the macropolitics of race and gender become powerful lived historical experiences through the intimate, micro-world of the senses. Just as we have a gaze that is filtered through our subjective lens(es), so too do we have what I call a “listening ear” that is historically embodied and culturally contextual. Far from being vision’s binary opposite, sound frequently appears to be visuality’s doppelganger—its unacknowledged but ever-present “other”—in the construction of race and the performance of racial oppression. 1 “It Thrills With its Wail of Sorrow”: Introducing the Sonic Color-line THE JUBILEE SINGERS The announcement that these colored singers, after their great success in England, are to appear again in this City, will doubtless bring to- gether anew the large audiences which thronged to hear them two years ago. There is something very plaintive and touching in their style of music. It is not artistic, like that of opera, but it has an indescribable pathos. The secret is that the melodies they sing are the ‘songs of their captivity’, which they learned when in the house of bondage. This kind of music will probably perish with this generation, and with it the sad memories that gave it birth. But while it lasts, it thrills with its wail of sorrow. The effect is the same upon all classes of hearers, the most simple and the most cultivated. New York Times “Amusements” January 31, 1875 At the same time as the “Colored Christian Singers” made the decision to limit their set list primarily to slave spirituals, they also decided to change their name to the Fisk “Jubilee Singers.” More than merely ornamental, the group’s transformation attempted to frame how audiences would receive their new sound. “Jubilee” refers to a joyous celebration of freedom, with its roots in the Biblical Jewish holiday of societal transformation, occurring every fifty years, where all slaves are to be freed, land is to be left untilled, and stolen property returned. While the group—composed 2 of nine men and women from Fisk University, many of whom were former slaves 1 — would now devote their voices to songs composed in slavery, they would do so as testament to and advocacy for racial progress, educational advancement, and continued transformation toward the promise of an interracial democracy held out by the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth Amendments (1870). The Fisk Jubilee Singers were the first group to perform slave spirituals on a public stage, as opposed to white minstrels, who had been performing plantation hymns in blackface for over thirty years. Their goal was to raise funds to save Fisk—one of the first Negro Colleges built in the wake of the Civil War—from financial destruction. After touring both Europe and the United States nearly nonstop for more than seven years, the group raised over ninety thousand dollars for the college, enough to cover Fisk’s debt, buy land for new university grounds—Fisk had been operating out of an old Union Army hospital—and erect Jubilee Hall, an impressive brick building at the heart of the new campus. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Fisk alumnus W.E.B. Du Bois described Jubilee Hall as “red with the blood and dust of toil” (204), referring both to the legacy of slavery in Atlanta and the struggles of the Jubilee Singers as they faced racism, extreme weather, starvation, exhaustion, and even death, on their lengthy tours. While unquestionably steeped in the musical traditions of slavery, the “Fisk Sound” also spoke to the progressive politics and cultural shifts occurring during Reconstruction and amplified an unprecedented hybrid musical form, what Ronald 3 Radano describes as a “concertized impression of slave singing” (1995: 82). The new arrangements of the spirituals combined African American vernacular expressive forms with the “body disciplines of the European concert stage” (Radano 1995: 83). Mediation of the songs was both imposed from without—European posture, breathing techniques, and enunciation style were part of the pedagogy of the group’s white director and business manager George L. White—and proposed from within the group as a way to mask the traditional songs against misinterpretation and appropriation by white audiences. Maggie Porter Cole, one of the original Jubilee Singers, remarked that the group felt that the antebellum songs in their traditional form “were for God and their parents’ talks with God. . .they were not for white men’s ears” (qtd. in Grant 22). As a result, the repertoire that the Jubilee Singers debuted in December 1871 at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn was a complex and contentious mix of cultural forms that both reflected and sought to alter the existent structures of power governing public musical performance in the United States. As the 1875 review from the New York Times attests, dominant racial norms shaped the reception of the group regardless of what and how they chose to sing. Northern white audiences did not hear the Jubilee Singers as heralds of an interracial modernity, but rather as “plaintive and touching” southern anachronisms: authentic black sonic throwbacks to the antebellum era. While Du Bois wrote that the group was asked to hide in the organ loft before their inaugural performance at Beecher’s 4 church, “lest pious Congregationalists see their black faces before they heard their heavenly voices” (1968: 122), the tremendous appeal of the Jubilee Singers to Northern whites during the 1870s was not predicated on their ability to transcend perceived “blackness,” but rather how well their “colored voices” embodied it. This dissertation, “The Contours of the Sonic Color-line: Slavery, Segregation, and the Cultural Politics of Listening,” takes up the relationship between sound, race, and listening, examining the interpretive process through which racial difference has been made audible at crucial moments in American history. The notion of the visible color-line, made famous by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, has always been imbricated with its aural echo, what I term the “sonic color- line.” The “sonic color-line” is an interpretive site where racial difference is echoed, produced, and policed through the ear. It is neither surprising nor arbitrary that I begin my examination of the “sonic color-line” with the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a global sensation whose voices captivated, thrilled, moved, amazed, and sometimes horrified white listeners during the era of Reconstruction, a period Eric Foner portrays as a “massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent” (xxv). Dating roughly from the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to the so-called “Bargain of 1877” in which the federal government essentially returned the South to white control, Reconstruction was a time of tremendous political upheaval and often violent adjustment to the end of chattel slavery. It began somewhat optimistically, as former slaves exercised new 5 political, social, and economic freedoms by building family lives, registering to vote in great numbers, organizing schools, churches and political institutions, constructing universities like Fisk and Atlanta, agitating for labor reform, and serving political office (although never holding a majority in any state legislature or serving in numbers proportionate to their population). The openness and optimism of the years immediately after the Civil War unfortunately proved to be short lived. Not only did resentful southern whites organize against black political representation using both legal and extralegal means, but Northern white support for progressive civil rights legislation waned after the brutal economic downturn of 1870, wide scale corruption of Ulysses Grant’s presidency, and pervasive circulation of what Nell Irvin Painter dubs the “myth of the carpetbagger-scalawag-Negro-era-of-misrule” (2). By 1877, when the last of the federal troops left the South, the retrenchment of white supremacy was so violent and the disenfranchisement of black people so profound that cultural critic Saidiya Hartman defines Reconstruction as a mere “point of transition between modes of servitude and racial subjection” (6). The theoretical framework of this project concerns such linkages between slavery and segregation— how the interpretive and perceptual structures of white supremacy persisted in alternate guises through and beyond Reconstruction—and the Jubilee Singers operate as an important cultural bridge between these two eras. The anonymous New York Times review reveals the ways in which the “Fisk Sound” was mediated for the “listening ears” of white audiences. I use the 6 expression “listening ear” as a theoretical construct describing how listening functions as an embodied cultural process that echoes and shapes one’s orientation to power and posture toward the world. Far from being a natural or arbitrary function of perception, listening is an act riven with power relations. While the write-up is entitled “The Jubilee Singers,” it reveals far more about white listening practices in 1875 than it does about black music makers themselves. The anonymous reviewer, backed by the editorial authority and cultural cache of the Times, functions as a powerful, invisible cultural arbiter influencing how the Jubilee Singers would be heard by white audiences in New York City. The review actually performs the division of labor in the burgeoning business of mass “Amusements” at the close of the nineteenth century, constructing whites as consummate listeners and black people as aural entertainment. Under the logic of the “sonic color-line,” “colored singers” produced sound, and white audiences “thronged” to consume it. I use “sound” deliberately here—and throughout the dissertation—as a neutral term describing an auditory event that includes speech, music, ambient sound, and noise. Terms like “music” and “noise”—a key term that I will say more about later—represent cultural value judgments about certain configurations of sound. For example, even as this writer expresses his enthusiasm for the sound made by the Jubilee Singers, he is loath to deem it music. Syntactically, he carefully sets the spirituals apart from the privileged, unmarked category of “music”; at best, the Jubilee Singers represent a “type of 7 music” or a “kind of music,” but never simply music itself. Furthermore, the reviewer is unwilling to hear the slave spirituals as “artistic, like . . .opera,” and simultaneously unable to hear opera as raced. Shaped by—and shaping—these judgments about art and music is the fact that the Times reviewer does not hear black artists as agents in their own cultural production. He characterizes the Jubilee Singers’ set list as “learned” rather than composed, a compendium passively “birth[ed]” by “sad memories” rather than actively crafted by musicians. Conversely, the writer does not hear the agency of whites in the slave system, whether as southern slave masters or Northerners profiting from slave labor and systemic racial oppression. This convenient “deaf-spot” was both a marker of Reconstruction’s failure and an intimation of why it collapsed. Venues for dominant discourse like the New York Times represented slavery as a tragedy that befell black people—“their captivity”—rather than a system of power and a site of cultural production constructed by and for whites. The writer even places qualifying quotation marks around “‘songs of their captivity,’” casting a suspicious intonation on the phrase and setting it apart from the rest of his discourse, what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as putting “the word on display” (322). The review attempts to bury the links between the “wail of sorrow” produced for white consumption in 1875 and the “wail of sorrow” elicited by the white slave master’s lash in the antebellum. With wishful “listening ears,” the white reviewer hears these songs as fleeting “sad memories” of slavery that will “perish with this generation.” It is precisely the 8 crumbling of Reconstruction at this historical moment that allows the “wail” to be re- characterized as entertainment and slavery’s legacy to be heard as transitory. Ironically, in this review it is the white audiences that are enslaved to black spectacle by their desire for and attraction to the “indescribable pathos” of the Jubilee Singers that “thrills” them so much. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the oldest definition of “thrill” is “one who is bound in servitude, a thrall”; “thrillman” was used interchangeably with “bondman.” In the nineteenth century the term “thrill” was also used generally to describe a feeling of pleasure mixed with excitement and specifically to account for the “acute tremulousness of sound”: the quivering, tangible, visible presence of sound waves. Part of the white audience’s “thrill” at a Jubilee Singers’ concert, then, was their perception that “blackness” was palpably and—as paradoxical as it may seem—visibly audible. The sound waves themselves seemed to carry a racial quality along with their “indescribable pathos.” This black sound thrilled, shocked, horrified, and titillated white audiences as it vibrated through their ears and bodies. Another anonymous review of the Jubilee Singers from February 2, 1875, for example, remarked that the choir’s voices were “so full of character and so full of color, and so little originality is met with these days that their strangeness is agreeable” (4, emphasis mine). The perceived “strangeness” of the Jubilee Singers—read: racial difference from an invisible, ubiquitous white American identity—is not just visual but sonic. The 9 reviewers hear the sound of the singers as both manifestly black and utterly Other, an oddity outside of history and a noise exterior to the American polity. As a direct result of the perceived sound of “blackness,” one of the primary “thrills” that white listening ears received at a Jubilee Singers concert was the opportunity to imagine themselves as a unified white “throng.” The placement of the article in the “Amusements” section points to another key historical context for the sound of the Jubilee Singers: the rise of the black performer within the well- established phenomenon of mass entertainment in urban centers like New York. During the late nineteenth century, fierce debates over Reconstruction, increased European immigration, and intensified class stratification due to rapid American industrialization, threatened the cohesion of a (white) American national identity. White “artistic” forms like opera could not offer a cultural solution to these deep fractures; as an elite musical form its very function was to distinguish the “most cultivated” from “the most simple.” The “colored singers” depicted in this review, however, were capable of producing a sound “whose effect was the same upon all classes of hearers” (emphasis mine). While the reviewer leaves “hearers” racially unmarked, he either assumes white hearers or describes the process by which these hearers were rendered white by their similar experience of the “effect” of black voices. Essentially, the strange, “indescribable pathos” of the Jubilee Singers allowed the “listening ears” of American mass audiences to hear themselves as white 10 and consequently to hear “white” as indescribably, universally human. Whiteness, it seems, is audible too. In spite of the reviewer’s desire for the sound of the Jubilee Singers to “perish with [its] generation,” the echoes of their voices have persisted long beyond their immediate historical context in both recorded 2 , transcribed 3 , and written forms 4 . Although attending Fisk thirteen years after their first tour, Du Bois was especially transformed by the Jubilee Singer’s sound and captivated by the struggle of the group to be heard. Du Bois himself managed a small men’s singing troupe while at Fisk and wrote about the group in The Souls of Black Folk as well as his 1940 autobiography Dusk of Dawn and his 1968 The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, in which he remarked, “one unforgettable thing Fisk did for me. . .was to guide and enlarge my appreciation of music” (12). In the next section, I will examine how this appreciation was absolutely central to Du Bois’s thinking about race throughout his career, particularly his later conception of race as a sonic phenomenon. The Problem of the Mid-Twentieth Century is the Problem of the Vacuum: Du Bois and the Genealogy of the Sonic Color-Line The theoretical foundation for “Contours” lies in the critical shift I have identified in Du Bois’s social theory from the color-line—the linear and visual metaphor that he offers at the turn of the twentieth-century—to the vacuum tube—a more complex, diffuse, and aural figuration that he proffers in his 1940 11 autobiography Dusk of Dawn. To better understand the eventual shift from the visual to the sonic in DuBois’s work, I want to briefly examine the etymology of the “color-line” itself and the kind of cultural work it performed at the turn of the century. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois’ key critical move was to change the language of the American debate from “the Negro Problem”—a term that by its very grammatical structure refused black subjectivity—to the “problem of the color-line” (Fossett and Tucker xv). By grafting these two phrases together, Du Bois rejects the definition of blacks as a “problem” people for a white America that increasingly felt that drawing a more absolute color-line was the solution, an attitude legally sanctioned by Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896. Hyphenating the term “color-line” enables Du Bois to steadfastly refuse any syntax that constructs racial presence as a problematic issue on its own and, as Gavin Jones describes, revivifies the “already existing words and phrases of the white pamphlet literature then dominating Southern politics” (30). In shifting the locus of “the problem” to the color-line itself—and by extension the structure of white supremacy that sanctioned, constructed, and enforced it—Du Bois adds complexity and dimension to what had been a one-sided construct. For a time, Du Bois’s notion of the color-line gave clarity to the complexities of racial segregation in America or at least what Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey Tucker describe as a “facile terminology” in which to discuss racial issues (xv). At this point in Du Bois’ intellectual trajectory, he felt that the virulent prejudice 12 American whites practiced against blacks stemmed from their fundamental ignorance of black humanity. This ignorance is in effect a type of myopic blindness brought on by the Western obsession with the visible world and the ethnocentric systems whites have constructed to divide and order it. Because whites have made blacks hypervisible through stereotype and racial marking, they have become almost entirely invisible to them as people. Du Bois accounts for this cultural blindness using the metaphor of the veil, an opaque panel that the white power structure places upon blacks to mark and entangle them in the system of white supremacy. The subsequent—and double-edged—consolation of solitary confinement within the veil is a striking clarity of insight into the artifice of the color-line and the empty but vicious truth of the concept of “race.” Although it is “almost a burden beyond the measure of their strength,” this “second-sight” equips blacks with incisive powers of social critique to deconstruct the workings of the color-line in American society (5). For whites, on the other hand, the veil represents an almost complete distortion of vision. As whites cannot see through the veil of “blackness” they have constructed, this metaphoric loss of vision is precisely what enables them to continually dehumanize black people, characterizing them as abstract, shadowy “problems” rather than unique individuals. However, while the genealogy of my concept of the “sonic color-line” stretches back to the more familiar Souls, it actually finds its deepest root in less familiar—but no less important—literary terrain. In 1940, Du Bois publishes his 13 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, the title of which suggests the paradoxical way he had come to view the modern world and “the race concept” that structured and underpinned it. Dusk of Dawn opens not with the kind of pronouncement heralded by his The Souls of Black Folk—“the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line”—but with an “Apology” that such declarations are now impossible to make. Dusk of Dawn is about the failure of clarity and reason in the face of intractable racism and violence now made palpable by what seemed at the time to be the apex of white supremacy in both theory and praxis. By this time, more than eight European countries had fallen to the Nazi military and cultural machine— including Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, and France—the London Blitz has begun, and the relation that Du Bois had described in 1903 of “the darker races to the lighter races of men,” which would occupy the social and political thought of the coming century, was embodied in full-scale warfare. The clearly demarcated cartography of the color-line he had drawn in Souls lay in tatters. He critiques his earlier assertion that the color-line’s boundaries could be visibly mapped and its battle front breached by a “series of brilliant immediate assaults” of education, scientific reason, and meritorious competition (6). For Du Bois, the idea of a definable (and therefore refutable) color-line separating black people from full inclusion into American social, political, cultural, and economic life had by mid-century malformed into what he describes as a “vaster and far more intricate jungle of ideas”: the sinuous snarls within the racialized mind 14 and the tangled global relationships structured by it. Du Bois no longer conceived of racism as driven solely by a visual color-line blocking access to the truth, but rather as a fundamentally conditioned misperception powerfully configured and trumpeted as “truth.” “As I grew older,” Du Bois wrote, “and saw the peoples of the land and of the world, the problem changed from a simple matter of color, to a broader, deeper, matter of social condition” (5). His move toward a third world/internationalist politics and a Pan-African diasporic framework during this period of burgeoning anti-colonial movements further complicates a simple view of the color-line. Standing in the ruins of the New Negro project which reached its apex in the Harlem Renaissance and reflecting on the violent failure of “progress with a capital P” (25)—Du Bois finds himself in a shifting space where dusk and dawn seem both indistinguishable and inextricably intertwined. Unable to summon the optimism of his earlier years to explain this treacherous gloaming, he instead invokes the chorus of a spiritual as if himself a supplicant on a church pew, listening. Just before delivering his devastating update of the color-line concept, Du Bois plaintively confesses: “my way was cloudy” (130). Importantly, Du Bois had evoked the chorus of this particular spiritual before, but under different circumstances. In The Souls of Black Folk, the song served as a primarily visual citational strategy; Du Bois juxtaposes a few bars of the song in European notation with an epigraph from Schiller’s “The Maid of Orleans” to open the chapter “On the Meaning of Progress,” a rhetorical move that evokes a powerful 15 absence of sound even as it purportedly attempts to embody it. In visually citing these phrases, Du Bois attempts to translate what he perceives as the “noise” of the spirituals—their cultural and historical alterity or as he describes it, the “haunting echo of these weird old songs”—into a form of music recognizable on equal footing with dominant European culture. This authoritative reframing does not provide a venue for the spiritual power of the song to be heard, but rather alters how the song is seen. While absent in notational form, the glossary that the lyrics provide—angels sent from heaven, God’s grace, the clouded path to salvation, streets paved with gold 5 —nonetheless resonate with the content of the chapter, where Du Bois witnesses the failure of Reconstruction and critiques the human cost of American capitalism and racism through the stunted life and premature death of Josie, one of his former students from rural Tennessee. Although the chapter ends with Du Bois on a Jim Crow car wondering whether the start of the 20 th century will represent either the “twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day” for black Americans, his powerful narration of the “love and life and strife and failure” of Josie passionately and expectantly reaches toward the dawn. In Souls, Du Bois positions himself in the debatably ironic role of the angel sent down from heaven—or at least an exuberant young representative of the Northern “Talented Tenth” sent via Fisk University—to guide rural folk like Josie beyond their limited, enclosed world. When Du Bois invokes the song in Dusk of Dawn, the confidence of Souls is gone; he now calls upon the spiritual as he once 16 imagined Josie might, himself in desperate need of clarity and guidance to steady his way through the tumult of what biographer Arnold Rampersad has described as “probably the most uncertain period of his life” (241). Du Bois is entrenched in the mist and the midst of the ever-more opaque dusk of the “racial tragedy” of global white supremacy that had stubbornly—and maliciously—refused to give way to any kind of recognizable dawn (at least on the equitable terms he had hoped for in Souls). Entreating the response to “Send them Angels Down,” he calls, “my ‘way was cloudy,’ and the approach to its high goals by no means straight and clear.” Against this sonic backdrop, Du Bois retheorizes the color-line. The veil is no longer a temporary opaque fabric of ignorance distorting racial relationships, rather it has permanently hardened into a “thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass,” a frightening aural metaphor for the extreme isolation and disenfranchisement of American segregation. In Du Bois’s first theorization of the color-line in Souls, the majority of his metaphors were ocular, focusing sharply on blindness, in/visibility, and the possibilities of enlightenment through seeing. This is not to say that Du Bois’s text is completely silent; in fact, he makes recourse to aural imagery throughout Souls to disrupt the visual color-line in order that “men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.” In addition to his use of the “sorrow songs,” he counters the veil with the subtle yet potent sonic leitmotif of “the wail.” 6 Throughout Souls he underscores various “wails”: of motherless slaves on the Georgia auction block with a revival 17 meeting in the black South, of his new-born child as an old man sings sorrow songs for strength. Sometimes bitter, often redemptive, the wail operates as a modality of resistance emanating from and calling to The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois invests the wail with the communicative power to express and represent racialized subjectivities beyond the visual hermeneutic of the veil, even as it potentially becomes a “(stereo)type.” 7 In Dusk of Dawn, however, the communicative potential of the wail is nullified by the muffled, distorted listening produced by the “sonic color-line.” Du Bois concretizes this interpretive difference in the figure of the plate glass prison, which he specifically describes as a vacuum, a term that had come into use with the rise of mass broadcasting technologies. The plate glass functions to isolate black people and cause their arguments, cries, and screams to remain unheard and unheeded by those outside the vacuum. It also works to circulate and re-circulate the cries within it, sounding out an ever-narrowing space of entrapment. In the context of this argument, Du Bois’s figural choice of “plate glass” is likely not coincidental. The major properties of this finely ground glass entail a high-grade of visual clarity in combination with thorough soundproofing. By 1940, two of plate-glass’s most prominent uses were for soundproofing radio and recording studios and for retail commodity display—banishing the noise of the street while beckoning passers-by to windowshop. Du Bois brings all of these meanings of “plate glass” frighteningly to bear in Dusk of Dawn at the moment when he hears about the lynching of Sam Hose. 18 On his way to the Atlanta Constitution to deliver his “careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts” for print—intended to stave off the lynch mob—Du Bois realizes that he is too late. Radio and newspaper media had already convicted Hose and packed the special excursion trains with eager white participants ready to “do what had to be done,” according to the April 14 th edition of the Constitution (qtd. in Hale 209-215). Hearing word that Hose’s “knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther down on Mitchell Street, on which [he] was walking,” Du Bois immediately turns around and heads home (67, emphasis mine). Silenced by the violent visual spectacle of lynching (re)enacted through the plate-glass window display—not to mention the palpable fear for his own life—Du Bois despaired that the cries of the lynch mob would always already drown out his carefully typed words. Through the multiple resonances of the plate glass prison, Du Bois reveals the power differential involved in the act of listening. Sounds that are exponentially amplified by those within the “sonic color-line” may simultaneously be dismissed, misunderstood, ignored, silenced, or devalued by those outside it. Whether blacks narrated the inequities of their enforced condition “evenly and logically” or whether they “scream[ed] and hurl[ed] themselves against the barriers, [they] hardly realiz[ed] in their bewilderment that they [were] screaming in a vacuum unheard” (131). Whites outside the barrier, confident in their empowered ignorance bolstered by the “curious glances” of scientific truth and objectivity, “either do not hear at all, 19 or hear but dimly, and even what they hear, they do not understand” (131). Under this model, black bodies are hypervisible, objectified by the same “plate glass” of white supremacist discourse that constructs their words as unintelligible. While whites may position themselves as consummate listeners, they hear only what they want to hear. Theory and Methodology of the Sonic Color-Line “Contours” investigates the ways in which sound and listening simultaneously echo and produce social and racial difference during two significant, interconnected moments in American racial formation: late antebellum slavery in the mid-nineteenth century and the late Jim Crow era in the mid-twentieth. Through contextualized close readings of literary and audio soundscapes from Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Folkways recording artist Tony Schwartz, I show how the macropolitics of race and gender become powerful lived historical experiences through the intimate micro-world of the senses. Using theoretical analysis, close reading, and archival research, I examine the “sonic color-line” within a range of African American cultural production, revealing that race has an audible contour; it can be heard as well as seen. The term contour—from the French “tourner,” to turn—is an especially useful analytic for this new configuration of the color-line, suggesting its spatiality, materiality, and multidimensionality—and its 20 potential porousness—which operates simultaneously in visual, physical, and sonic registers. The literary and audio texts that I examine in this project—slave narratives and social realist works—explicitly responded to and intervened in racial discourse during slavery and segregation, representing the uneven power dynamics of U.S. white supremacy in order to dismantle them. I use white supremacy here as Cornel West defines it in Prophesy Deliverance!: “the controlling metaphors, notions, and categories of modern discourse that develop and delimit specific conceptions of truth and knowledge, so that certain ideas are rendered incomprehensible and unintelligible” (47). In West’s conception, white supremacy is not just associated with logic and reason, but rather its epistemological structures determine what is recognized as logical, reasonable, and legible. “Contours,” then, examines the “sonic color-line” as a discursive site where racial difference is produced and policed through the social constructs of listening and “noise.” For whites, the “sonic color-line” protects and preserves the (il)logic of white supremacy; for blacks it operates as the parameter of the boundaries that supremacist thought places on their freedom, identity, and mobility. I understand the concept of “noise” not merely in scientific terms—loudness measured in decibels— but rather as a shifting analytic boundary that renders certain sounds—and the bodies that produce and consume them—as “Other”: different, illegible, out of place, dangerous, unwanted, ignored, or what West describes as “ incomprehensible and 21 unintelligible.” “Noise” is always context-dependent as well as culturally and historically contingent. 8 It frequently functions as an aural substitute for and marker of “race.” Precisely because the visual discourse of race has saturated American thought—structuring slavery in the antebellum, drawing the “color-line” at the beginning of the twentieth-century, and undergirding the claim to be “colorblind” at its close—many African American writers use aural imagery to reveal that race operates on a sonic register as well. The African American literary tradition has always had particularly powerful aural dimensions due to African oral cultural retentions and entrenched legal prohibitions to and corporal violent sanctions against literacy during slavery. Representations of speech, noise, and ambient sound within written narratives form an important site of counterdiscourse to white supremacy. In “Contours,” I argue that two of the most powerful dimensions of these counternarratives of race have heretofore been overlooked: the way in which they represent racism as operating in multiple sensory modalities—especially sound—as well as their use of aural imagery to challenge the dominance of visual discourses of race stemming from the Enlightenment. Socially constructed—and power-laden— aural representations circulate through American culture and communicate an alternate epistemology of how people create, use, and perceive sound. Not only can race be heard as well as seen, but “whiteness” and “blackness” themselves are listening practices, informed by and informing the construction of racialized subject 22 positions. Race functions as a faculty—a way of assessing the world—that configures the sensory perception of sound as well as sight. Just as we have a gaze that is filtered through our particular subjective lens(es), so too do we have what I call a “listening ear” that is historically embodied and culturally contextual. By disentangling the audio and visual domains to concentrate on the auditory sense, I do not mean to suggest that listening is, in fact, separable from or dichotomous with looking. Nor do I wish simply to replace the eye with the ear atop the Western hierarchy of senses. 9 Rather, I argue that sound is crucial in the construction of racialized subjectivity and that aural imagery in written texts and soundscapes forms a discourse in which these subjectivities can be examined. In literary study, aural imagery traditionally refers to the study of the sound of words in poetry—assonance, consonance, and other phonetic techniques. In music study, “aural imagery” is linked to the process of “inner hearing”—the ability to look at a musical score and hear it sound in one’s mind without actually playing a note. I use “aural imagery” to describe literary representations of sound that activate our “inner hearing” as our eyes move across the page. Thus, “aural imagery” implies both the literary representation of sound and the transmission of it. This includes dialogue, music, screams, cries, laughter, and other human sounds not reducible to speech, as well as a full range of ambient sounds, such as the creak of Linda Brent’s shoes in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or the clanging alarm that opens Richard Wright’s Native Son. By shifting critical emphasis from the oral—what the 23 mouth speaks—to the aural—what the ear ears—my conception of aural imagery levels the interpretive playing field in that it treats speech and music as sounds among many within a literary text, rather than automatically according them primacy in the soundscape. Recasting discussions of racial formation in terms of the ear usefully places central significance on aural discourses and epistemologies usually taken for granted. This recasting also broadens our consideration of listening to include not just its pleasurable or resistant aspects, but to acknowledge and seriously contemplate the ways in which listening has been and continues to be active in the processes of subjection that we usually ascribe solely to the visual realm. Examining listening as a process of racialization also allows me to interrogate the notion of “colorblindness” with a fresh set of critical tools, contending that its proponents are able to triumphantly declare “race” invisible precisely because “sonic color lines” still render it audible. Far from being vision’s binary opposite, sound frequently appears to be visuality’s döppelganger—its unacknowledged but ever-present “other”—in the construction of race and performance of racial oppression. The notion of the “sonic” does not just operate as an immediate referent to sound, but it highlights the particular ability of sonic devices to sound out the contours of that which cannot be seen—the cartography of the ocean floor, the shape and extent of a darkened cave—or more pertinent to this project, that which is concealed from sight (either consciously or unconsciously). The sonic is an analytic 24 that enables critics to hear “around corners,” to borrow from the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (13). What the “sonic color-line” ultimately provides me as a theorist is a way of listening to a conversation between and among a range of black cultural producers that remains, as Houston Baker once described, “scene. . .not heard” (1993:38): a dialogue about power and knowledge and the role of sound as a modality through which these cultural discourses operate. The methodological approach I use to examine the “sonic color-line” in narratives of slavery and segregation is theoretical, literary, and historical. Informing my entire project are theoretical concerns with the nature of listening, the type of knowledge produced through listening practices (and how this differs from visual epistemologies), the relationship between aural and visual discourses of race, the spatiality of listening, and, ultimately, how power operates through divergent “listening ears.” My theorizations are drawn from—and applied to—a range of primary texts connected by their use of aural imagery as both a formal and aesthetic representational strategy. My primary texts include slave narratives, novels, short stories, biographical writing, critical essays, songs, and audio soundscapes. I interpret these texts through the literary method of close reading, but with a heightened consideration to the aurality of a text, or what I describe as a “close listening.” In performing “close listenings,” I do not consider myself to be reading against the grain as much as I feel I am drawing something out of a text that has 25 always been present, but has remained unheard. Soundscapes are textual “open secrets” that have been silenced by the primacy of the visual in our critical practice. Paying careful attention to both explicit and implicit aural imagery and the representations of listening within a text, I culled “soundscapes” for each work. Soundscapes are the acoustic spaces created within a text by representations of ambient sounds, music, speech, and noise. These soundscapes are more than encyclopedic listings of all present sounds; they are schematics of how sound works both formally and thematically within a text. Formally, I listen for the frequency and repetition of certain sounds, the particular language used to represent sound, the syntax of the soundscape in particular scenes (which sounds are privileged, which sounds are overlooked, which are louder, softer), 10 the relationship between the aural and the visual imagery in a given scene, and the relationship between sounds. Thematically, I examine the content of the sound, the cultural history of the sound within and without the text, and, most importantly, the simultaneous “listening ears” that interpret various sounds (and the multiple meanings made from them). In “close-listening” to audio texts, my overall method is somewhat similar, except that I read tone rather than language as the primary medium and I must necessarily construct my own aural imagery to represent the sound. In describing and analyzing aural imagery, I try to retain a sense of historicity, both of the moment in which the sound was recorded and circulated as well as the temporal process through which my own embodied listening practices were shaped. 26 To build the historical context for “Contours,” I performed original archival research. First, I embedded my “close listenings” within each artist’s theorization of their craft. Many of Wright’s essays were readily available in anthologies; I supplemented those by digging up writings from The Daily Worker (1937) and The Chicago Daily News (1940). These pieces showed Wright as cultural critic, a different side of him than most literary critics examine. For Petry, this task was more difficult. I culled her critical essays and early writings from several historical sources: The Crisis (1943), The Writer (1948), Holiday Magazine (1949), and The Writer’s Book (1950). For my final chapter, I actually established contact with Tony Schwartz; although his archive remains private and he is unavailable for new interviews, he sent me a wonderful package full of rare interviews, writings, and reviews gleaned from throughout his extensive career that proved invaluable to thinking through his artistic process. Furthermore, I did extensive archival work to examine how these cultural producers were “heard” in their own time by critics in a diversity of venues: the New York Times, the Crisis, Phylon, College English, the Washington Post, High Fidelity (to name a few). This research helped me think through issues of audience reception in conjunction with racialized listening practices. Finally, I used the archival research to embed the literary and audio soundscapes to which I was “close listening” within dominant contemporary constructions of the larger American cultural soundscape. ::: 27 By amplifying the unheard conversation occurring within and between my primary texts, I sound out a new interdisciplinary critical terrain at the intersection of African American Literary and Cultural Studies, American Studies, and Sound Studies. The foundational lens for my work, African American Literary and Cultural Studies, provides a rich scholarly language for critiquing the philosophical concerns and aesthetic innovation of African American writers. Furthermore, the field has cultivated a long line of thought dedicated to examining the nature of social justice and building a critical understanding of how lives, cultures, and institutional structures have historically been—and continue to be—shaped by race, class, and gender in the United States. From this field I also take my primary method of critical investigation: close textual analysis. My close-reading practice—theoretically informed and culturally and historically contextualized—enables me to intervene at the critical site where the literary meets the epistemological: language. Close reading is necessary not just to tease out what something means but to examine “the way something means” (Garber 12), paying careful and sustained attention to the tools that writers use to make meaning: diction, tropes, narrative structure, figurative language and other aesthetic strategies. My close reading of the “sonic color-line” in literary texts takes inspiration from Toni Morrison’s re-examination of the American canon for an “Africanist” presence in Playing in the Dark (1993) and Fred Moten’s seminal investigation of “how sound infuses the verbal” in African American literature and culture in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition 28 (2003: 52). My textual analysis of dominant discourses like those found in the New York Times is especially motivated by Saidiya Hartman, who close-reads non-literary texts against the grain “for purposes contrary to which they were gathered” to devastating effect in Scenes of Subjection (11). American Studies has helped me to conceive my multi-genre archive— music, slave narratives, fiction, recorded sound, record liner notes, contemporary critical reception, biographies, newspaper and magazine articles—through the paradigm of representation. As I listen to and through this archive, the field of American Studies sharpens my theoretical attentiveness to historical exigencies of power and inequality as well as my awareness of the complex and intersectional nature of subjectivity. I place my examination of the sonic color-line alongside other American Studies projects that seek to interrogate race and gender at the crossroads where discursive constructions meet lived historical experience. 11 The interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies enables me to place sound and aural culture at the center of my inquiry. I work from its foundational insight that “none of the arts is entirely mute, many are unusually soundful despite their apparent silence” (Kahn 1999). 12 The theoretical framework of sound studies—which includes acoustic ecology, psychoacoustics, analyses of sound in film, and historical research—gave me the initial tools to begin the process of what Bruce R. Smith calls “‘un-air[ing] sounds” from their textual hiding places (129) and embedding them in a 29 larger historical and cultural conversation about aurality, (inter)cultural communication, technology, and the representational machinations of modernity. In mapping this new interdisciplinary terrain, I have also identified gaps that presently hide or reside in each discipline. Within both African American Studies and American Studies, I identify the sense of listening as a process of racialization, exploring “whiteness” and “blackness” as historical configurations of the sensorium beyond “the gaze.” “Contours” demonstrates how a consideration of the socially constructed nature of listening is especially relevant to the study of racial regimes of domination, precisely because race has heretofore been conceived as largely scopic. As Lindon Barrett contends in Blackness and Value (1999), It is the skin colors, the textures of hair, the shapes of skulls and noses, the placement of cheekbones, the thicknesses of lips, the contours of the buttocks that visibly define those in the African diasporia [sic]. Diasporic populations find themselves in circumstances in which the sense-making capacity of vision, the significance of vision, is monopolized from a hostile perspective (318). European, Enlightenment-driven epistemologies of looking categorize, divide, and rank human beings according to phenotypes that arbitrarily link visible physical features to an abjected “Otherness” called “blackness.” Judith Butler’s “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia” (1993) theorizes the process by which the “sense-making capacity of vision” is racialized. In questioning how white jurors were able to view Rodney King as a threat in the video that showed police officers beating him without visible resistance, Butler finds that visual evidence is always already framed by a “racially saturated field of visibility” 30 where “racism pervades white perception” (16). Based in “shared ideologies rooted in race that provide a consistent and detectable structure that guides [whites’] interpretation of the physical world,” these perceptual differences are neither essential nor fixed (Berger, Sight Unseen, 1). In “Contours,” I advance theories of racialization in terms of the ear, not just by claiming that ideas about race structure how one hears, but that what one hears can intimately structure experiences of “race” and the construction of racialized subjectivities. While I build from theories about the racialization of the eye, I believe that our overwhelming theoretical emphasis on vision has created large critical blind- spots concerning how “race” functions through other senses. Scholars like Mark M. Smith have begun to address these oversights, asserting that the visual identification of skin color is only one way in which race operates in American society. Not only are racial stereotypes quite abundant in the realms of sound, smell, taste, and touch, Smith argues, but these sensory representations are often more insidious because non-visual stereotypes align “race-thinking” with what Smith theorizes as “gut- feeling” (139). During legalized segregation, southern whites may have reluctantly acceded to the fallacy of race, for example, while still claiming visceral offense at the “‘strange and frightening sounds’” and the “‘queer smell of things’” in the Jim Crow train car (Smith: 2006 60). Smith’s interest, however, resides almost exclusively in the geography of the Jim Crow South, like the majority of studies about segregation. My work deepens and extends his concept of sonic stereotypes to 31 the highly segregated North, where I argue such representations functioned as an invisible means to construct, bolster, and enforce de facto residential, employment, and social discrimination for people of color in the country’s urban centers. While sound represents only one element of Smith’s argument—and one he restricts largely to historical descriptions of white-held stereotypes about black sound—I place aurality center stage, providing a full-length study that centralizes black writers and thinkers and how they conceived the cultural politics of listening at work in the soundscapes of both slavery and segregation. Within the context of African American Literary and Cultural Studies, I enact a critical practice that examines social realist “narratives of segregation” 13 as simultaneously social and psychological, realist and expressionistic, and importantly, political and aesthetic. My project directly refutes Alain Locke’s claim in Phylon (1947) that social realism “will satisfy the reformer rather than astonish the aesthete,” a statement which has cast a wide footprint in the criticism of social realism in general and African American social realism in particular (17). Despite the overwhelming contemporary popularity of Wright and Petry—Wright’s Native Son was the first “Negro” Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Petry’s The Street sold 1.5 million copies in 1946—and social realism’s continuing resonance in American culture, African American literary texts produced during these years are frequently dismissed as merely journalistic or treated as transparent political propaganda. 14 Furthermore, my project identifies, theorizes, and traces two new critical literary 32 tropes: the “sonic color-line” and the “listening ear.” I also put forward aurality as an important aesthetic of the tradition alongside voice, music, and orality. 15 In both African American Studies and literary study as a whole, “Contours” highlights the aural dimension of the act of reading, which in turn gives literary scholars a fresh set of tools. Despite the ubiquity and richness of sound in most novels, the visual image continues to dominate literary analysis (Bailey 1998; Picker 2003). I direct scholars toward the literary soundscape as a subject of critical attention, enabling the “classic” canon to be heard anew. In the context of American Studies, “Contours” makes claims for the continued importance of literary works—and the methodology of literary studies—to understanding power and systems of inequality. Throughout my research I kept the struggle of writer Ann Petry in mind. For the duration of her writing career, Petry had to defend her social realist style in a hostile literary climate, reminding critics in a 1950 essay called “The Novel as Social Criticism” that the “craftsmanship that goes into [sociological novels] is of a high order. It has to be” (35, emphasis mine). Petry honed her literary aesthetics and narrative talents precisely because she felt the political and social stakes of her work so acutely. I hope that “Contours” renews and expands the discussion within American Studies of how and why literary creations affect their audiences as they do, examining how political and social critique within fictional texts happens through the careful use and craftsmanship of its language, not in spite of it. 33 Because my research in African American Studies brought me to the burgeoning field of Sound Studies (and not the other way around), I was surprised to find that the body of scholarship examining African American culture, art, and sound is rarely grouped under the rubric of “Sound Studies.” Literary scholars and cultural critics like DuBois, Houston Baker, Fred Moten, Paul Gilroy, Nathaniel Mackey, Jon Cruz, and Angela Y. Davis have been writing about sound long before the “new” field of Sound Studies had a name or an institutional presence. One of the goals of this project is to amplify the links already present between these two fields. Furthermore, I find that Sound Studies often treats the auditory realm as a utopic space of democratic inclusion, simultaneity, and cultural merging (Lipsitz: 1994, Connor: 1997, Bull and Back: 2003, Kun: 2006). When cast against the distanced and unidirectional “gaze,” the multidirectional and intimate nature of hearing—where multiple sounds can be listened to at once and are actually taken in to the body as waves—seems to allude to the possibility of a less hierarchical and more harmonious world if we would only open our ears to it. However, while re- thinking the overdetermined relationship between vision and Western culture is both difficult and necessary, many sound theorists do not accord the power relations they see operating in the visual sense to the auditory realm. For example, Josh Kun links listening and race in Audiotopia (2005), but he emphasizes listening experiences that are liberatory and restorative. My research acknowledges the ways in which listening has been and continues to be imbricated in the processes of raced and 34 gendered subjection that we usually ascribe to the visual realm. To Kun, the “song of America” is an “always available site of psychological reward, nourishment, and survival for populations who have been taught over and over again that their lives do not matter” (19). However, I cannot help but think of Kun’s argument in relation to recent reports of American popular music being used as “torture lite” at military prison camps like Guantánamo Bay. 16 We also need a framework for understanding the relationship between listening and oppression. Especially where sound is concerned, resistance and subjection are not readily separable. Without foreclosing the resistant possibilities of listening that are integral to African American cultural production, “The Contours of the Sonic Color-line” shows how African American writers and thinkers have also portrayed American sound—and the act of listening— as a significant part of the education of exclusion that happens “over and over again” during slavery and segregation. While “sound connects us in ways that vision does not,” as Michael Bull and Les Back claim (6), the many representations of sonic terror in African American literature that I examine here attest that these connections are not always positively charged or egalitarian in nature. Even as African American writers work from sonic epistemologies for cultural, political and literary representation, they are exceedingly aware that sound is always already enmeshed in power relations. Finally, the aurality of the novel—and literature in general—remains understudied within Sound Studies and I provide new language and methods toward 35 this end. 17 I have refined the term “soundscape” within this project, using it to reference the aural (counter)narrative within a written text. Acoustician R. Murray Schafer initially defined a “soundscape” as “any acoustic field of study” in 1977’s The Soundscape and the Tuning of the World (7). Schafer’s term implies an encyclopedic collection of sound, one that does not probe how socially produced identities of class, race, sexuality and gender produce divergent aural experiences. In addition to largely ignoring social difference, Schafer also treats literary texts as if they are exclusively historical documents, passively recording the sounds of history rather than actively constructing and contesting historical memory through the aesthetic device of aural imagery. In my formulation, a “soundscape” is a literary tool that writers like Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry use to create a sense of place, space, time, and history, to represent a character’s subjectivity, and to tell stories in contestation of—and sometimes in collusion with— the visual world. As I mentioned earlier, these aural images circulate and exist in relation to each other, and therefore my use of “soundscape” also implies the economy of sound within a text: how the sounds are ordered, arranged, and understood together. Finally, because aural images come to readers in effect “already listened to”—mediated through and by literary representations of raced, gendered, and historicized “listening ears”—the soundscape is also a subjective audible terrain that constitutes and is constituted within historically specific systems of power. In addition to producing their own sound, novels represent, organize, and 36 record the process of the social production of sound through the interaction of aural imagery and “listening ears” within a soundscape. Finally, my theorization of the “sonic color-line” re-frames the role of the body in producing auditory knowledge. There is a tendency in the field of Sound Studies to make a clear distinction between “listening” as cognitive and “hearing” as bodily, especially in order to build a case for listening as an active process of meaning making on par with “looking.” I find this distinction to lay uncomfortably close to the epistemological divides that Enlightenment philosophy produced between mind and body and culture and nature, the very ruptures that undergirded New World Slavery. However, as composer Daniel Barenboim (2002) points out, distinguishing between “listening” and “hearing” is itself a highly specific cultural construct. 18 While I am attentive to how the distinction between hearing and listening has served in Western Culture—especially in determining who can and cannot access the power associated with “listening”—I consider both processes as active, simultaneous, and cognitive, albeit of differing valences. Listening is associated with the self; it is a method of making sound one’s own by constructing a narrative to make sense of it. Hearing, on the other hand, connected with the “Other,” representing the practice of taking in sound without deliberate transformation. The “sonic color-line” does not operate not through sound itself—sounds are not essentially “black” or “white”—but through the socially constructed practice(s) 37 of listening. Listening provides the narrative net in which sounds are captured and laden with meaning. As Elaine Barkin states, “listening is primary composition” (qtd. in Dunn). 19 The listening ear is not merely a receptor for sound; it translates vibrations of air into sound and transforms sound into knowledge. In Acoustic Communication (1984), Barry Truax provides a useful contextual model of listening as a dynamic, socially constructed process; sound effectively mediates relationships between the listener and their environment. Therefore, “a sound means something partly because of what or who produces it, but mainly because of the circumstances under which it is heard” (xii). Through the process of listening, sounds are actively interpreted, understood, organized and placed in a syntax that both constructs and reflects the listener’s positioning in the world. Truax’s schema is especially useful as it allows for the fact that listeners attend to and are influenced by a broader range of ambient sounds outside of either speech or music. Even as I understand both listening and hearing to be cognitive and largely socially produced, this is not to say that aural experience is entirely a cultural construct divorced from the body. Bruce R. Smith asserts that holding fast to social construction is “just as partial as to assume physiological determinism” (2004: 38). As a corrective, Smith utilizes a model that rejects limiting definitions of listening as either physically universal or psychologically partial: I accept the ‘hardwiring’ of the human body with respect to speaking and listening but understand that each culture provides its own ‘software’ for programming those capacities. The hardwiring may determine the range of 38 those possibilities, but no one set of cultural software ever exploits them all (38). Rather than relegating “hearing” to the body and promoting “listening” to the realm of the learned and the cultural, as Jonathan Sterne does in The Audible Past (19), Smith asserts that both activities are enabled by the physiological ‘hardwiring’ of the body as a receptor for sound waves. However, cultural “software”—and I would add the socially constructed codes of race, gender, class, sexuality, and geographic location—profoundly affects the cognition of information gleaned from listening and hearing, an often unconscious process, as the term “programming” suggests. The primary distinction between the activities of hearing and listening rests with perceived desire. Listening—whose root comes from the Teutonic “lust”—is associated with agency; it represents a deliberate engagement of the self with sound and an expressed desire to attend to particular sounds. Hearing often implies a lack of control, a forced attentiveness to sounds that one did not select, anticipate, or desire; however, it importantly entails a more sustained attention to sound on its own terms. While these two processes are distinct, they are also interconnected. Hearing can potentially disrupt listening, but listening also constructs narratives that limit and shape what can be heard. Listening can become habitual and more akin to hearing; however, hearing can enact the desire that leads to listening. As Du Bois’s treatise The Souls of Black Folk (1903) points out, knowledge comes from both. Within Souls there is an important interchange between the two processes; Du Bois opens the work with the hope that his readers will “listen to the striving in the souls of 39 black folk” (12, emphasis mine)—actively choose to engage with his depiction of black life—but he closes the text with the demand that readers, “Hear my cry!”(217, emphasis mine)—that they will take his word as it stands, unaltered. ::: While the temporal parameters of the soundscapes I explore in “Contours”— the late antebellum and the close of Jim Crow—may initially seem like an unusual juxtaposition, it is my contention that there are important links between the cultural production of the two periods that my focus on sound amplifies and facilitates. 20 It is not my intention to blur the boundaries between these historical moments, claiming that notions of race during slavery and segregation were one and the same. Historical specificity is fundamental to my argument, as it was to the writers and artists under discussion here. I also do not mount a claim for a direct causal relationship between the two periods, nor do I suggest that the literature of one period was directly predicated on the writing of the other. However, I do argue that there are some important stylistic and epistemological echoes between narratives of slavery and narratives of segregation that justify an examination of the two in tandem. Both simultaneously attempt to render black life audible within the written word while consciously narrating these experiences for consumption by a mass white literary audience. 21 Writers working in both periods use varieties of what Gene Jarrett (2006) calls “racial realism” to make explicit, politically motivated interventions in the structures of white supremacy in order to dismantle them. 22 I 40 argue that both genres characterize racism as operating in multiple sensory modalities while using sound to challenge the visuality of race and disrupt the scopic spectacles that (re)enforced it in the particular racial formations of their respective historical moments. I begin my examination of the contours of the sonic color-line in chapter one, ‘If Not in the Word, In the Sound:’ Listening as Technology and Epistemology in the Genre of the Slave Narrative” by identifying the trope of the “listening ear” in early African American literary works such as Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and arguing that the figure of the listener is central to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and the genre-blurring The Bondswoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts (1859/2002). While the genre of the slave narrative is usually defined in relationship to visual spectacles of violence, I explore how Douglass, Jacobs and Crafts use various representations of the “listening ear” to disentangle audio and visual experience and demonstrate that sound is capable of communicating truths about slavery that the eye always already distorts. By close-reading scenes where listening is positioned as the dominant sense, I argue that slave narrators represent the “listening ear” as a critical technology and epistemology of race, power, and identity for masters and slaves. Written just under a hundred years after Emancipation, African American social realism shows how the cultural listening practices developed during slavery 41 did not disappear after 1863, but rather persisted in alternate guises through the era of Jim Crow. Although many of the sounds are qualitatively different, narratives of segregation are no less sonic than narratives of slavery; writers like Petry and Wright use aural imagery to explore how the power dynamics of the past accrete in the present, especially the systemic violence of racism and gender oppression. In “The Novel as Social Criticism,” Petry argues that, despite a dramatically different setting and characters, the plot of social realism remains “derived from Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” largely because the “arguments used to justify slavery still influence American attitudes toward the Negro” (38). Wright’s early fiction signifies heavily on iconic moments from Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass. Petry and Wright do not just use sound to represent segregation, but to amplify the “unseen” yet still resonant traces—what Joseph Roach calls “echoes in the bone” in Cities of the Dead (33)—that the seemingly ephemeral sensory experiences of slavery have left upon the American cultural imaginary. While the first chapter amplifies how the power dynamics of slavery operate through the “listening ear,” chapter two introduces the sonic color-line in greater detail and examines how antebellum listening practices persisted—albeit in temporally and geographically changed guises—during segregation. “‘Hunger in those Sounds’: Apprehending the Sonic Color-line in Early Richard Wright” “close listens” to three of Wright’s early works, the autobiographical essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” (1937/1939), the short story “Big Boy Leaves Home” 42 (1936/1939), and the novel Native Son (1940), exploring them as aural counternarratives—“soundtracks”—to visual representations of lynching and the photographic, cinematic, and print media that bolstered the violent practice. Written during the Second Great Migration, Wright’s early work emphasizes the primacy of listening at crucial moments in the experience of young male African American migrants at the end of the 1930s, representing their the “listening ears” as they move across the “sonic color-line” from the rural South to the urban North. As his narrative focus shifts from the dirt roads of Mississippi to the frigid pavement of Chicago, Wright depicts aural literacy—the ability to apprehend the world through sound—as increasingly important to detect the invisible—but no less powerful or materially devastating—power of race during segregation. Chapter three, “Echoes in ‘a Vacuum Unheard’: Listening, Segregation, and Distortion in Ann Petry and W.E.B. Du Bois,” builds upon my discussion of the “sonic color-line” operative within segregated Northern cities by moving from Wright’s late-thirties Chicago soundscape to the “vacuum” sealed spaces of Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn and the urban “echo chambers” of Petry’s 1940s Harlem in “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” (1943) and The Street (1946). Despite the resonant connections between their writings, this is the first study to examine Petry and Du Bois in concert. Although Petry and DuBois write in different genres— fiction and social theory, respectively—I argue that both authors re-theorize race in the 1940s, using aural imagery to represent the contours of its pervasive, persistent, 43 and palpable invisibility. If color-lines are heard—not just seen—the processes of racialization can continue to operate in covert and extralegal ways, even when a society enacts laws and propagates cultural representations that turn a “blind eye” to perceived racial difference. The radio was one of the key mass mediums through which colorblind racial formations were constructed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, at the exact moment when the United States began preparing for war. To mobilize Americans—particularly African Americans—around the prospect of fighting racism and fascism abroad, the United States government attempted to make domestic racism invisible. I argue that the overwhelming presence of aural imagery in Petry and Du Bois’s texts amplifies the ways in which race and racism remained audible during this period, particularly through the radio. In their work, the “sonic color-line” is not simply a horizontal boundary between white and black neighborhoods and social spaces, but an encapsulating atmosphere that profoundly isolates black people within American society and, as Petry reveals, men and women from each other. Due to the distortion of the sonic color-line, listening can confuse as much if not more than it clarifies. In chapter four, the urban soundscapes are taped rather than transcribed—the spliced aural montages of postwar Manhattan street life produced by Jewish recording artist Tony Schwartz. Schwartz records, edits, and re-combines live sound to construct a narrative linking migration, segregation, and nationalism in the post- war era that both underscores and challenges the black-white racial binary upon 44 which segregation was built. Despite his technological and aesthetic innovation, I am the first to perform critical work on Schwartz. He has been labeled in the popular press as a documentarian, a sound technician, and an audio journalist, but never an artist. 23 “‘New York, On the Other Side, That Is’: Tony Schwartz and the “Noise” of Segregation in Nueva York” combines “close listening” with original archival research to present a case study that examines the multiple contours of the “sonic color-line,” connecting the legal and public discourse around “noise” with Puerto Rican migration to New York City. Schwartz’s self-described project— “to capture sound that was part of everyday city life”—placed him at the epicenter of the profound demographic changes rocking the city in the late 1940s, a phenomenon the New York Times quickly labeled “the Puerto Rican problem.” In a critical maneuver reminiscent of Du Bois, Schwartz’s 1955 recording Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers attempts to shift discourse surrounding “the Puerto Rican problem” to an epistemological predicament of fundamental misrecognition. Even as many whites supported racist housing laws that segregated people of color into overcrowded, substandard housing nearer noisy, industrial urban areas, they frequently described “noise” and “loudness” as essential qualities of black and Puerto Rican people that threatened the “peace and quiet” of suburban neighborhoods. “Quiet” has thus been constructed as an invisible but tangible possession of white privilege; increasingly, the struggle to preserve it within the city—and 45 fabricate it within the suburbs—becomes a thinly disguised claim on particular spaces. “The appropriation of space is also a matter of sound,” argues Roland Barthes in The Responsibility of Forms (248). Barthes does not discuss listening in terms of racialized identity formation; however, I bring his spatial politics of listening into the conversation about migration within and immigration to the U.S., where discourses of white supremacy privilege a particular sensory orientation as objective and universal, laying sonic claim to the nation. Listening can function as a territorial sieve to separate the sounds of what is constructed as the known, familiar, and domestic, from the noises of what is deemed unfamiliar, foreign, and threatening: accents, dialects, music, names, social events, calls to prayer. While Schwartz posits listening as a practice that can potentially break down the socially constructed boundary whites draw between their “sound” and the Other’s “noise,” his work also reminds us that, in a society where the ideology of colorblindness has gained immense political currency, sounding out the multiple contours of the sonic color-line remains central to the hermeneutics of racial difference. 1 The original nine members of the Colored Christian Singers were named Ella Shephard, Benjamin Holmes, Jennie Jackson, Minnie Tate, Isaac Dickerson, Maggie Porter, Thomas Rutling, Ella Walker, and Green Evans. The group was directed by George L. White, the white business manager of Fisk University. 2 For a concise history of the early recordings of the Jubilee Singers (1910-1946) and their impact on American culture and the recording industry, see Tim Brooks’s “‘Might Take One Disc of This Trash as a Novelty’: Early Recordings by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Popularization of ‘Negro Folk Music’” (2000). 3 The Jubilee Singers published a songbook in 1872 entitled Jubilee Songs: As Published by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University. 46 4 Debate over the perceived “blackness” or “whiteness” of the Jubilee Singer’s sound continued long after their first tour. Despite the confident arrogance of the music critic’s assertion, for example, the Jubilee Singers did not sound the same to “all classes of hearers” during their tours. Some white ears, conditioned by the sounds of the Minstrel Stage rather than the opera, found the Jubilee Singers inauthentically “black” when compared to the burnt-cork buffoonery they had come to expect. For black listeners, the Jubilee Singers enacted qualitatively different listening experiences, but no less multiple. Some black listening ears heard a betrayal of African American vernacular culture as the sacred songs were rearranged and performed for white audiences (Gilroy 89). In addition to Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston wrote about the group in her 1934 “Characteristics of Negro Expression” describing the songs as “Negroid to be sure”; however, she also claims that the “musician’s tricks” employed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers have made spirituals sound strange to “Negro congregations [that] are highly entertained when they hear their old songs so changed” (1030). While her remarks are frequently read as a critique of Du Bois’s representation of the singers, I feel she is actually challenging the writing and recording of amateur audio-ethnologist John Lomax, who spent summers riving through rural Texas with his son Alan recording—sometimes with the coercive assistance of prison guards—the “‘Sinful Songs’ of the Southern Negro” in the early 1930s. In an article published the same year as Hurston’s, Lomax describes the early Jubilee Singers as the epitome of the black racial authenticity he was chasing through Texas: It is interesting to compare the musical arrangements used by the first group of Fisk Jubilee Singers who went out to astonish America and Europe more than fifty years ago, with the arrangements of the identical songs as they are now commonly sung for public entertainment. These later versions are perhaps more musically ornate and interesting than were their forbearers of the Fisk Singers; but that remains a question of taste. My point is that the first book of the Fisk Singers contained music more nearly representative of the singing of spirituals by the great mass of Southern Negroes. They were certainly more like the original and ‘made up’ spirituals. Such songs can yet be heard in their rich and harmonious simplicity if one but goes to the right places (185-186). 5 For a traditional arrangement of the song illustrative of what Du Bois references see Leontyne Price’s version recorded with the Rust College Choir (1997). Here is my transcription of the lyrics: My way, my way is cloudy, My way (Oh send them angels down) Brother, my way, my way is cloudy, My way (Oh send them angels down) John said the city was just foursquare (Send them angels down) By God’s grace I’ll meet you there (Oh, send them angels down) Brother, my way, my way is cloudy, My way (Oh send them angels down) Ain’t been to heaven but I’ve been told (Send them angels down) The streets up there are paved with gold (Send them angels down) Brother, my way, my way is cloudy, 47 My way (Oh send them angels down) Brother, my way, my way is cloudy, My way (Oh send them angels down) 6 This reading is inspired by and builds from Fred Moten’s examination of the “Black Mo’nin in the Sound of the Photograph” from In the Break (2004). 7 I use parentheses in this term to point out the reference to sound embedded within it. For early work on aural stereotypes, see Christopher Wight’s “Stereo Types: The Operation of Sound in the Production of Racial Identity” (2003). 8 For an alternate—yet not mutually exclusive—view of noise as resistant within the context of African American cultural production, see Fred Moten’s In the Break (2003). Moten argues that noise represents an unprecedented form of interchange that is possible “only when language is not reducible to a means of communication, when the sounded word is not reducible to linguistic meaning” (104). Noise, like “blackness,” represents excess, a “radically exterior aurality” that goes beyond and cannot be contained by the oppressive literacy of Western culture (6). For additional theoretical discussions of “noise” see Ellison (1955), Schafer (1977), Truax (1984), Attali (1985), Rose (1994), Kahn (1999), Thompson (2002), and Schweighauser (2006). 9 For a complex historical and philosophical debate about the notion of a Western “hierarchy of the senses” see Robert Jütte’s A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (2005). 10 I am grateful to Bruce R. Smith for this notion of syntax (1999, 2004). 11 Projects, for example, like Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and The American Working Class (1993), Farah Jasmine Griffin’s “Who Set You Flowing?”: The African American Migration Narrative (1995), Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (1995), Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997), George Lipsitz’s Dangerous Crossroads (1994) and The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1999), Robin Kelley’s Race Rebels (1996), Sarah Banet- Weiser’s The Most Beautiful Girl in the World (1999), Josh Kun’s Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (2005), and Jacqueline Goldsby’s A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (2006). 12 In the past five years there has been an explosion of in work in this area. The burgeoning field of sound studies encompasses scholarly texts such as R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World (1977), Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead’s edited volume Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde (1992), Peter Bailey’s Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (1998), Alain Corbin’s Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in Nineteenth Century France (1998), Douglas Kahn’s Noise Water Meat (1999), Bruce R. Smith’s The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (1999), Stephen Connor’s Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism in America (2001), Mark M. Smith’s Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (2001), Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (2002), Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003), John Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes (2003), Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), Michael Bull and Les Back’s Auditory Culture Reader (2004), and most recently Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), Kun’s Audiotopia (2005), and Philip Schweighauser’s The Noises of American Literature (2006). 48 13 “Narratives of Segregation” is a fairly new term; the concept will be the subject of a forthcoming special issue of African American Review in early 2008. 14 Stacy Morgan’s Re-Thinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature 1930-1953 (2004) and Jacqueline Goldsby’s work defining a “cool aesthetic” at work during this period are notable exceptions. Morgan, however, does not address sound or aurality in his work; to my knowledge, Goldsby does not discuss sound in the way that I do, although music, especially Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool (1949), is important to her project. 15 While the issue of “voice” has been a constant and classic thread of African American literary study (see Stepto, Baker, and Gates), studies of music in African American literature are more recent, appearing at a fairly rapid pace. In addition to Houston Baker and Fred Moten’s work, see Robert H. Cataliotti’s The Music in African American Fiction (1995), Saadi A. Simawe’s Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison (2000), and A. Yemisi Jimoh’s Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction: Living in Paradox (2002). 16 In the December 26, 2005 issue of The Nation, Moustafa Bayoumi details how the “song of America” is frequently forced through the ears of detainees in the U.S.’s “War on Terror.” Bayoumi writes, “Whatever the playlist—usually heavy metal or hip-hop but sometimes, bizarrely Barney the Dinosaur’s “I Love You” or selections from Sesame Street—the music is pumped at detainees with such brutality to unravel them without laying a finger on their bodies” (32). While there has been several analyses linking lynching photography to the snapshots of torture taken at Abu Ghraib (see the Fall 2006 Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art special issue on lynching), there has yet to be a discussion about the role of Western music in scenes of lynching and torture, such as Wagner’s Lohengrin in W.E.B. Du Bois’s “On the Coming of John” or Brahms in Langston Hughes’s short story “Home.” 17 In addition to seminal monographs by Kahn (1999), Moten (2003), Picker (2003), Weheliye (2005), Kun (2005), and Schweighauser (2006), I am indebted to the few and eclectic articles I have come across in my research: Stephen J. Adam’s “‘The Noisiest Novel Ever Written’: The Soundscape of Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep” (1989), Kathryn Wildgen’s “Aural Imagery in Adrienne Mesurat” (1990), Philip K. Jason’s “‘The Noise is Always in My Head’: Auditory Images in the Literature of the Vietnam War” (1996), and Philipp Schweighauser’s “The Soundscapes of American Realist Fiction” (2002). 18 In his conversation with Edward Said in Parallels and Paradoxes Barenboim comments, “you can listen without really hearing. I think it’s wonderful that, in the English language, you have a difference in the two words. It’s not in every language is it?” (74). 19 In Audio-Vision, cinema theorist Michel Chion posits that “listening with the ear is inseparable from that of listening with the mind” (1990, 33). Media critic Jonathan Sterne concurs: “Listening is a directed, learned activity: it is a definite cultural practice. Listening requires hearing but it is not simply reducible to hearing” (19). 20 I do think that a wonderful case can be made for the continuous presence and significance of aurality throughout the African American literary tradition—think of the screeching saw in Charles Chesnutt’s “Po’ Sandy” (1899), the whispering pines of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1921) and the charged silences of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988), to name only a few examples—but that is not my ultimate goal in this project. 49 21 As Toni Morrison points out in Playing in the Dark (1992), until very recently and regardless of the race of the author, “the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white” (xii). This fact has had a dramatic impact on the trajectory of African American literature, where black writers have confronted the challenge of constructing selves in the face of an audience who has historically, politically, economically, and ontologically attempted to negate them. 22 Jarrett defines realism as “a rearticulation of written discourse as representational, ideological, and pragmatic” (7). 23 Although it does not include Schwartz, Michael Cahan’s Repeated Takes provides a concise compendium of early “audio artists” in the 1940s and 1950s (1995: 138-142). 50 CHAPTER ONE “If Not in the Word, In the Sound”: Listening as Technology and Epistemology in the Genre of the Slave Narrative “The extreme patterns of communication defined by the institution of plantation slavery dictate that we recognise the antidiscursive and extra-linguistic ramifications of power at work in shaping communicative acts.” —Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic “Sound-reproduction technologies are shot through with the tensions, tendencies, and the currents of culture, right on down to their most mechanical functions. Our most cherished pieties about sound-reproduction. . .were not and are not innocent empirical descriptions of the technologies’ impact. They were wishes.” —Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past Although the “sonic color-line” detectable in the mid-twentieth century may have resulted in a vacuum—as W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn asserts—it was not, however, constructed in one. The auditory technologies that produced and maintained the racialized spaces of segregation had their precedent in the racialized listening practices helping to construct the subject positions of “master” and “slave” in the antebellum South. What Paul Gilroy describes as the “extreme patterns of communication” (1993: 57) defined by chattel slavery were central to Western conceptions of modernity and, I argue, left a discernible trace on the sound recording and reproduction technologies developed and propagated in its wake. If early twentieth century audio technologies like the talking-film, radio, and phonograph are “shot through with the tensions, tendencies, and currents from which they emerged, right on down to their most mechanical functions” (Sterne 8), then these technologies extended the listening practices of the early nineteenth century as much as, if not 51 more than, they altered them. 1 Therefore, this dissertation begins exploring the historical contours of the “sonic color-line” within the foundational African American literary genre of the slave narrative. I argue for the importance of a critical contemplation of sound to the study of the slave narrative and the significance of the slave narrative to any cultural history of sound in the United States. To do so, I perform close readings of key passages from a range of early African American cultural production: Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and the recently-recovered fictional account of slavery, Hannah Crafts’s The Bondswoman’s Narrative (1859/ 2002). I make no claims for inclusiveness in the selection of these texts; rather they were settled on primarily for their canonical or iconic status in concert with the range of representations of listening they encompass. Taken together, I contend that these narratives expose how listening itself functioned as an antebellum technology that performed, managed, and sometimes contested raced and gendered power relations. The slave narrative is often defined by its textual representation of violent visual spectacle. Although Saidiya Hartman has fruitfully widened our critical aperture to take scenes of everyday activity and enforced merriment into an account of this spectacle, the narrative power of the genre has historically rested on images of blood, gore, lacerated and scarred flesh, assembled into the iconic tableau of the 52 white slave master whipping a broken black body. I want to unsettle the longstanding affinity between the eye and the slave narrative by examining the genre through an alternative but co-existant sensory organ: the ear. The overwhelming and overdetermined emphasis on looking in Western culture—coupled with the nature of the ear as “always open” 2 — has meant that scholars have frequently treated the act of listening as passive, natural, and universal, even in texts like the slave narratives that depict it as anything but. From the screams of Aunt Hester falling relentlessly upon young Frederick Douglass to the stiff squeak of Linda Brent’s shoes offending the “refined” sensibilities of her cruel mistress, the slave narrative resonates with compelling representations of aural imagery. Considering these texts in terms of their aurality does not simply mean swapping out one set of sensory images for another, nor does it suggest that representations of sound within the genre simply complement sight. While iconic sounds abound in slave narratives—the insistent creak of the linden tree in Crafts and the opaque silence of the “talking book” in Equiano come readily to mind—the power of these images stems from their perception; how they are made sense of by the multiple, simultaneous, and divergent depictions of “listening ears” within these texts. I have developed the term “listening ear” to describe the representational device slave narrators used to depict how people perceive and use sound. Attention to various “listening ears” foregrounds listening as an embodied cultural process that echoes and shapes one’s orientation to power and posture toward the world. Slave 53 narratives, therefore, do not just function as a literary archive of the sounds of slavery, but they represent the “listening ear” as a critical technology and epistemology in the lives of both masters and slaves. For masters, listening functioned as an invisible process of identity construction willfully unaware of itself as a process. The “deaf” listening ear of the master—as portrayed in Douglass—and the “refined” listening ear of the mistress— as depicted in Jacobs and Crafts—produced a highly structured sonic economy within slavery that orchestrated certain sounds for white listening pleasure while deeming sounds that escaped or resisted white orchestration audible signs of black agency that must be physically squelched and/or recuperated through cultural narratives that accounted for it as meaningless, incomprehensible or even necessary “noise.” 3 Because whites envisioned their “listening ears” as universal and unmediated, the technology of listening was highly effective in its enforcement of white privilege. It bolstered the raced and gendered economy of slavery precisely because it remained largely undetectable to whites themselves. Part of the cultural work that slave narratives performed was exposing and critiquing this process. 4 Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs, and Crafts also represent listening as a technology of apprehension for slaves. Because whites did not account for listening as a cultural practice, masters tended to treat the “listening ears” of slaves as merely an echo of their own interpretive stance. The careful consideration of listening within slave narratives reveals this perceptual gap and shows how slaves maneuvered 54 within it, sometimes evading the threshold of white auditory surveillance. Through the cultivation of a sophisticated aural literacy that detected discrepancies in listening practices—that those on top of the power structure labeled particular sounds as “black” and interpreted them markedly different from sounds deemed “white” (read: normal, human)—slaves accrued knowledge, prevented punishment, fostered resistance, preserved memories, and constructed cultural identity. 5 The Trope of the “Listening Ear” and the Silence of the “Talking Book” “I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I had a great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did.” —Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano “When you read. . .you begin to ‘hear’ something, not quite a voice, but a shadow of a voice. You might even feel something, a tickle in your throat, a twitching in your tongue and jaw muscles, as if that interior voice were really on the verge of pressing outward, down through larynx and lips, to make itself heard.” —Georgina Kleege, “Voices in My Head” Within the African American literary tradition, scenes where listening emerges as the primary sense occur quite frequently; I argue they form one of the key tropes whose revision has served to create what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls a “web of filiation” between texts (1988: xxii). According to Gates, the “ur-trope” of African American literature is the “talking book,” a recurrent metaphor in the earliest slave narratives such as Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). In these texts, scenes recur where the slave narrator places his ear to a book in order 55 to read it, expecting that it will speak to him as he perceives it does to white readers. In Equiano’s narrative, he recounts his earliest attempt to read while at sea with his captors. Still very young and profoundly disoriented, Equiano had just been purchased from an ailing slave master in Virginia. While on this plantation, Equiano experiences the fragmentation of his body and senses for the first time, a forcible epistemological rupture at the heart of slavery’s power dynamic. To represent this division, he juxtaposes three images for the reader: of a slave that can only listen, a watch that can only talk, and a portrait that can only look. The silenced slave woman, locked into an iron muzzle, shocks him with the abject image of a body reduced to a dominated ear. From the incessant noise of the ticking watch, he fears betrayal to the master of his every action in a language he can neither control nor understand. The portrait, whose white male gaze follows him about the room, equates looking with powerful, remote—even “magic”—surveillance (39). These objects so terrorize him that he is grateful to leave Virginia, even at the risk of new horrors on the “Industrious Bee.” In contrast, Equiano’s description of reading conveys a yearning to (re)integrate and (re)order these three atomized senses, replacing subjection and surveillance with desire and interchange. After the ship sets sail, he describes how I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I had a great curiosity to talk to the books as they did; and so to learn how all things had a beginning. For that purpose I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes that it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when I found it remained silent (43). 56 In Equiano’s depiction of the active “employment” of reading, the visuality of eyes moving across a page acts as a gateway to an epistemology that ultimately depends upon an interchange between talking and listening. Equiano attempts to engage the book “when alone” and safely out of range of white surveillance; this act not only amplifies listening as an important outlaw knowledge, but shows how Equiano attempts to claim his ear for himself, as he imagines the woman with the muzzle is unable to do. Equiano’s disappointment with the silence of the text is palpable, and certainly he desires to be able to listen to the “talking book” as much as he wishes it would speak. At the root of the word “listen” is the Teutonic “lust,” suggestive of his yearning. While Gates reads this trope as symptomatic of the tension between oral and printed literatures in Western culture, especially the struggles of black writers to make (white) written texts speak with black voices, it is actually unclear if the silence lies in a muzzled book or in Equiano’s frustrated desire to listen through and beyond looking. While the act of speaking is highlighted within The Signifying Monkey, the act of listening is often simply ignored, assumed, or naturalized. Certainly, as Gates discusses, de-forming the master’s words to make them speak with a black voice was one of the triumphs of the slave narrative that shaped the trajectory of black cultural production. While the figuration of the voice remains decidedly important, Equiano also represents the act of listening as fundamental to transmitting knowledge and making meaning from it. 57 Therefore, I argue that the “talking book” represents only part of the literary equation. Moving the discussion from the “talking book” to the “listening ear” enables us to conceive of these two terms not as a simple binary, but as a nexus in a more complex and inclusive system of literacy that does not exclude aurality. 6 Aural literacy—the ability to understand and relate to the world through sound—demands that we expand notions of orality (what the mouth speaks) to include the full range of aurality (what the ear hears): noises, whistles, screams, whispers, silences, rhythms. Aural literacy also contests the artificial and imbalanced dichotomy between orality and literacy and the inherent ocularcentrism embedded within it that privileges the silent written word. 7 I am influenced here in my thinking by Joseph Roach’s adaptation of Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s conception of “orature” in Cities of the Dead (2001): “Orature comprises a range of forms, which, though they may invest themselves variously in gesture, song, dance, processions, storytelling, proverbs, gossip, customs, rites, and rituals, are nevertheless produced alongside or within mediated literacies of various kinds and degrees” (11). The existence of hybrid forms of orature—such as literary representations of “listening ears” within the texts that I point to in this chapter—show us that oral and aural ways of knowing the world do not simply disappear or dissolve into written discourse; Roach argues that orality and literacy are co-constitutive, interactive categories rather than mutually exclusive moments in an evolutionary model of culture. Literary representations of aural literacy amplify the fact that “listening ears” continue to be 58 and always have been important producers of knowledge in a society that an overwhelming number of scholars argue has given itself over almost completely to the eye (Berger: 1977, Foucault: 1977, Jay: 1996, Schafer: 1994, Connor: 1997, Bailey: 1998, Kahn: 2001, Leppert: 2004, Smith: 2004). “The Bloodstained Gate” of Aunt Hester’s Scream “Hearing is a way of touching at a distance.” —R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape “I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the bloodstained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery.” —Frederick Douglass, Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass In Douglass’s 1845 narrative, the epistemology of listening is intertwined with subjection and connected to “the bloodstained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery” (255). The passage where he describes his master beating his Aunt Hester is frequently identified by critics as “primal scene” both because of the role Douglass gives it in shaping his subjectivity as well as the inextricable intermingling of sex and violence made palpable through Hester’s scream 8 . The moment in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass where six-year-old Douglass overhears the beating of his Aunt Hester is an archetypal scene of listening that later African American literary texts grapple with and signify on. 9 Douglass himself calls attention to the aural dimensions of Aunt Hester’s abuse by deliberately hiding in a darkened closet “because he was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight” of Hester’s blood 59 dripping to the floor (259). Agreeing with Fred Moten that it is the “phonography of the very screams that open the way into the knowledge of slavery and the knowledge of freedom” (21-22), I think that we must also examine the role of the “listening ear” in constructing this knowledge. What Douglass offers us as readers is not just a potent aural description of Aunt Hester’s screams, but critical representations of how those sounds are heard and by whom. By focusing on the scream itself, the multiple “listening ears” represented here—Hester’s in call, the Master’s in response, and Douglass’s overhearing the dialogue—can easily be overlooked. While the screams of Hester saturate the barn, Douglass shows there is a decided difference in how each participant listens to them. Through the use of powerful aural imagery, Douglass depicts the subjectivities of both slave and master as indelibly shaped through and by white terror, a “transaction” that takes place through the ear (259). Douglass’s use of “transaction” has multiple registers in this passage; the term refers to a business exchange, but also more generally to a physical process—such as the sound vibrations entering Douglass’s young ears unbidden—and the action of transference, of changing states. For Douglass, this incident is both a singular horror and a recurrent trauma. Before detailing the “first time [he] ever witnessed [the] horrible exhibition,” Douglass notes the regularity of this violent event: “I have often been awakened at the dawn of the day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom [master] used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back until she was 60 literally covered with blood” (258, emphasis mine). Douglass ironizes the notion of “enlightenment” with the metaphoric image of his repetitive, involuntary, and far-too early awakening to these shrieks. As his body resonates with the vibrations of Hester’s scream—we hear with our entire physical forms, not solely the ear—it is forced into a new “realization of itself as vulnerable and black” (Alexander 96). Some theorists view listening as more intimately connected to the body than touch (Schafer: 1977, McCartney: 2004), because touch at least “respects the perimeter of [the] skin” (Burrows 16); sound waves actually move into one’s body, resonating deep within the bones. To young Douglass, Hester’s scream is intimate, bodily knowledge of the frequency of sexual violence on the plantation and its role in maintaining the white power structure. I find Hartman’s delineation between spectacular and mundane violence in Scenes of Subjection extremely useful to understanding the complexity of racial domination; however, I argue that Douglass’s Narrative uses images of listening to challenge readers to imagine how the spectacular can become mundane. On the plantation, the slave master routinizes the sounds of traumatic, sexual violence; its threat permeates the air in their wake. As the master forces Hester’s scream of terror to (inter)mingle with the slavemaster’s curses of pleasure in Douglass’s ear, Douglass comes to understand the connection between the slavemaster’s dominating masculinity and slavery’s violence, fearing that “it would be [his] turn next” for sexual abuse, physical domination, or both (259). Precisely because Hester’s scream 61 is nonverbal, it is able to simultaneously represent her sexual and physical abuse in ways that mimetic quoting could not accomplish under the surveillance of the abolitionist publishing industry; 10 the violent “heart-rending shriek” becomes aurally associated in this scene with the moan that might come from sexual activity. Although allied in gender, the “listening ears” of both Douglass and the master are formed against this sonic backdrop in highly racialized ways. Douglass, sympathetic to his Aunt Hester’s plight and fearing himself vulnerable to the slave master’s sexual violence, can never hear her screams as routine no matter how often he listens to them; the sound remains acutely “heart-rending” every morning. In contrast, Douglass depicts the slave master’s “listening ear” as so willfully calloused that he does not hear Hester’s screams as brutal. Douglass’s work depicts the white male ear fashioned by slavery, anticipating Mark M. Smith’s claim that “punishment itself produced mewling, and as such, it had to be reconstituted as necessary noise by aurally sensitive masters” (75). Within Douglass’s Narrative, the “listening ear” of whiteness operates through a highly selective process that removes whites from the violence they enact upon black people by providing alternate narratives for its sound. The result is a curious dual effect where slave masters appear “deaf” to the sounds of black suffering—and are often characterized as such by abolitionist writing (Mark M. Smith: 2003)—but are actually gratified and titillated by listening to it. Douglass describes his master as a “cruel man” who was “hardened by a long life of slave holding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave” (258). 62 Whereas Douglass perceives Aunt Hester’s shrieks as metaphorically able to penetrate and tear his own heart apart, “no words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move [the master’s] iron heart from its bloody purpose” (258). Harryette Mullen argues that Douglass’s narrative choice not to recreate Aunt Hester’s words or prayers upon the page effectively silences her and highlights the “inability of her voice to affect the slave master who beats her” (252). However, I argue Douglass reveals the process by which the master’s “listening ear” silences Aunt Hester’s words and prayers, reconstructing the aural horror of her scream as a “necessary noise” signifying his physical and sexual dominion over her. The fact that the slave master is not moved to cease swinging the cowskin says nothing about the eloquence of Aunt Hester’s pleas, but rather speaks volumes about the narratives that the white power structure constructed to absorb them. Douglass’s Narrative represents the master’s experience of hearing Aunt Hester’s complex range of words, tears, and prayers as simultaneously a flattened lack and a repetitive “no”—a recasting of Hester’s initial refusal that sparks his jealousy and retribution. Furthermore, Douglass represents the process by which white slave masters transformed black sound as “noise” as imperfect and incomplete. As Jon Cruz describes in Culture on the Margins (1999), “Far too many of the accounts of owners and overseers that describe black noise also contain a deeper unraveling of noise—an unraveling toward the irrepressible acknowledgement of meaningful emotions” (49). We hear this unraveling as the master continues to beat Hester: “The louder she 63 screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest” (258). At first, the white ear is depicted as hungrily attuned to the noise of black suffering; the master violently produces this sound through Hester for his own gratification. However, Douglass’s description rapidly inverts this image, showing the slave master losing control when her continued screams escape the bounds of his desire and the orchestration enacted by his whip: “He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush” (258). Once Hester’s screams suffuse the kitchen and escape his orchestration, the “irrepressible acknowledgement” of black humanity is made. 11 The “noise” of Hester’s screams becomes meaningful sound to the slave master’s ears and he compulsively continues to whip her to smother her voice and (re)bury this realization. As this potent aural image depicts, spectacular scenes of violence on the plantation produced horrific aural tableaux of black pain— screams, curses, oaths, groans—and Douglass shows how the power of the white male ear is in the constant orchestration of a delicate, (un)conscious balance between aural sensitivity and cultural deafness. Ultimately, the narrative power of Aunt Hester’s scream comes from the paradoxical fact that its significance is irreducible to words. 12 Mullen’s reading doubly silences Hester by discounting the power of her scream as an aural signifier in excess of either oral or written literacies. Only if the substance of the voice is reduced solely to language—the word—do we hear absence and lack in the sound of Aunt Hester’s scream. However, the absence of the word can also be heard as an 64 augmentation to language (Moten 178). The aural image of Aunt Hester’s indeterminate cry supplements Douglass’s frustrated acknowledgement that he cannot adequately express the true horror of her beating and paradoxically represents its very unrepresentability in written language. 13 He tells his readers that her abuse “was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it” (258). Dwight McBride argues that such moments actually “pla[y] on the fetishistic desire of the spectatorial reader” rather than gratify it (158). By amplifying Aunt Hester’s screams, Douglass simultaneously calls attention to and attempts to suture the gap between embodied African American experience and its expression in Western written forms conventionally viewed as disembodied. Douglass’s critics have charged that this scene is overly sexualized to the point of pornography and that his detailed (re)production for white readers is tantamount to textual abuse of Hester (McDowell: 1991, Slote: 1996, Hartman: 2001). Admittedly, this is the site where Douglass sacrifices Hester’s agency to his own (McDowell: 1991, Mullen: 1992), but because he takes away her ears, not her words. Douglass does not represent Hester as a listener here, only as a producer of sound. Rather than examine how this scene sounds to Hester’s listening ear, Douglass instead places her scream in a mediating role in the relationship between himself and the Master. However, this choice may also prevent voyeuristic readers from imagining themselves in Hester’s place, thus effacing her body with their own, as Hartman suggests is the danger of empathetic identification in Scenes of 65 Subjection (19). Her study calls important attention to the limits of empathy incited through the violent spectacle, especially its inherent voyeurism, prurient sexual charge, and potential to lead to self-pity on the part of white audiences. Refusing to reproduce this scene in order to (re)read it, Hartman chooses instead to highlight the “more mundane and socially endurable forms of terror” that Hester’s scream seems to render whites incapable of seeing and hearing (42). Interestingly, though, Hartman’s move to critically conceal the violent visual spectacle of Hester’s beating from view is precisely the move that Douglass himself makes. He describes himself as: “so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over” (259). By placing Douglass the boy inside the closet, Douglass the writer attempts to disentangle the visual from the aural imagery of Aunt Hester’s beating in the mind of his readers. Plunging himself into darkness—a symbolic critique of notions of Enlightenment—Douglass funnels Hester’s screams through a literary representation of his young “listening ear.” Far from muffling the screams, the closed, dark space of the closet emphasizes, amplifies, and echoes them. Subtracting the sight of the “warm, red blood” forces potentially voyeuristic readers into the position of the listener who overhears. 14 Douglass’s deliberate narrative shift from the eye (“point of view”) to the ear (“point of audition” 15 ) is critical, because it works to disrupt any comfort, pleasure, or safety readers may have found by remaining strictly observers. The positions of the voyeur and the eavesdropper are 66 not one and the same; there is a particular intimacy and proximity inherent to being within the “eave’s drop” of a “bloody transaction” that is not necessarily so with the more distance-oriented mechanism of the eye. This would have been especially true before the development of technologies that mechanically amplified sound and made it reproducible in sites beyond its immediate physical context. Film critic Elisabeth Weis describes the intimacy of overhearing as an “erotics of listening” that posits “overhearing [as] a primal phenomenon that invokes anxiety” (83). There are no earlids to provide protection from unwanted sound; access to the psychological muffling mechanisms Douglass aligns with the slave master’s horrific “iron heart” are uneven and dependent upon a listener’s relationship to power. Furthermore, a threat that is heard but left unseen enables the reader to call forth something even more terrifying than anything a specific image could describe (Weis 83), enabling Douglass to represent slavery’s unrepresentability through the ear. However, the eavesdropper’s anxiety occurs not only because the ear is more vulnerable and less self-controllable than the eye, but also because it implicates listeners in the production of the mental imagery to accompany these sounds. Up until this point, the reader could quite easily have felt himself/herself observing violence perpetrated by the slave master; by removing the visual description, Douglass compels readers to realize they have been actively supplying the violence all along. In the ethical framework of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, listening is synonymous with involvement, as he describes himself as both 67 a “witness and a participant” in Aunt Hester’s torture (258). If Douglass represents himself as complicit as a six-year old slave, then his white Northern readers— listening from the safety of their reading chairs—are exponentially indicted. Furthermore, unlike the visual spectacle that disappears when removed from view, aural imagery leaves echoes, reverberations, and traces that linger and bleed into new situations. Douglass’s separation of the audio and visual narrative tracks works to embody the reader while disembodying Aunt Hester’s scream. As Douglass no longer directly sees her mouth as the source of the sound, the screams seem to him to emanate from everywhere. Hester’s shriek becomes extradiegetic, lasting “long after the bloody transaction was over” (259). 16 The sound of Aunt Hester’s “heart-rending shrieks” remains present and circulating throughout Douglass’s text: in Demby’s murder, in Captain Auld’s beating of Henny, and in the sonic imagery that closes the Narrative in which the “slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master” (327). Most immediately, they permeate the dense forest where the “wild notes” of the sorrow songs are sung, black cultural expressions whose most potent meanings are rendered “if not in the word, in the sound” (20). 17 68 “If Not in the Word. . .”: Douglass and Aural Literacy “I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake.” —Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass The moment when Douglass describes the slaves singing in Colonel Lloyd’s woods is not only linked to Aunt Hester’s beating by the lingering sound of her scream, but also by repeated representation of the “listening ear” as part of a circuit linking the mind to the heart through the body. By using Aunt Hester’s scream as a frame for his recollection of listening to the slaves’ songs, Douglass recasts the vulnerability to sound he experienced in the closet as a critical openness to it. For Douglass, hearing the slaves on their way to the Great House Farm is both emotional and didactic, another early lesson in the dehumanizing effects of slavery. He remembers: While on their way, [the slaves] would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wildsongs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. . .The thought came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one than as the other (emphasis mine, 262). In the improvisatory cultural production of slaves, words only comprise part of a song’s meaning, and they can be easily misunderstood or even dismissed as “apparently incoherent,” “unmeaning jargon” by cultural outsiders (263, 262). Sound, both on its own and through the tense, often ironic relationship with words that Douglass describes here, operates as a double-voiced discourse 18 unquestionably “full of meaning” to those “within the circle” of slavery (262). By connecting the 69 obdurate deafness of the slave master with the inability of many white northerners to hear slave songs as anything but an expression of a perceived contentment or as musical gibberish “consult[ing] neither time nor tune” of European styles (263), Douglass challenges his white readership to listen beyond their culturally shaped expectations and desires, to hear “every tone [as] a testimony against slavery” related to Aunt Hester’s screams. Robert Stepto argues that African American literary texts frequently use framing structures to reform their white readers, exhibiting their ignorance by representing both good and bad listening practices and encouraging the reader to transform himself in accordance with the model (312). 19 Douglass's demand for readers to “place themselves in the deep pine woods” (263) and listen can be read as an attempt to instruct the “listening ears” of his white readership in aural literacy, a lesson that would enable them to hear across the sonic color-line separating those within and without the circle. For Douglass, the precondition of aural literacy is an intellectual and emotional openness to sound. He educates his white Northern readership in detecting the ironic interplay at work in the songs—“[slaves] would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone and the most rapturous in the most pathetic”—while attempting to explain how one must “analyze the sounds” (262). Douglass states: If anyone wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself deep in the pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul (263). 70 The noun “chambers” here describes the soul as if it were both a heart and a home, echoing the image of Douglass listening in the domestic space of the closet, his heart rending at the sound of Aunt Hester’s shrieks. A closed ear, on the other hand, is simultaneously the cause and the result of an “iron heart,” such as that of the slave master who beats Hester mercilessly for his pleasure (258). If a listener hears the sorrow songs and is not “thus impressed, it will only be because ‘there is no flesh in his obdurate heart’” (263). Obdurate is a poetic term that according to the Oxford English Dictionary means hardhearted, impenitent, and not easily moved to sympathy, recalling Douglass’s master who remains unaffected by Hester’s cries. Douglass uses the word “impress” twice in this section to describe the desired effects of the songs’ sound, implying that the vibrations themselves have the potential to exert a tactile pressure to re-form the mind and the heart. By first striking the “loud, long, and deep” (263) tones of the sorrow songs within his text and then (re)combining them with the visual image of tears sliding down his cheeks, Douglass uses the evocative power of sound to trigger a particular type of memory and emotion in excess of the written word’s capabilities. Douglass’s Narrative juxtaposes Aunt Hester’s beating with the scene in Colonel Lloyd’s woods to enact the possibility that the “listening ears” of his white Northern readership may be re- formed. However, as Carla Kaplan’s critique of Stepto reminds us, African American literature “often seeks to dramatize its lack of listeners” and the impossibility of 71 reaching competent, let alone ideal, readers (118). Although Douglass’s appeal to his readers’ “listening ears” to effect social change is promising, the fact that the “listening ear” of the slave master remains intractably illiterate and attuned to the sounds of domination is an important counterbalance. Douglass connects the dehumanizing physical violence of Aunt Hester’s beatings to the deleterious interpretive violence performed by white listeners who ignore, misunderstand, dismiss, and/or (mis)interpret black cultural production to their own ends. Even as Douglass makes an impassioned appeal to the power of sound for political and literary representation, he is exceedingly aware that sound is always already enmeshed in power relations and ultimately inextricable from the visual realm. The interpretive challenge he presents to his readership works to divide them—some have the potential to be “impressed” by the music and some cannot or will not be— as much as it potentially brings them together. Meaning making through the “listening ear” remains contoured by culture, history, power, and racial ideologies (Cruz: 1999, Tucker: 2002, Sterne: 2003, White and White: 2005). Douglass’s representation of aural literacy is no naïve appeal to truth, but rather a challenge to how notions of truth are produced, disseminated, and maintained. 72 Refining the “Listening Ear”: Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl “Socialized as the quieter if not the silent sex, women were likely to be more aurally alert than men. Noise unsexed women.” —Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City “I shuddered, but I was constrained to listen.” —Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Whereas Douglass represents listening rather iconically in his Narrative—only calling attention to the act in the two scenes I have discussed—listening is pervasive in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Incidents is a first person narrative told through a pseudonymous persona Jacobs names Linda Brent. 20 To tell the intertwined stories of Brent’s harrowing fight against sexual abuse and protracted struggle for freedom for herself and her children, Jacobs weaves elements of the slave narrative form with the conventions of the sentimental novel. Brent, like Douglass, spends her early childhood away from the immediate horrors of slavery; her Grandmother, a free woman, raises her after the death of her parents. Her initiation into the gendered economy of slavery also occurs through listening; however she is forced to endure the “foul words” whispered into her fifteen-year old ear by her cruel and lustful master, Dr Flint. As Jacobs bluntly states, “slavery is terrible for men, but it is far more terrible for women” (405). Linda refuses to accede to the master’s crude and relentless advances, taking a lover both to spite him and to exact some control over her body and her desire. She has two children with Sands, all the while remaining subject to her master’s rage and her mistress’s 73 jealousy. When Flint refuses to let Sands buy her children and begins to use them as a bargaining tool—threatening to sell them to slave traders if Linda does not comply with his wishes—she goes into hiding in her grandmother’s garret, which she calls the “loophole of retreat” (437). Nine feet long, seven feet wide, and only three feet tall, this miniscule space hides Linda for over seven years, as she struggles to make sure her children are freed not only from Mr. Flint’s clutches, but from the institution of slavery itself. Battling atrophy and illness, Linda listens hungrily for her children’s voices, overhears valuable information from the street, and writes letters that fool Dr. Flint into thinking she has already escaped to the North. He at last consents to let Sands buy Linda’s children; Sands does not free them, but sends them North. Linda is smuggled out of the garret and becomes a fugitive slave in New York, where she works as nurse to a wealthy white family in order to make the money to free her children and create a home for them at last. The text ends with Linda and her children struggling against new oppressions in the North, free but still unable to create any semblance of a domestic life of their own. Within her narrative, Jacobs does not bemoan the limitations of written language to describe brutal spectacles, but rather its inability to represent the everyday terror lurking underneath the surface of domestic life on the plantation. “No pen can give can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery” Jacobs writes, “the slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of her masters are her teachers” 74 (382). Conflating the crack of the lash on her back with the undulations of her master’s tongue in her ear, Jacobs’s writing illustrates that even the quietest of sounds can have a violent psychological impact. She describes the coming of age of the slave girl as the moment when “she will learn to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall” (361). Signifying on Douglass, Jacobs too articulates the moment she feels fully interpolated into the subject(ed) position of slave as a passage through a gate, however she describes this threshold in very subtle aural imagery. After Linda tells her grandmother that she is pregnant—and therefore no longer a respectable woman under the codes of nineteenth century femininity—her grandmother rips her mother’s wedding ring from her finger and kicks Linda out of her cottage. As she leaves this former safe haven, Linda remembers “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” (387). The sound of the gate cuts Linda off from her childhood past and the dreams of the future her grandmother’s love and protection had allowed her. Furthermore, as a mother- to-be in the slave system, she realizes that she has limited control—if any—over the future of her own child. This loss of agency is embedded in the very syntax of the sentences; as a child Linda eagerly opened the gate, but now the gate “closed upon [her]” on its own. The gate remains visually familiar, but sounds with a strange new pitch. Jacobs represents the complete transformation of her world with the aural image of the gate’s indescribable sound. 75 As the example of the gate attests, the plantation atmosphere Linda Brent learns to read is a cloistered, domestic world of subtleties, silences, and carefully guarded secrets; her movements on the plantation are circumscribed by murmurs rather than screams. The vulnerability of her ear to her master’s aural invasions— whose sexual whispers she characterizes as “stinging, scorching words; words that scathed ear and brain like fire” (66)—metonymically stands in for the constant susceptibility of her body to rape in the patriarchal system of slavery. Similar to Douglass, Jacobs represents the openness of Linda’s “listening ear” as double-edged. While staying alert to the “scathing” sounds of the plantation heightens her fear, it also provides Linda with self-knowledge necessary to her survival. “When he told me I was made for his use” Linda remarks, “never before had my puny arm felt half so strong” (352). Although she cannot control the influx of sound to her ear, Jacobs constructs a counternarrative to resist it. Within the domestic space of the plantation, the “listening ears” of the white power structure were female as well as male. Jacobs represents the “listening ear” of the slave mistress as a constant threat, surveilling her even as she sleeps. By exposing Mrs. Flint’s listening practices, Jacobs reveals the fabled fragility of southern women as a selective and racialized performance of gender. She describes how her mistress Mrs. Flint, like many southern women, was totally deficient in energy. She had not strength to superintend her household affairs; but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see 76 a women whipped, till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash (347). Her gendered performance as delicate slave mistress is dependent upon the subjugation of black females as invisible “God-breathing machines” (344) able to run “her household affairs” and hypervisible suffering bodies, subject to her “every stroke of the lash.” Mrs. Flint’s nerves are not only strong enough to withstand the sensory assault of the woman’s beating, but Jacobs’s description insinuates that she voyeuristically enjoys the view from the comfort of her “easy chair.” There is no aural description here; Jacobs articulates the punishment of this woman in strictly scopic terms. The “listening ear” of this cruel slave mistress re(de)fines the spectacular sounds of black suffering as audible markers of her racial superiority. Just as in the Aunt Hester passage, there is not only racial identity at stake in scenes of subjection on the plantation; gender identity is bound up in the act of listening as well. While Lydia Maria Childs’s introduction frames Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as Jacobs’s narrative attempt to re-gender herself as a “lady” by confessing to the “delicate ears” of her white, Northern readers, Jacobs’s narrative instead struggles to “ungender” southern white ladies like Mrs. Flint by exposing the notion of “delicate ears” as a deliberate artifice that not only shields white women from the suffering of their “sisters,” but also enacts and elicits racialized subjugation. As Hazel Carby describes, “the ideology of true womanhood was as racialized a concept in relation to white women as it was in its exclusion of black womanhood” (55). For example, Jacobs represents Flint’s implacable ear as a decidedly more 77 sensitive instrument during the day-to-day running of the plantation, when racial boundaries are much less clearly demarcated than at the joist. Black and white bodies frequently and simultaneously occupied the same intimate domestic spaces on the plantation. In these settings, Jacobs depicts the ears—of both slave mistress and slave—as an intimate instrument in everyday scenes of subjection, which she describes as both “petty [and] tyrannical” (363). Mrs. Flint’s “listening ear” functions as a vigilant technology that detects racial difference and discerns white superiority in even the smallest everyday detail. Similar to the slave master but on a different frequency, the ear of the slave mistress operated as an agent of racialization through the arbitration of “noise” and “sound.” Within the domestic space of the plantation, the sound produced by black bodies is persistently marked as noise by white ears—sound that does not belong, sound that is out of place, sound that must be continually policed in order to maintain the plantation as white racial space. For example, Linda’s first punishment while a slave is sparked by the sound of her new winter shoes, given to her by her grandmother to protect her from the frigid conditions. To her, the shoes signify both necessity and the protective care of her grandmother. The “listening ear” of Mrs. Flint, however, jealous of the sexual attention forced on Linda by her husband Mr. Flint and threatened by Linda’s love and loyalty toward her free grandmother, amplifies the small squeak to a noise marking an epic transgression: When I walked through Mrs. Flint’s room, their creaking grated harshly on her refined nerves. She called me to her, and asked what I had about me that 78 made such a horrid noise. I told her it was my new shoes. ‘Take them off,’ said she; ‘and if you put them on again, I’ll throw them into the fire’ (353). Jacobs details this moment mere paragraphs after Mr. Flint’s obscene assault on Linda’s ears and only pages after Mrs. Flint’s sensory callousness in the face of horrific brutality; suddenly her mistresses’ “listening ear” is so sensitive that even the slightest creaking of Linda’s shoes assaults her “refined nerves.” This juxtaposition suggests that what has changed is not her ear, but rather the power dynamic. In this case, Mrs. Flint asserts her power over Linda through listening; her ear draws an interpretive boundary that marks any unsanctioned, unasked for sound that Linda makes as distasteful to her refined sensibilities as a white woman. Mrs. Flint hears the creaking shoes as an aural signifier marking the literal and metaphoric presence of the black female body in her private domestic space, the only actual arena of power she wields on the plantation as the (re)producer of legitimate offspring and heirs to her husband’s wealth. Heard through her jealousy, the creaking shoes sound a little too much like agency and sexual threat to Mrs. Flint’s ears, tuned to hear her own quiet white womanhood as normal, refined, and superior. Jacobs expresses this in the doubled language of Mrs. Flint’s barbed inquiry into “what I had about me that made such a horrid noise” (emphasis mine), suggesting the sonic offense is both on Linda’s person and deep within her essential nature. Jacobs represents the delicate, refined, and ultra-selective “listening ear” of the slave mistress—capable of the utmost cruelty—as both the product and the process of a class and race privilege that deafens her to any gender solidarity with Linda. To re- 79 assert her own power, Mrs. Flint forces Linda to remove the shoes and quite literally, toe her sonic color-line through miles of biting cold snow. “A Watching Listening Attitude”: The Bondswoman’s Narrative “In the nineteenth-century poetics of property, black personae are presumptively expropriated through the generous designs of the gift—presumptively translations; presumptively repetitions, presumptively mechanical reproductions.” —Stephen Best, The Fugitive’s Properties “Having eyes we should not see, and having ears we should not hear.” —Hannah Crafts, The Bondswoman’s Narrative While I begin this section discussing similar scenes of sonic subjection that occur in Jacobs’s narrative and Hannah Crafts’s recently discovered unpublished novel, The Bondswoman’s Narrative (1857/2002), it will close with examples revealing how Crafts use of aural imagery is strikingly different from either Jacobs or Douglass. 21 The representations of sound and listening in both Narrative and Incidents are neither as frequent nor as detailed; with few exceptions, they tend to be mimetic, focusing overwhelmingly on organic sounds stemming from human sources: screams, whispers, speech, and music. Crafts’s text, on the other hand, uses a much wider palate of sound—real, imagined, human, mechanical, animal, natural, supernatural—for a varied range of mimetic, metaphoric, symbolic, and metonymic representational purposes. Whereas Douglass and Jacobs tend to focus on one sound in great detail—Aunt Hester’s scream, the squeak of Linda’s shoes—and direct their readership to travel South for listening experiences of slavery—Douglass challenges 80 his audience to listen to slaves singing in the woods, Jacobs tells her readers to masquerade as slave traders to hear real southern truths—Crafts creates dense, layered audio tableaux that are listening experiences in themselves. I concur with Augusta Rohrbach’s assessment that The Bondswoman’s Narrative is largely concerned with “verisimilitude, rather than,” as was the case with slave narratives, “verifiability” (11) and, like Karen Sanchez-Eppler, I treat Crafts’s deliberate shift to novelistic form seriously, especially the “compelling insights [it offers] into the attraction of the novel at this crucial moment of literary and political history” (255). What is the role of sound and aural imagery in creating literary “verisimilitude,” especially in representing processes of racialization? In what ways can The Bondswoman’s Narrative be read as a proto-realist novel, anticipating the literary soundscapes of Richard Wright and Ann Petry? Furthermore, if writing a novel rather than a slave narrative allowed Crafts certain kinds of literary freedoms from the racialized confines of genre unavailable to either Douglass or Jacobs (Buell: 2004, Rohrbach: 2004, Sánchez-Eppler: 2004, Wald: 2004), then I argue that the dramatic, concurrent rise in Crafts’s use of aural imagery is central to constructing, representing and expressing that freedom. While The Bondswoman’s Narrative reveals listening as an important antebellum technology of control and subjection, Crafts’s text also imagines ways in which listening has the potential to be resistant and self-affirming. 81 Part slave narrative, part gothic novel, part sentimental fiction, part proto- realist exposé, The Bondswoman’s Narrative is a first-person chronicle of the life of a young woman named Hannah, born into slavery on a plantation called Lindendale. A quiet, curious girl, Hannah steals as much time away from her household labors as she can in order to “think and speculate”; she wanders the woods and the vast halls of Lindendale, imagining her body free from slavery, her mind unfettered by racism, and her life “destined for something higher and better than this world can afford” (17). Hannah learns to read rather early on, having stumbled upon a religious couple during one of her explorations into the forest who teaches her to read The Bible. However, as Sánchez-Eppler argues, written “literacy is less celebrated in this text than taken for granted” (260). Hannah describes reading as merely one tool among many that her quick mind uses to obtain knowledge on the plantation. Her ears are as important as her eyes, as “instead of books, [Hannah] studied faces and characters” (27). As she grows older, Hannah learns that Lindendale was cursed by a slave woman named Rose, who was viciously murdered at the plantation’s namesake tree. With her dying breath, Rose vowed that the memory of her death would haunt the family; every time the creaking of the branches is heard, a tragedy will befall Sir Clifford’s descendants. The tension builds on the evening that Hannah’s master brings a new wife to the plantation, as the wind lashed the branches of the Linden and the “creaking of the tree filled [everyone’s] bosoms with supernatural dread” (25). Hannah’s new 82 mistress arrives in a state of melancholy and perturbation, accompanied by a mysterious man named Mr. Trappe. Not long after, Hannah overhears her mistress and Mr. Trappe discussing the secret source of her sadness: while working as her father’s lawyer, Trappe had discovered that her mother had been a slave and was using the knowledge to extort money from her. Unfortunately, her marriage to the master of Lindendale had proved to be much less profitable than Trappe had anticipated and he was threatening to expose her secret. Still smarting from her rejection of his sexual advances, Trappe was determined to ruin the woman’s social standing and sell her into slavery. Repentant for having accidentally overheard such a tragic story, Hannah tells her mistress what she knows. Her mistress collapses, grateful to have a confidant, and the two women decide to escape together and steal off in the middle of the night accompanied by the sound of the creaking Linden. They live for several months in an abandoned cabin in the woods; Hannah tries her best to protect her former mistress as she slowly goes insane. Patrollers eventually stumble across the women and drag them off to jail. Mr. Trappe, now the women’s legal owner, arrives to “dispose of [them] in a private manner” as sex slaves; upon hearing this, Hannah’s mistress literally dies on the spot (99). Hannah is sold the following day, but before the speculator reaches his destination, they are involved in a grisly wagon accident that leaves him dead and her seriously injured. She is nursed back to health by the Henry family, who find her sprawled in the road and take her in, assuming she is 83 white. When Hannah informs them she is in fact “a slave. . .one of that miserable class” (117), they allow her to stay on until they can contact Lindendale. Mrs. Wheeler, a visiting friend of the Henrys and a vain, cruel woman ever in search of “a bargain” (153), decides Hannah would make a good personal servant. She forces Hannah to write a letter to Lindendale asking that she be sold. The text Mrs. Wheeler dictates to Hannah denigrates her in almost every way, an act which forecasts the power inequities in their relationship: “I never felt so poor, so weak, so utterly subjected to the authority of another,” Hannah describes, “as when that woman with her soft voice and suavity of manner. . .told me that I was hers body and soul” (155). Hannah accompanies the Wheelers to Washington D.C., where a she “accidentally” makes Mrs. Wheeler the laughingstock of the capital by obtaining an anti-aging powder that turns her face and hands black. The narrative climaxes when Mr. Wheeler loses his government post and the family returns to their North Carolina plantation. Upon their arrival, Mrs. Wheeler resolves to teach Hannah a lesson for the Washington incident by sending her to work in the fields for the first time in her life. Revolted at the thought of living in the slave quarters and being forced to marry a field hand—a “man whom [she] could only hate and despise” (206)—Hannah decides to run away a second time. She disguises herself as a man and steals away alone, listening to every noise and fighting the “mental anxiety and apprehension” that she describes as “one of the greatest miseries of [her] fugitive condition” (211). She eventually falls into the 84 company of two fellow runaways, a man named Jacob and his ailing sister. They travel together for sometime, until the woman dies and Jacob is killed trying to steal a boat to help them up the river. The boat is dashed on the rocks and Hannah almost dies; however she is miraculously rescued by the same woman who taught her to read as a child. After a full recovery, Hannah again dons her disguise and takes a steamboat to the North, where she lives out the happiest of endings. She has a “neat little cottage,” a “fond and affectionate husband,” and a job as a schoolteacher (237- 238). She is even reunited with the mother that she never knew. 22 The character of Mrs. Wheeler, with her “affected” voice (151) and discerning ear, greatly resembles Mrs. Flint from Jacobs's Incidents and Crafts details a similar scene of subjection enacted by listening. Like Linda Brent’s creaking tread, Hannah’s sonic offense occurs in the private domestic space of Mrs. Wheeler’s bedroom. Mrs. Wheeler, wife of a Southern congressional sycophant, summons Hannah to “inquir[e] if [she] was musical, adding that [her former servant] Jane used to soothe her to sleep with the guitar” (153). Mrs. Wheeler expects to purchase Hannah as a literal replacement for Jane; she believes that one black female servant can be swapped out for another in quite the same way that she imagines a harp’s tones may be a sonic surrogate for plucked guitar strings. As soon as Hannah describes how she “played a little on the harp,” Mrs. Wheeler elicits a command performance, demanding that Hannah “play very softly on account of her nerves” (153). Crafts, however, has already cued readers to interrogate Mrs. Wheeler’s 85 obvious manifestations of nineteenth century femininity as façades of racialized power by exposing the steely interior underneath her helpless demeanor and breathy speech. While her voice is appropriately “soft and low” befitting ladylike conventions, Hannah declares that the “tone was rather artificial than natural” and as capable of commanding other people as a scream (151). 23 Mrs. Wheeler’s discerning “nerves” prove to be equally domineering, as Hannah describes how—despite her willingness to “play very softly”— her music “did not suit her. It was sharp, or flat, or dull, or insipid anything but what she wished” (153). The ideologies that shape Mrs. Wheeler’s “listening ear” not only actively prevent her from being able to hear Hannah’s agency, but she actively seeks to suppress it. Hannah’s unique playing, which she claims as “my music,” resists what Hartman describes as the “fungibility” of black bodies in the power relations of slavery (7). Fungibility has two prongs: first, the guiding view that enslaved black bodies were infinitely exchangeable commodities and second, that blackness was an opaque screen upon which whites projected images of themselves and their fears and desires. Hannah’s musical assertion of self-expression directly confronts Mrs. Wheeler’s assumption that all slaves are essentially interchangeable parts. Rather than examine this tension, Mrs. Wheeler instead impedes Hannah by asserting her own racial identity through the gendered and socially-constructed orifice of the ear. Her finely-tuned “nerves” and ears do not listen to Hannah’s music but rather listen for a preconceived notion of 86 what music should sound like—however nebulous—insuring that any music that Hannah produces will remain noise unable to “suit her.” In both Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and The Bondswoman’s Narrative, the delicate, refined, and ultra-selective “listening ear” of the slave mistress is represented as both the product and the process of class and race privilege. In deliberate contrast, the ears of the slave woman are supposed to be dulled, passive receptors, incapable of aesthetic judgment, emotional response, or complex interpretation. Slave narratives depict this stereotype and actively invert and resist it. For example, while Mrs. Wheeler saw fit to summon Hannah with a “little bell [that] stood on a table by her side,” a sound intended to invoke an automatic, mechanistic response, Hannah mentions how “its ting a ring ding reminded me of my servitude a hundred times a day” (160). Not once does Hannah respond to that bell without deeply feeling it; in contrast to the ears of the slave mistress that are inured to even the most heart-rending screams, her ears are wounded a “hundred times a day” by the bell’s “ting a ring ding.” The sound reminds her of the limited space she works in, never out of the auditory footprint of the bell’s ring. Crafts’s narrative depicts how many sensory stereotypes the dominant culture propagates about black people stem from performative listening situations constructed by whites themselves. Hartman argues that the “crimes of slavery are not only witnessed but staged” (17), and a large part of The Bondswoman’s Narrative is dedicated to exposing this process. As the bell scene evinces, Mrs. 87 Wheeler imagines Hannah as a listener only as it pertains to her needs; indeed, listening itself becomes a command performance of Hannah’s obedience. While Hannah dresses her hair, Mrs. Wheeler speaks at Hannah rather than to her, as if she is a recorder or an aural equivalent of a mirror. Hannah describes, “she was not fond of silence when there was a listener” (150). The use of the nondescript “a” suggests interchangeability and the particular brand of generic response Mrs. Wheeler seeks to extract from Hannah; Mrs. Wheeler’s words are not aimed specifically at her, but are designed as a monologue to fill up the silence. Their “conversation” is staid and quite staged; Mrs. Wheeler pauses in her chatting only to give directions to Hannah or to allow her to ask a brief clarifying question such as, “what do you think?,” that puts the focus immediately back on Mrs. Wheeler (150). The power dynamics inherent in slavery enable and depend upon Mrs. Wheeler’s ability to imagine Hannah’s ears as an extension of her own. Crafts echoes this point just a few pages later in a seemingly innocuous but—when coupled with the Wheeler scene—quite pointed depiction of the link between power and listening. While describing Washington D.C., the city where the Wheelers reside, Hannah imagines how the “great President of the Great Republic” feels about the winter weather as he looks perhaps from the windows of his drawing room, and wonders at the mud and slush precisely as an ordinary mortal would. Perhaps he remarks to the nearest secretary that the roads are dreadful; and the secretary bound to see with the same eyes and hear with the same ears echoes ‘dreadful’ (157). 88 This tableau can be read as an allegory of slavery—a doubling of the scene where Mrs. Wheeler makes small talk with Hannah—as well as a deft rumination on the linkages between power, perception, and subjection. The President, looking through the “windows of his drawing room” (emphasis mine)—their glass seemingly transparent but framed of course by his prestige and power—imagines himself to be remarking on the weather “precisely as an ordinary mortal would” (157). While seeming to downgrade the power of the “great President” by suggesting that he too makes small talk—“what a pity it is,” the narrator bemoans, “that great men should care about roads or such common things” (156)—this depiction subversively describes the invisibility and pervasiveness of his power. While he may envision himself speaking as an “ordinary mortal would,” he is certainly not listened to as one; this fact both assures him of his power and insulates him from full recognition of it. Like Mrs. Wheeler, he throws his remarks out to fill up the silence and catch the ears of the “nearest secretary” available to listen. “Nearest” implies fungibility; one faceless, nondescript secretary is interchangeable with another. He speaks not to the ears of an individual secretary, but to the imagined subordinate subject position of “secretary.” In fact, the very sound of his words performs that subordination, which is enacted by listening. The secretary’s response is almost entirely circumscribed, as he is “bound to see with the same eyes and hear with the same ears” (157). Coercion and consent are completely intertwined here, as “bound” has a double meaning as both anticipation and compulsion. The labor of the secretary 89 involves both transcribing the President’s dictated words and “echoing” the president’s observations. By suppressing his own perspective—the roads in front of the White House are probably not nearly as “dreadful” as those where a secretary might live—and conforming to the President’s expectations and sensory observations, he embodies the politician’s power. Crafts, however, represents Hannah’s “listening ear” as anything but an echo of her various masters and mistresses. She opens the novel with this description of her protagonist: “I had none of the quickness and animation that are so admired in children, but rather a silent unobtrusive way of observing things and events, and wishing to understand them better than I could” (5). She thus establishes herself as a watcher and a listener—the term “observe” fuses the two—and her silence not as weakness or a lack of curiosity or agency, but rather a precondition for knowledge. Throughout the novel, silence is one of the main texts that the narrator mines for information. As she strolls through the halls of Lindendale, the plantation upon which she is raised, she expresses how “memories of the dead give at any time a haunting air to a silent room” (16). By listening carefully to the silence gathered within the plantation’s walls, Hannah can detect the echoing traces of the past in the present. Even after she learns to read, Hannah continues to hone her “listening ear” and trade in aural knowledge. Crafts’s text represents written literacy as an 90 extension of Hannah’s aural literacy; the two are not mutually exclusive. She describes: By and by, as I grew older and I was able to manifest my good intentions, not so much by words, as a matter of sympathy and consideration for everyone, I was quite astonished to see how much I was trusted and confided in, how I was made the repository of secrets (11, emphasis mine). Hannah continues to make meaning “not so much by words,” but in the “sympathy and consideration” with which she shapes them. The ear is constructed here as an instrument of connection with others; it is also a way to gain knowledge and potential power. Her ability to listen steals part of the plantation’s power, as she herself becomes a “repository of secrets” that contests the oppressive silences held within Lindendale’s walls. ::: While Crafts’s text shares some similarities with Jacobs and Douglass, her use of sound is much more metaphoric and symbolic then any of slave narratives I have previously discussed. In some ways, her use of aural imagery—especially her attention to silence and expressionistic description of the landscape—resonates much more strongly with the soundscapes of Richard Wright’s Mississippi and Chicago or Ann Petry’s Harlem, which I will discuss at length in the following chapters. Crafts uses sound to represent the violence of slavery—both the spectacularly physical and the psychologically intimate—but she also uses aural imagery to re-story the southern landscape with that violence. 24 91 While whites may lay visual claim to the spaces of antebellum slavery, Crafts represents the interplay of sound and listening as a technology of memory for slaves, producing counternarratives of memorial within those same spaces. A primary example is the story Hannah tells about the linden tree, which has both a stable physical presence on the plantation and a shifting symbolic resonance throughout the narrative. From its initial appearance in Crafts’s story, the linden tree has a ghostly quality; Hannah immediately associates it with the haunted silence that echoes through the “silent rooms of a large house. . .a sound [that] does not seem of mortality” (15). The first aural image Crafts uses to represent the tree is not the incessant creaking of its branches, but rather the haunted absence of sound represented by its shadow. Strolling illicitly down the hallway of her master’s family portraits, themselves ghostly representations of generations long dead, Hannah notices the linden as a shadow—a liminal projection both material and ephemeral—falling across the “line of stolid faces” (16). “As the shadows of the linden played there,” the portraits seem to come alive, animated by the tree’s anthropomorphized touch. The movements of the linden tree’s shadow are uncanny, purposefully altering the “official” historical memory represented by those regal portraits. One of the likenesses “appears to open and shut his lips continually though they emit no sound,” indicating the bankruptcy of the family’s official narrative and hinting that there are far more stories to be told about Lindendale than those apparent in the “pictured memorials of the past” (16, 17). The linden tree’s shadowy figure 92 forces the slave master to be silent, conferring narrative authority onto the young slave Hannah as she wanders down the hallway, feeling the storytelling power of her own imagination to transform these seemingly immutable representations of history by relating her own version of events: “as I mused, the portrait of my own master seemed to change from its usually kind and placid expression to one of wrath and gloom” (17). Comforted by the shadows of the linden tree as they fall “broader and deeper” around her until they “wrapped all in gloom,” Hannah is emboldened to “think and speculate” about freedom, her destiny, and her ability to transcend the narrow limits prescribed her by slavery; she imagines her living presence in a past where it had been almost completely erased (16-17). Hannah strips the paintings of their narrative power, viewing the portraits of her master’s family as merely flat, artistic renderings that “could not enforce drudgery, or condemn me on account of my color to a life of servitude” (17). She redefines herself as their equal “companion,” not their chattel (17). Unlike Douglass, Crafts does not depict written literacy as the driving force enabling her protagonist’s mental liberation from domination; Hannah learns to read quite early on and, like Linda Brent who suffers Mr. Flint’s aggressively sexual notes, Hannah’s literacy is frequently used against her. Instead Hannah marks the encounter with the potent, generative, and silent shadows of the linden tree as the moment where she entered a “new world of thoughts, feelings, and sentiments” (17); the tree is a force representing both the hidden stories of the past and future prophecies to come. 93 Crafts’s representation of silence as a powerful, uncanny sound is especially important when considered in conjunction with the tendency of antebellum slave owners to represent the soundscape of the southern plantation as a space of nature, quiet, and peacefulness, a phenomenon examined by Mark M. Smith in Listening to Nineteenth Century America (2001). “For the most part,” argues Smith, “slaveholders imagined themselves custodians of a seemingly tranquil society where calm reigned and harmony was heard” (20). In “Soniferous Gardens,” he uses newspaper articles, diaries, planters’ journals, and travel writing to show both the construction and utility of the image of an unchanging and halcyon southern silence as a marker of power. Slave narratives like Douglass’s punctured this constructed plantation tranquility with the sounds of the horrific screams of human anguish that white southerners deliberately omitted. Crafts’s narrative both represents these screams and metaphorically embeds them within the seemingly pastoral landscape itself. Through the uncanny image of the silence sounded and embodied by the shadow of the Linden tree—whose roots, she notes, are “manured with human blood” (20)—Crafts makes the familiar image of antebellum pastoral quietude strange, depicting it as the suffocating silence of held breath and withheld stories. The silence is simultaneously foreboding for those who wish to perpetuate it and fecund for those who wish to unearth its buried, bloody roots. While the threatening silence established in the opening chapter pervades the entirety of Crafts’s text, the most prominent sonic signature of the linden tree is the 94 creaking and groaning of its branches swaying in the wind, an aural image Craft uses as both a mnemonic and a metonym for slavery. Crafts replicates the sound of the creaking branches several times in flashbacks and imagined sequences, indicating that it serves a primary and important role in Hannah’s construction of personal and cultural memory within the text. Interestingly, most of Crafts’s description of the tree itself is aural, other than the linden’s “huge branches.” Its visual appearance and dimensions are taken-for-granted, suggestive of its given role on the plantation— called “Lindendale”—as a sign of the wealth, power, legal legitimacy, and longevity of the white family’s reign there. 25 Intended to function as a type of family tree, it was “planted by Sir Clifford,” and, much like the family’s wealth and dominance, “had grown exceedingly under his management” (20). Immediately after describing the “official” narrative of the linden, Crafts goes on to reveal an alternate story of its history and symbolism on the plantation, as slaves remember and retell how “the linden was chosen as the scene where the tortures and punishments were inflicted” by Sir Clifford (20). Much like the “official” portraits that line Lindendale’s halls and completely conceal the history of the black families who lived there and generated the white family’s wealth, the visual presence of the towering green tree obscures the memory of the horrors that occurred there, the blood having long sunk into its roots. However, the creaking, groaning sound of the tree—and the layers of meaning placed on that sound by its listeners—challenges the official history of 95 Lindendale by representing the unofficial, repressed history of the murder of a woman named Rose. Like Douglass’s representation of Aunt Hester’s torture, Crafts’s retelling of Rose’s horrific death demarcates power relationships through divergent listening experiences. Within the story, recounted in flashback by Hannah, there are several “listening ears” represented: those of the slave master, slave mistress, master’s young son, and Rose herself. First, Hannah describes the willfully calloused ears of the obdurate slave master, Sir Clifford, who planted the linden tree and designated it as the site of torture and punishment. The roots of his power at Lindendale are in fact dependent on the subjection and bloody violence that he administers there: On such occasions, Sir Clifford sitting at the windows of his drawing room, within full sight and hearing of [the slaves’] agonies would drink wine, or coolly discuss the politics of the day with some acquaintance, pausing perhaps in the midst of a sentence to give directions to his executioner, or some mitigation of the torture only to prolong it (21). What Crafts describes here is a carefully calculated performance of power; Sir Clifford makes a dramatic show of his spectatorship that clearly informs his audience—the slaves as well as the anonymous peer “acquaintance”—that he is in control of his emotions and the slaves on the plantation. He orchestrates the sounds of subjection for his own ears, casually “pausing perhaps in the midst of a sentence” to arrange the torture. The sounds quite literally become background music for his ears. It is important that Crafts uses “hearing” here rather than listening, suggesting the slave master’s deliberate choice not to listen, his purposefully “cool” 96 conversation represses listening and makes a show of the fact that he has severed the link between sound and emotion. His ears reframe the sounds as signs of his power and control rather than evidence of human suffering. While he hears the “agonies” of torture as the sounds that make him, he refuses to interpret them as the sounds that will ultimately break him. While Crafts depicts the slave master as a “hard-hearted man [that] was obdurate to all” (24)—language very similar to Douglass’s characterization of Mr. Flint—she represents the white slave mistress as slightly more open to the emotional power of Rose’s screams. When Rose and her dog are first gibbeted to the tree, the mistress “besought [Sir Clifford] with tears and prayers to forgive the old woman in consideration of her great age, her faithful services, and her undying affection for the little animal” (24). This is congruent with nineteenth century gender roles: women were viewed as household repositories of emotion and sympathy. However, the mistress’s empathy is still limited. Although the screams have penetrated her heart, they activate fear of guilt rather than convictions of justice. When she begs her husband to “put [them] to death at once,” her primary impetus is not to end the suffering of the dying woman, but rather to repress her screams—Rose’s narration of the pain and injustice the Cliffords have inflicted on her. Like Lady MacBeth driven mad by the invisible blood on her hands, Lady Clifford fears that the “sight of their agonies and the noise of their groans would haunt her to her dying day” (24). Far from awakening her to the evils of the slave system, the sounds of the dying woman 97 make her temporarily aware of her own culpability and guilt, which she must suppress. Rose’s screams—which last for five horrific days—bring about divergent interpretations of the sound within the white household. Sir Clifford’s “listening ear” hears his own power being challenged and (re)enforced. Lady Clifford hears her own guilt as a faithful elderly slave is punished too harshly. Their son listens, horrified at the “barbarous treatment of his kind old nurse” (25). In listening to the screams, each of these complicit characters—no matter their level of empathy—fails to hear Rose’s fundamental humanity. Even though Lady Clifford and her son are emotionally moved to act, they judge and value Rose’s existence almost entirely in relation to themselves. Pointing out these differences de-naturalizes the act of listening, exposing it as racially charged and power-laden. Within the flashback, only Rose’s “listening ear” discerns the humanity in her screams. One of the main differences between this scene and Douglass’s representation of Aunt Hester is that Crafts represents Rose as a speaker as well as a listener: It was enough, they said, to have melted a heart of stone to hear her talk to that affectionate and equally tortured favorite [Rose’s dog] so long as she retained the power of speech, as if she sought by such demonstrations of tenderness to soothe her own misery and mitigate his sufferings. How she seemed to consider him a being who could know; and think and reason, and as such assured him of her undying love and regard (23). Unlike Douglass, it is not tears and screams that fail to melt the Master’s obdurate “heart of stone,” but rather Rose’s “power of speech” and her “demonstrations of 98 tenderness” toward her dog, an utterly stark contrast to her treatment at the hands of the whites of Lindendale. The dog is a living memorial of her youngest daughter, sold to Alabama by Sir Clifford, and, as Hannah describes, “the only earthly thing that regarded her with fondness, or to whose comfort her existence was essential” (22). Rose’s relationship with the dog has enabled her to imagine herself a human subject rather than an enslaved object. In listening to the sound of her own voice comforting and humanizing the animal—“consider[ing] him a being who could know; and think and reason”—she audibly resists the subject position of slave during the ultimate visual display of her o/abject status. Rose’s final, enduring act of resistance permanently alters the listening practices of the whites on the plantation. With her dying breath—a “deep sepulchral tone”—Rose curses Lindendale, linking her death wails directly to the sound of the linden’s branches. “When death, or sickness, or misfortune is to befall the family,” Rose shouts, “ye may listen for ye will assuredly hear the creaking of its limbs” (25). Rose’s curse instills fear and dread in the “listening ears” of Lindendale’s white owners, while presenting a counternarrative of resistance to the “listening ears” of their slaves; she effectively re-stories Lindendale’s soundscape with the memory of her murder. The linden’s creak disrupts any view of the plantation as pastoral and it functions as a persistent reminder of slavery’s brutality and cruel inequality throughout the novel. The sound lives in Hannah’s memory long after she leaves 99 Lindendale; while a fugitive, she even imagines her former master committing suicide to the creak of the branches underneath his window. ::: Hannah’s ability to hear alternate truths beneath the oppressive silences of Lindendale is one facet of the “watching listening attitude” that she cultivates in order to survive and resist slavery. Hannah’s ever-vigilant orientation to the world establishes an alternate epistemology and simultaneously explores its double-edge. Crafts represents slavery as a continuous feedback loop between taxed senses and a heightened intellectual state of vigilance, anticipation, and interpretation. Heightening one’s “watching listening attitude” is essential for survival within slavery—as Crafts illustrates with depictions of the dangers faced by fugitives as well as the brisk trade of information between slaves—but such vigilance frequently taxes Hannah’s spirit: But those who think that the greatest evils of physical suffering possess no just or rational ideas of human nature. The soul, the immortal soul must ever long and yearn for a thousand things inseparable to liberty. Then, too, the fear, the apprehension, the dread and deep anxiety always attending that condition in greater or lesser degree. There can be no certainty, no abiding confidence in the possession of any good thing (94). Part of the subtle, everyday subjection of slavery is being stuck in a mode of constant awareness, interpretation and “deep anxiety” that cripples the spirit and attempts to subsume all personal desire; a slave’s continued existence often depends upon noting even the minutest foreshocks that signal danger and perpetually modulating one’s self accordingly. “Need I describe how painfully awake we were,” Crafts’s 100 protagonist articulates, “how we were sensitive to the smallest sound” (64). Far from a state of being insensible or overly sensual, as dominant rhetoric likening slaves to animals often depicted, Hannah is stuck in a mode of constant awareness, apprehension, and uncertainty. One key aural distinction Crafts draws between slave and free is the ability to make random, unselfconscious sound. After Hannah and her former mistress are captured as runaways, they are imprisoned within a country cottage. Trapped in a dismal upstairs room, they listen to the sounds of mobility below: “we were likewise sensible of more noise in general. There was more opening and shutting of doors, more ascending and descending stairs, and more of everything accompanying the presence of free life” (95). The free residents of the cottage do not have to modulate or silence themselves according to evade detection, orchestration, and misinterpretation by their master’s “listening ears”; these anonymous strangers announce their presence with heavy footfalls, slamming doors, and a mélange of arbitrary sounds. To the ear of Hannah and her mistress, listening through the walls of their prison and across the sonic color-line, “free life” sounds like the haphazard, unsystematic “noise” of one’s desire. Crafts further amplifies the link between listening, desire, and subject formation at the close of the text; it is through listening that Hannah reconstitutes a self fragmented by the epistemological structures of slavery. Upon running away for the second time, Hannah meets a fellow fugitive named Jacob and his ailing sister, 101 who dies of a fever shortly after they begin traveling together. Even though she has only known him a short time, Hannah begins to trust Jacob. On the second evening of their journey, Hannah keeps a vigil beside his sister’s corpse while Jacob leaves the cave to forage for food. When he does not return, Hannah immediately fears his betrayal, death, or capture. The expressive soundscape full of “trees shuddering in the wind” (221) and “the dismal howling of wolves” (222) reflects and heightens her growing dread. His seeming abandonment—along with the death of his sister— make Hannah feel more alone than she ever has, causing her to speculate that she herself is dead: I was unable to move. I could not shriek, but remained spell-bound under the hedious [sic] benumbing influence of a present embodied death. Then it seemed that some one was calling me. I knew the voice to be Jacob’s, and strove to answer, but my tongue seemed palsied and my lips immovable (222). Sociologist Orlando Patterson describes the sensation of “present embodied death” as “social death,” a liminal state of institutionalized marginalization that deprives the slave of any existence outside of the master (38). Having lost all of her human ties and fearing the worst, Hannah continues to feel the oppressive grip of slavery’s “benumbed” and “embodied death” upon her body and mind; she loses her mobility and is gripped with aphasia, the overwhelming feeling of being unable to speak. The sound of Jacob’s voice calling her name is the only thing able to revive Hannah from the living death of her isolation, and I argue that the interplay between sound and listening in this scene represents the critical role of call-and-response 102 expressive patterns in slave life as a form of world-centering and self-fashioning. Music historian Ronald Radano describes the practice of call-and response—also called responsorial or dialogic singing— as both pervasive and iconic in slave culture and traces its roots to the activity of labor and the dynamic interchange of preacher and congregation in religious meetings. Pertinent to my reading of Crafts, Radano describes call-and-response as a momentary sonic reclamation of space and humanity by slaves (2003: 162). The call audibly articulates a feeling of “placelessness” and “groundlessness” (2003:163)—like the fugitive Jacob lost in the woods—and the response confirming the “comfort of belonging in situ” through sound (2003: 163)—like Hannah finding herself whole, alive, and reconnected with Jacob, even in a strange and hostile landscape. As her dreaming self “concentrat[es] all her energies” on the voice echoing though the woods, Hannah describes how she roused [herself] and listened, it was and listened, [sic] it was a human voice, and the shout or hallo was such as a person lost from his companions generally makes to discover their locality. [Her] previous fears were for the moment forgotten. [She] crept to the door of the hut and answered” (222, 223). While the repetition of “and listened” may perhaps be an error on the original unpublished handwritten manuscript, it still speaks to the importance of this act in the narrative. The use of “listening” also points to the active “desire to establish meaning” rather than merely the experience of sensation or the passive notice that she gave to the voice in her dream (Rodeway 89). Still wrapped in darkness, Hannah focuses her “listening ear” on the sound of the human voice. While dreaming, she 103 was certain that the voice belonged to Jacob; upon waking she is only sure that the voice is lost and in need of assistance. Her desire to help enables her to come to her own voice—Hannah responds to Jacob’s call—and she is rewarded with the sound of her name echoing back to her. “The sound reverberated in a thousand echoes throughout the woods,” Crafts describes, “it was still very dark, but the day-star was just rising; and the sky was almost clear” (223). Their voices, calling one after the other, carve mutual human space out of the vast darkness. Because “auditory perspective is not linear but multidirectional” (Rodaway 92), the sound envelops the bodies; they form two poles around which the “thousand echoes” reverberate. 26 At this moment—as their voices call to and constitute each other in the darkness— Hannah and Jacob are at the center of their world. The morning image that follows is both one of hope—the dark night they have both endured is lifting and a new day is on the rise—and one of symbolic enlightenment (re)enacted by listening rather than looking. Although it is “still very dark,” both Hannah and Jacob can now see themselves and each other with renewed, “almost clear” internal vision. 27 Hannah and Jacob continue the process of seeking and finding each other by interweaving their voices in a responsorial pattern similar to the form of slave spirituals, perhaps not in the word, but in the sound and the intent: “The shout was repeated again and again; each time I answered it and each time it came nearer and nearer” (223). In this scene, Crafts portrays call and response as a form of echo- location; through the interchange of sounding and listening, each person is able to 104 sound out the other while simultaneously hearing one’s self through and in relation to another. 28 Hannah recalls how she “heard hurrying footsteps, a crackling in the bushes and under wood, and shortly discerned the figure of a man. It was Jacob. He had strayed farther than he designed to” (223). In that first split second, Hannah hears, views, and recognizes “the figure of a man,” first and foremost, not a slave, not a runaway, not even “Jacob.” The shared space of desire Hannah and Jacob create through the call and response —the desire to recognize and be recognized— dynamically shifts and collapses with each repetition of the shout until the two stand re-constituted in each other’s presence. The language Crafts uses to represent the exchange between Hannah and Jacob is similar to Douglass’s famous description of the sorrow songs in his Narrative, particularly the image of the sound echoing off the dense canopy of the forest. However, Douglass asks his largely white readership to place themselves at the center of his scene in order to analyze it, Crafts focuses instead on the sonic experience of those within the tangled woods of subjection, constructing potential white readers as eavesdroppers. While this scene can perhaps be read as a symbolic appeal to a kind of disembodiment—a separation of the human voice from the racially marked body of the slave—I contend Crafts’s emphasis on listening actually interrogates visual ways of experiencing, knowing, and categorizing the world. As Paul Rodeway describes in Sensuous Geographies, “Acoustic space is quite different from visual space. ‘Sound places one within a world’ (Hull 1990:62). Sight, by contrast, sets a world, 105 as an object or series of objects, in front of the eye” (102). Crafts’s representation of the “listening ear” shows how Hannah and Jacob use sound to find themselves within a hostile world where the white power structure defines them as “an object. . .in front of the eye” (108). While sound can sometimes appear disembodied, the act of listening is always highly embodied; in fact, echoes and reverberations are physical waves sensed throughout the entire body, not just the ear. Perhaps their momentary sonic interchange can be considered something akin to freedom, as “one never possesses a sound, one never has it within one’s power the way one possesses sight.” (Hull quoted in Rodeway 108). Like Hannah and Jacob, sounds can sometimes be fugitive. ::: By representing multiple and divergent “listening ears,” Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs, and Crafts provide readers with the aural tools to hear the more intimate workings of white hegemony. The slave narrative exemplifies the importance of listening as a “realm wherein the unseeable becomes known and the unwatchable becomes imagined” (Brophy 54). Through the process of unpacking the sounds of audio-terror that permeate slave narratives—as well as how they are being heard and by whom—listening emerges as far from a passive, universal given, but rather is represented as a highly contextualized process of interpretation, meaning making, and racialization. By identifying and excavating the trope of the “listening ear” within early African American cultural production, this chapter provokes a deeper 106 understanding of American racial formation, and allows a critical and more nuanced (re)imagining of the historical workings of white power and supremacy through the senses in both slavery and segregation. 1 While Sterne’s project in The Audible Past (2003) is precisely to trace this genealogy and present “ a history of techniques of listening in modernity,” he does not go beyond the immediate context of late nineteenth-century white, American “middle-class” scientific and popular cultures in order to do this. This chapter provides an important corrective to his argument, which almost completely ignores race. 2 In Audio-Vision, Chion describes the sense of listening as inextricable from vision but qualitatively different from it as well. “Due to natural factors of which we are all aware—the absence of anything like eyelids for the ears, the omnidirectionality of hearing, and the physical nature of sound—but also owing to any real aural training in our culture, this ‘imposed-to-hear’ makes it exceedingly difficult to select or cut things out” (33). Hillel Schwartz’s “The Indefensible Ear: A History” (2004), examines how the ear has been considered “a vulnerable organ of perception: always in operation, unreflectingly accumulative, and naively open to even the most harmful of loud, high, or percussive sound” throughout Western cultural history (487). 3 I use deafness as a metaphor sparingly throughout this dissertation, in acknowledgment of the violence that this metaphor performs in erasing the experiences of those who are physically deaf or hard-of-hearing. While my dissertation does focus on sound and listening, I do not wish to propagate audism by taking the hearing body for granted. I do, however, examine the use of “deaf” as a common cultural metaphor describing inattention or unwillingness to hear, particularly in this chapter. 4 I take the notion of “cultural work” from Jane Tompkin’s Sensational Designs (1986), where she describes how literature performs a “certain kind of cultural work within a specific historical situation. . . . their plots and characters as providing society with a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality which the authors and their readers shared, dramatizing its conflicts and recommending solutions” (200). 5 Mark M. Smith’s Listening to the Nineteenth Century (2003) and Shane White and Graham White’s The Sounds of Slavery (2005) are helpful as comprehensive renderings of slavery’s soundscape. It is my goal here to present a more targeted examination of the antebellum soundscape specifically focused on the dynamics of listening. For a discussion of how African American music came to be labeled as a “black” sound by whites, see “First Truth, Second Hearing” in Ronald Radano’s Lying up a Nation (2003). 6 Valerie Smith’s treatment of autobiography as “process rather than genre” in Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (1987) is also helpful in re-considering literacy, as she interrogates the frequent connection drawn between freedom, self-making, and written literacy, imagining that the “unlettered person who can manipulate the meanings and nuances of the spoken word might also be considered literate” (4). I push Smith’s argument by considering how slave narrators depicted the role of sound and listening in their respective self-fashionings. 107 7 “Aural literacy” is not my term—it comes from the discipline of education, where it is used to describe one of the diverse learning styles that students bring to the classroom besides text-based skills—although I am the first to use it in conjunction with African American literature. This move bears relation to Zora Neale Hurston’s description of blacks as “Lords of Sound”(1) in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1939) that provides the theoretical framework for Shane and White and Graham White’s historical discussion of antebellum African American musical and spoken culture in The Sounds of Slavery (2005). Discussions of listening in White and White’s study, however, focus almost exclusively on how black cultural production sounded to “outsider” white ears of Southern slavemasters and Northern travel writers, journalists, and abolitionists. 8 Critics have examined this moment as a “primal scene” because it intertwines knowledge with traumatic sex/violence (Moten: 2003), enacts a particular type of spectacular representation of African American bodies (Hartman: 2001), and functions as a moment of conversion (McBride: 2001); however, none of them directly implicate the role of the listener in this process. Film Critic Elisabeth Weis suggests that any discussion of the Freudian primal scene must include listening, as “Freud, having first postulated the importance of children’s watching their parents make love, later decided that it was more likely to have been a case of the children overhearing their parents make love. He theorized that they projected their own fantasies onto this violent-sounding business” (82). 9 And indeed, appears in a range of forms in many other texts including Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces (1899), Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932), Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1944), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Ann Petry’s “The Witness” (1971), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1974). 10 What Douglass leaves unsaid about the master’s sexual access to Aunt Hester’s body is not necessarily unable to be heard. Douglass, like Harriet Jacobs (whom I will discuss in a moment), is limited in his own way by the conventions of sentimental literature and the demands of the white publishing industry. We see this in the Aunt Hester scene in particular, when he censors the “horrid oaths” of the slavemaster as “d-----d b----h” (263). These aural silences increase attention to the actual obscenity being perpetrated in the kitchen—the slave master’s violence—which Douglass quite ironically is able relay in graphic detail to his pious Christian abolitionist audience. This representation also implicates nineteenth-century white American literary culture where, as Richard Yarborough argues, the “popularity of antebellum slave narratives was likely due in large measure to the relatively high quotient of violence and sex (explicit and implicit) that they contained” (34). I think that the (easily filled) aural gaps of “d-----d b----h” also serve as cues to prick up readers’ ears to what Douglass cannot explicitly represent, the lust of the slave master for Hester, which is expressed primarily through the sound of her scream. 11 Conductor Daniel Barenboim’s description of the relationship between an orchestra leader and his musicians in Parallels and Paradoxes resonates in an interesting way with this passage from Douglass: “When one speaks about the feeling of power in the actual act of making music, the conductor has to understand what the nature of sound is: that he can change everything around it, but the actual sound in the end is made by the musicians. In an ideal situation, this will also keep the conductor’s ego within bounds; and it will also give the individual musician in the orchestra the feeling that he’s not just an instrument for somebody else’s feeling of power or determination” (71). 12 My reading of the aural image of the moan as a narrative strategy is underscored both by Dwight McBride’s reading of Narrative, in which he describes the “self-consciousness with which [Douglass] understands, profiles, and addresses the reader” (158) and Douglass’s own revision of the scene for his autobiography My Bondage, My Freedom (1855). In the expanded retelling, Douglass does directly quote Aunt Hester, an important moment which Mullen’s analysis does not mention: “Each 108 blow, vigorously laid on, brought screams as well as blood. ‘Have mercy; Oh! have mercy” she cried; “I won’t do so no more.” (38). These words might have worked to limit meaning and obscure the sexual nature of Aunt Hester’s punishment in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, where Douglass was not able to speak freely of it. In My Bondage, My Freedom, Douglass explains Aunt Hester’s precarious situation in much more detail—and her beating in much less—assuming what Eric A. Goldman calls a “more meditative than powerfully oratorical tone” (277). 13 In her writing on the role of sound and memory in cultural representations of the Holocaust, Leslie Morris describes the “charge of unspeakability [as] the sound heard within critical studies on the Holocaust. . .it is a sound that has been repeated compulsively, a paradoxical linguistic formation that the Holocaust lies beyond language and the speakable” (4). This phenomenon seems to have a powerful analogue in African American literary representations of slavery, which filled both with “unspeakable things unspoken” and “unspeakable thing[s] spoken at last” (Morrison 387). 14 Although he does not mention listening specifically, McBride suggests that Douglass’s testimony has been working readers up to this point of identification from the beginning of the text, especially through his representation of his childhood as free from knowledge of slavery’s evils: “In this way, the Northern reader is identified in this rhetorical economy with the innocent child Douglass, and through Douglass’s testimony, may also have a primal scene of a sort that might lead to another kind of conversion, from spectator to abolitionist” (161). The listening ear, I argue, is the point of entry for this potential conversion. 15 “Point Of audition” is a filmmaking term that comes from the work of Michel Chion, namely AudioVision: Sound on Screen (1994). It is intended here as the audio-analogue to the typical literary term “point of view,” which typically describes whose perspective—or “eyes” that we view a story through. 16 In The Voice in Cinema, Chion identifies this moment as the “screaming point,” and argues that while the scream “occupies a point in time but has no duration within. It suspends the time of its possible duration; it’s a rip in the fabric of time” (77). 17 Moten argues that it is not coincidence that prompts Douglass to analyze the sound of the slave song just a few short pages after detailing Aunt Hester’s brutalization. Whereas Hartman views these two passages as separate entities—one as ultimate debasement and the other as potentially insurgent—Moten sees them as inextricably intertwined as “passionate utterance and response” (21). Moten fundamentally disagrees with Hartman’s refusal to (re)read Aunt Hester’s beating, arguing that suppression of the brutal spectacle of Aunt Hester’s beating is impossible, as it is “reproduced in every scene of subjection [her] book goes on to read” from whiskey-fueled Christmas reels to Sambo’s laughter on the minstrel stage (4). The “sobbing” of the auction block is present within and inseparable from the “fiddling” for one’s master. 18 Mikhail Bakhtin describes double-voiced discourse as speech that “serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions” (324). Gates signifies on Bakhtin in The Signifying Monkey (110-113), using the concept of double-voiced discourse to describe how African American cultural producers “created their own vernacular structures and relished in the double play that these forms bore to white forms” (xxiv). 19 Jon Cruz describes Douglass call to a new kind of hearing as “ethnosympathy” in Culture on the Margins and provocatively argues that it formed the hermeneutic roots of modern American cultural interpretation (1999). My argument is also indebted to Stepto, who asserts in his seminal essay “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives,” that “distrust is not so much a subject as a 109 basis for specific narrative plottings and rhetorical strategies” and claims that that storytelling frameworks are used within African American literature to restructure and reform its white readership while simultaneously telling them off (303). 20 Like Jean Fagin Yellin, I believe it is important to make the distinction between Linda Brent “black fugitive slave narrator” and Harriet Jacobs “black fugitive slave author” (xxxiii). When I refer to the textual personae, I use Brent. When making reference to the writing of the narrative and development of Brent as character, I use Jacobs. 21 The unpublished handwritten manuscript of The Bondswoman’s Narrative was purchased by Henry Louis Gates Jr., at the annual Swann Galleries Auction. Before Gates, the document had belonged to Dorothy Porter Wesley, historian and librarian at Howard University. Although scholars have largely agreed that The Bondswoman’s Narrative is “ostensibly the only known novel written by an escaped slave” (Nickell 406), there is still considerable debate about the identity of Hannah Crafts. See Gates and Hollis Robbins’s recent edited volume In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on the Bondswoman’s Narrative (2004) for an extended conversation about the controversy involving the text. 22 It is actually this happy ending—so different from Douglass and a world away from Jacobs—that has provided critics with a strong case for reading Crafts’s text as imaginative fiction. William Andrews argues that the ending functions as a kind of literary resistance that “challenge[s] the notion that an African American woman had no business expecting or even hoping for such fulfillment, even in fiction” (40). 23 Crafts further deconstructs the power of white femininity when she describes how, when Mrs. Wheeler’s skin turns black from the powder, the sound of her voice changes as well, having temporarily lost the tone of easy command connected to her identity as a white woman. After being treated as a black woman all day, she arrives home with a voice “not in the least languid” and inquires, “are you all gone mad?” in a “not now languid” voice (166). 24 I borrow the term “re-story” from Gary Nabhan and Neil Campbell, who developed it in reference to contemporary Western American literature. While I do not want to erase the specificity of their concept, I believe that its major tenets are at work in Crafts’s narrative, which depicts Hannah attempting to layer African American histories, memories, and counternarratives on the contested landscape of the Southern plantation, a space both physically and narratively dominated by whites. “Re-storying” has three main tenets that I would like to extend into this conversation: (a) the sense of creating new stories that “counter and displace the mythic ones” that have long framed the dominant understanding, (b) the sense of restoring, the power of stories to heal, inspire, and regenerate communities, and (c), the sense of remapping spaces depicted as monoracial or monocultural, of articulating them as sites where cultures “collide, fuse, intermingle and interrelate” (29). 25 I have some theories about why Crafts chose a linden to bear the symbolic weight it does within her narrative. Outside of being a fairly common tree in the South—often called “lime tree” because of its scent in springtime—it has a special resonance in European mythology (particularly eastern countries like Germany, Poland, and Slovakia, of which it is the national symbol). What I find particularly illuminating is that she chose to use the more archaic European name “Linden,” rather than “basswood,” which the tree is normally called in the United States. This supports a connection with the powerful symbolic and mythological associations that many European cultures drew between the linden and powerful women and the linden and justice, two themes that emerge clearly in Crafts’s depiction of the symbol. In Germany and Poland the tree was first linked to Freya, wife of Woden and the guardian of life and goddess of fortune, love and truth and later linked to Mary upon the 110 spread of Christianity in the region. These themes were readdressed in Hans Christian Anderson’s popular story “The Elf of the Rose,” published in the United States in 1839. The story concerns the concealed murder of an innocent man underneath a linden tree and the eventual delivery of justice for the crime by an elf—someone so small as to be invisible, yet able to move the world. The linden tree is the site of the murder of an innocent woman in Crafts’s text—named Rose—and its sound foreshadows the eventual doom of the family at Lindendale. I am curious to know if this book was found in John Hill Wheeler’s library catalogue, partially listed in the appendix to the 2002 edition of The Bondswoman’s Narrative and I plan to pursue the connection between these two pieces in future research. 26 While the echo is a recurrent aural image in The Bondswoman’s Narrative, this is the first and only time that Crafts uses it to represent a positive or generative feeling. Heretofore, the echo has primarily represented haunting, fear, and apprehension. For example, Hannah first realizes her mistress is harboring a deep secret by the way she perpetually listens for the echoes of her husband’s footsteps. Later on in the text, after Hannah and her former mistress are captured and jailed as runaways, they despair at the heavy door that closed on them with “so many echoes I half fancied that all the doors in the house were shutting” (93). Here, Crafts uses the aural image of the echo to connect the literal with the metaphoric depths of the women’s entrapment. Finally, just moments before hearing Jacob’s voice, Hannah hears her own fear in the form of “mutterings, chatterings, and sounds of fearful import [that] echoed through the gloom” (222). 27 This scene signifies on Plato’s cave, recasting the outcome and contesting the visual bias of Western notions of enlightenment. As Bruce Smith argues in “Tuning Into London c. 1600,” “It is by light, not echo, that Plato’s thinker finds his way out of the cave” (127). 28 In Sensuous Geographies, Paul Rodaway describes echo-location in the context of blindness, as the way in which blind people move confidently through space “using the environmental fashioning of sound to ‘read’ the structure of the environment in which that sound occurs—whether it is [through] their own footsteps or voice, or some other sound source” (106). 111 CHAPTER TWO “Hunger in those Sounds”: Apprehending the Sonic Color-line in Early Richard Wright “The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew.” —Richard Wright, Black Boy “The ideological truth of the sound track covers that excess which escapes the eye.” —Mary Ann Doane, “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing” “The freeze-framed Simi Valley videotape, stripped of a soundtrack in which falling blows and bystanders’ screams are audible, disallows the possibility that heard terror could imprint itself on the jury’s mind.” —Elizabeth Alexander, “Can You be BLACK and Look at This?” “I agreed to supply what I have always thought of as a soundtrack to these pictures, which, when viewed together, make up America’s first disaster movie.” —Hilton Als, “GWTW,” written to accompany Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America The relationship between sound and vision is complex and politically charged, especially when issues of race and representation are at stake. Richard Wright’s statement is usually read as a testament of the power of the visual in the white supremacist regime of Jim Crow (Hale: 1998, Apel: 2004), which utilized violent spectacles like lynching as social control. 1 Because the dominant U.S. social structure in the early twentieth century will punish someone like Wright for looking directly at white violence, he fearfully imagines that the brutality he knows must be merely a prelude to even worse violence hidden from view. However, this reading is predicated upon two assumptions that I argue Wright’s literary work actually contests: first that notions of race are solely ocular, and second, that white violence 112 must be seen to be experienced or believed. Wright’s claim that violence “not seen” terrifies him more than “that which he knew” produces a gap between seeing and knowing. It is within this interpretive space that sound maneuvers, shaping what is seen and leaving audible traces testifying to what remains invisible. Rather than constructing vision as a totalizing force, Wright’s statement points out its epistemological gaps and makes a claim for the importance of sound and listening as a critical modality through which the structures of racist violence are (re)produced, apprehended, and resisted. Precisely because racism has been constructed as a “discourse of power that thinks with the eyes” (Bull and Back 14) by a culture driven by an “overdetermined politics of looking”(Moten 191), the sense of sound has served as a repository of apprehension rendered invisible by ocularcentric systems of comprehension. While apprehension and comprehension both mean to “grasp or seize with the mind” (OED), they are not interchangeable terms. The prefix “com-” describes a joining together, while “ap-” describes a state of in-betweeness, of perpetually being “before” or going “toward, to, through.” Comprehension, therefore, is used to describe mastery and totality—the privileged knowledge of the panorama and the overview—and is not surprisingly more frequently associated with sight (OED). Apprehension, on the other hand, defines an epistemology on the move, a shifting knowledge of survival built upon anticipation, expectation, and readiness. However, the knowledge of apprehension is dangerously double-edged; it can lead to an almost 113 carcereal paralysis— to “apprehend” means to arrest or detain—and the term also denotes fear and anxiety, such as Wright’s epigraph conveys. Grouped together, the three epigraphs I chose to accompany Wright’s passage also make a compelling argument for the performative power of the “not seen”—in the form of an audible “sound track”—to convey a truth denied, hidden, or disavowed by visual structures of meaning. I use the “soundtrack” here both as a literal referent to the track accompanying visual cinematic display, which is composed of voice, music, and ambient sound, and as a metaphoric term that posits the sense of sound as autonomous from sight even as it is inextricably intertwined with it. While vision appears to operate as the “prime medium of official regulation, commercial enthrallment, and masculine hegemony” in the United States (Bailey 194-95), Mary Anne Doane argues that there is still “excess which escapes the eye” which must be “covered” by a soundtrack. I want to highlight the multiplicity of meanings of “cover” in Doane’s formulation; a soundtrack can potentially operate in collusion with visual regimes of truth—concealing the fact that vision is not omnipotent—even as it simultaneously functions to bridge the gap between seeing and knowing and to protect the “excess” knowledge of the “not seen” from visual regimes that would deny its validity. Even more significant to my examination of Richard Wright, the epigraphs from Elizabeth Alexander and Hilton Als specifically reference the importance of a soundtrack in representing historical memory of racist violence. Alexander describes 114 the stilled video of Rodney King being beaten by four LAPD officers as deliberately “stripped of a soundtrack” that might have imprinted “heard terror” on the mind of a jury in a way that a mute(d) picture could never do. By connecting the video to the 1955 photos of Emmett Till’s lynched body, Alexander’s work invites us to imagine visual representations of lynching—postcards, family photos, newspaper reprints, or artistic renderings—as also “stripped of a soundtrack.” Cultural critics and historians speak of lynching almost exclusively as a visual discourse (Weigman: 1996, Allen: 2000, Apel: 2004, Markovitz: 2004, Apel: 2006, Carby: 2006, Reighford: 2006), but without considering how or why it was constructed as one. Photographs of lynchings proliferated, sound recordings did not. 2 Mute(d) photographs of lynching, then, conceal as much if not more than they reveal. The grinning white spectators photographed in their Sunday best gathered around the bodies of black men they had tortured and killed were listeners as well as lookers. 3 Alexander’s statement suggests that in order for these images to circulate as documentary evidence of white supremacy and righteousness to spectators outside the immediate frame, any audible evidence of racial terror had to be “stripped” away. Als’s remarks—written in response to the circulation of lynching photographs in James Allen’s Without Sanctuary exhibit catalogue (2000)—shows how the desire for a “soundtrack to these pictures” still resonates. The truth of “America’s first disaster movie” remains lost, partial, and fragmented without the (re)imposition of its soundtrack. 115 This chapter examines the early fiction of Richard Wright as a literary reckoning with the “soundtrack” of lynching and racial violence and an exploration of the role of the “listening ear” in apprehending race and racial terror during the height of Jim Crow in the late 1930s. I argue that Wright uses aural imagery as a technique to disrupt the dominance of vision and voyeurism in representations of lynching and intervene in the gap between what (white) America “sees” and “knows” about racial violence. Using the modality of sound, he effectively re- frames lynching through the “listening ears” of the young black males that appear and reappear in his work between 1936 and 1940. However, in offering listening as an epistemological point of entry to the psychological impact of racial violence, Wright’s work also calls attention to the audibility of race itself, in other words, the “sonic color-line.” The “sonic color-line” functions as an interpretive site where racial difference is produced and policed through the ear. For whites, the “sonic color-line” protects and preserves the logic of white supremacy; for blacks, it sounds out the boundaries that supremacist thought places on freedom, identity, and mobility. Sounds that are exponentially amplified for and by those within the “sonic color-line” may simultaneously be dismissed, misunderstood, ignored, silenced, or devalued by those outside it. While the “soundtrack” of lynching and other forms of racial violence has the potential to speak an audible truth, there is no guarantee how it will be heard or by whom. 116 To examine the role of listening in Wright’s early work, I concentrate specifically on three coming-of-age texts, all written between 1936 and 1940: “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” (1937/1939), “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1936/1938) and Native Son (1940). While these narratives are diverse in terms of genre—an essay, a short story, and a novel respectively—they all utilize extensive aural imagery to depict young male characters’ apprehension of their subjectivity within and through the brutalizing parameters of America’s racial regime. Certainly, as Abdul JanMohammed describes in his recent assessment of Wright’s oeuvre The Death- Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (2006), Wright’s early writing presents a collective meditation on—and an attempted exorcism of—fear (47). It is my contention that Wright’s fiction uses aural imagery as an aesthetic device to represent racial terror and the machinations of white supremacy in the 1930s that produced it. In “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” “Big Boy Leaves Home,” and Native Son Wright presents the “listening ear” as it moves across the “sonic color-line” and from rural Southern to urban Northern spaces. 4 Aural literacy has become more important rather than less in Wright’s depiction of 1930’s America and the “listening ear” functions simultaneously as a disciplining force, a conduit of terror, a tool of survival, and a purveyor of critical knowledge. Through literary representations of aural experience, Wright shows the fluidity of the racial regimes of power in the Jim Crow South and the segregated North; the “droning” bees of Big Boy’s rural soundscape have their sonic counterparts in the “droning” furnaces of 117 Bigger Thomas’s South Side Chicago. While the “forces of oppression are less visible” in the North (Griffin 98), Wright’s depiction of an urban soundscape riven with “sonic color-lines” shows that they are no less audible. To illustrate the contours of the “sonic color-line” within Wright’s work, I will first contextualize the aurality of “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” “Big Boy Leaves Home” and Native Son within Wright’s theorization of aural literacy, contemporary conversations about representing lynching in anti-lynching movements, and innovations in film sound in the 1930s that shifted the relationship between sound and the image in cinematic representation. Then, I will examine the “sonic color-line” in “Big Boy Leaves Home” and Native Son, focusing specifically on how Wright uses sound to express the gendered nature of white racial violence, the enactment of racial terror in both crude and subtle forms, and the construction of white supremacy as both extreme silence and overpowering noise in both texts. Far from being vision’s binary opposite, sound frequently appears to be visuality’s döppelganger in the construction of race and performance of racial oppression, its unacknowledged but ever-present “other” covering the gap between seeing and knowing. 118 Aural Literacy and Richard Wright “He was trusting the sound of his voice rather than the sense of his words to carry his meaning.” —Richard Wright, Native Son Aural literacy, and the often-painful process through which it is shaped, honed, and disciplined, is one of the central concerns of Wright’s early writing. Embedded in this epigraph from Native Son are textual echoes of Frederick Douglass’s famous assertion that the deepest meaning of slave songs was found “if not in the word, in the sound” (262). In 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Wright revisits antebellum black culture to examine how slaves wrested words from the lips of whites who wished to deny them language, and charged this meager hoarde of stolen sounds with all the emotions and longings we had; we proceeded to build our language in inflections of voice, through tonal variety, by hurried speech, in honeyed drawls. . .[until] they became our words, our language (40). Through the practice that Houston Baker would later describe as the “deformation of mastery” in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), Wright conveys how slaves claimed the white word by (re)shaping its aural texture, in essence drawing a sonic color-line that both expressed and sheltered “all the emotions and longings we had.” Through subtle changes in rhythm, cadence, and vocal grain, African Americans compelled hostile words to carry their linguistic identities under the strictures of slavery. For those within the circle, meaning and truth resided not in the form of the word, but in the “shape and color” of the sound (40). 119 Shaped simultaneously with these sonorous words, was the aurally literate “listening ear.” The listening practices of slaves detected subtleties of meaning through sounds produced on both sides of the color-line. On the one hand, they fostered an interpretive community of cultural insiders; after all, as Baker asserts, the “indigenous sound appears monstrous and deformed only to the intruder” (52). On the other hand, Wright describes how listening practices were connected to everyday survival on the plantation: “even when a white man asked us an innocent question, some unconscious part of us would listen closely, not only to the obvious words, but also to the intonations of voice that indicated what kind of answer he wanted” (41). In this way, the power relations of slavery could be heard in even the most mundane communication between masters and slaves, a phenomenon Hartman describes as an “elaborate micropenality” (125). To an aurally literate “listening ear” operating within the structures of white supremacy, there were no “innocent question[s]” or “obvious words,” be they everyday talk or the more formal lexicons of legal, economic, or religious discourse. Words merely provide a veneer of truth; one must “listen closely” to the real meaning hidden inside the sound. Aural literacy is both a strategy of survival—a method of comprehending what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls “doublevoiced discourse”(xxiii)—and a knowledge of apprehension operating between seeing and knowing, as ideologies of race and power continue to be heard in intimate and terrifying ways beyond what the eye sees. 120 Re-Presenting Lynching and Racial Violence in the 1930s “Pictures can fight!” —Angelo Herndon, Introduction to Struggle For Negro Rights Exhibition Catalogue “Could words be weapons?” —Richard Wright, Black Boy Wright’s decision to use words as weapons to combat lynching and racial violence— particularly his investment in textual representations of the sound of racial terror— can be better understood against the backdrop of a larger discussion about lynching in the 1930s, especially the role of visual imagery within anti-lynching movements. Since the development of portable photography, underground circulation of images of twisted, suffering black bodies functioned as a technology of vicious social control from which many whites took great voyeuristic pleasure. Photographs of spectacle lynchings, or “lynch carnivals” as they were described in the 1930s (Apel, “On Looking” 54), were intended as instructive scopic scenes that reached far beyond the immediate local mob to regional and national imagined communities who learned about these lynchings from newspapers, pamphlets, books, and postcards (Hale: 1998, Apel: 2004, Markovitz: 2004, Reighford: 2006, Carby: 2006). James Allen, curator of Without Sanctuary, describes the ubiquitous commodity of lynching images in the introductory panel to the exhibition: “Prints could be bought in drugstores, through the mail, or from vendors in town squares; discounts were given for bulk purchases. Newspapers, as well, sold the mayhem.” In response and opposition to this trade, anti-lynching activists had debated whether or not to utilize 121 photographs of lynching as anti-lynching statements since Ida B. Wells published a lynching photograph in her 1895 pamphlet A Red Record. 5 Could photographs taken by whites and circulated as evidence of their superiority and domination be effectively reframed as proof of the systemic violence whites used to produce and uphold their power? What was the most effective way to combat not only the violence of lynching, but also the violence of the photographic image? During their respective tenures as leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois (both of whom wrote extensively about lynching in fiction and essays) labored over decisions to republish intercepted photographs in anti-lynching material, especially as publication itself might have unleashed precisely the type of violence the NAACP was trying to curb (Goldsby 250-251). 6 While lynching had been in significant decline since the racial nadir of 1890s, lynching was once again on the rise in the 1930s—from ten in 1920 to 28 in 1933— fueled by the economic downturn of the Depression twinned with the increased presence of blacks in the workforce due to New Deal legislation. In 1931, the Communist Party decried the arrest, trial, and death sentences of the “Scottsboro Boys” as a “legal lynching” (Trotter 143). After a scuffle with a group of white boys, nine young black men were pulled from a freight train and arrested on false charges of raping two white women found hiding on the train; all but the youngest were sentenced to death after a speedy sham trial. The International Labor Defense 122 arm of the Communist Party launched a campaign to save the young men, using mass protests and court appeals to bring the practice of lynching into public discussion. After several stays of execution and a lengthy series of retrials, charges against four of the young men were dropped by 1937. 7 While serving as the Harlem correspondent for The Daily Worker from 1937-1938, Wright was heavily involved in researching and writing about the case of the Scottsboro Boys for the Communist Party. 8 In her discussion of gender and political radicalism in Uncle Tom’s Children, Cheryl Higashida describes the profound influence of the case on the collection. She argues that while Wright expunged most of the direct textual references to the Scottsboro struggle on the advice of an editor, the case nonetheless resonates as a subtext in the novellas (413). In Native Son, white Communist Jan Erlone asks Bigger Thomas if he has “read about the Scottsboro boys” (85). In 1935, the year that Wright published a poem about lynching entitled “Between the World and Me” 9 and began to write “Big Boy Leaves Home,” the NAACP flew the black flag emblazoned with “A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY” twenty times from the window of their New York office. That same year, NAACP director Walter White organized the controversial An Art Commentary on Lynching at the Arthur U. Newton Galleries in uptown Manhattan, which featured 38 artistic responses to lynching. At least one of the pieces was commissioned by White to comment directly upon the Scottsboro case: Peggy Bacon’s caricatures of Judge W.W. Callahan and Attorney General Thomas E. Knight (Apel 118). Weeks 123 later and only a few blocks away, the John Reed Club of New York sponsored a similar exhibition at the ACA Gallery entitled Struggle For Negro Rights. 10 Both exhibits sought to use art to increase awareness of the continued practice of lynching and drum up support for federal anti-lynching legislation; the NAACP seeking wide scale support of the Costigan-Wagner bill and the John Reed Club pushing for the more radical and comprehensive Bill for Negro Rights and the Suppression of Lynching. In using visual art to contest the “scopically aggressive” white gaze of souvenir lynching postcards—which, although illegal to produce or mail since 1910, continued to be secreted and exchanged through clandestine networks (Goldsby: 235)—these artists essentially mediated the photographs, utilizing perspective, light, composition, and other representational strategies to explode the documentary truth that lynching photographs claimed and refocus a critical juridical gaze onto the white mob rather than the lynched black figure. However, through the process of mediation, these counter-representations were fixed in a tense referential relationship to the “original” photographs; to contest the images, they themselves featured graphic depictions of the black male body victimized and in pain, leaving many critics to wonder if the artwork actually reified this subject position and accentuated racial subordination despite the overt intention to dismantle and critique it (Langa: 2006). Visually re-presenting lynching proved to be a very fraught tactic, precisely because this practice was still located within the politics of looking that constituted lynching itself. 124 The Cinematic Wright “I wanted the reader to feel that Bigger’s story was happening now, like a play upon the stage or a movie unfolding on the screen. . .this was the best way to enclose the reader’s mind in a new world, to blot out all reality except that which I was giving him” —Richard Wright, “How Bigger was Born” “He said he felt like movies were like life itself, and he openly admitted to me that he modeled his dramatic and melodramatic fiction after the movies.” —Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius Wright’s professed desire to create a cinematic experience for readers of Native Son, in which they would feel the immediacy of Bigger’s experience as if it were “unfolding on the screen” in real/reel time, has been remarked upon by several critics, but only under the rubric of visuality (Pudaloff: 1993, Decoste: 1998, Pérez: 2001). I want to make a distinction here between visuality—a term strictly referring only to the sense of sight—and the cinematic, which references the interplay between visual and audio techniques. Not only do I argue that the auditory dimension of Wright’s early work has been understudied, but I contend that, given the enveloping and ephemeral qualities of sound, it is the auditory dimension of cinema rather than the visual that comes closest to enacting Wright’s desire to create a story that could “‘enclose’ the reader’s mind in a new world” that feels like “life itself” (537). 11 While rarely acknowledged, sound—and the dissonance it can create with the visual realm—is essential to the cinematic experience. As sound editor Walter Murch (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now) describes: Image and sound are linked together in a dance. And like some kinds of dance, they do not always have to be clasping each other around the waist: 125 they can go off and dance on their own, a kind of ballet. . .Out of the juxtaposition of what the sound is telling you and what the picture is telling you, you (the audience) come up with a third idea which is composed of both picture and sound and resolves their superficial differences (qtd. in Paine, 356). The synthetic relationship Murch describes evolving from the juxtaposition of sound and vision is especially interesting given Wright’s own interest in dialectical materialism in the late 1930s. 12 Furthermore, “Wright loved the movies,” as friend and biographer Margaret Walker describes (220) and had been enthralled with the medium since his childhood (Walker: 1988, Pérez: 2001). 13 Given Wright’s own emotional, aesthetic, and occupational investment in the medium—he labored for many years to produce a screenplay for Native Son, eventually directing a version of the film in 1949—Murch also provides a useful schematic for reading how sound works within Wright’s early fiction. While “the screen” is certainly key to understanding Wright’s cinematic aesthetic, we must also examine how texts like “Big Boy Leaves Home” and Native Son utilize sound in conjunction with visual imagery to make new meaning, especially to disrupt the politics of looking that constructs seeing and knowing as one and the same. However, while Murch’s thinking is helpful in amplifying the “soundtrack” of Wright’s early writing, he actually describes a much later (and more expressionistic) moment in cinema history, the 1970s, after interventions like Wright’s had been made. The idea that there was a “soundtrack” separate and separable from the visual one was not popularized until well into the 1950s, when the 126 production of LPs of a film’s musical score began on a widespread basis. When Wright began drafting the texts I explore in this chapter, the notion of the “sound track” had only recently come into being. Therefore, before I examine the cultural role Wright stakes out for sound through his writing, I want to place his work more directly within the context of realist developments in cinematic technique during the 1930’s—specifically the dramatic increase in clarity of synchronous sound and the “inaudibility” of sound editing—and the links between sound and race in the cinema at this historical moment. In 1933, the year Wright turned 25, new editing technology signaled the death of the “talkie” and the beginning of “sound cinema”; dialogue could now be mixed with music and other background sounds without losing sound quality. During this decade, “sound track” remained primarily an industry term and film producers worked hard to meld sound with image as seamlessly as possible. Film critic Rick Altman argues, “throughout the thirties, nearly every important technological innovation can be traced back to the desire to produce a persuasive illusion of real people speaking real words” (47). He goes on to describe the naturalization of this relationship as “sound cinema’s fundamental lie,” a falsehood that insinuates “that the sound is produced by the image when in fact it remains independent from it” (46). Merging these two sensory modalities and limiting the role of the aural in cinematic narrative has the effect of reifying vision as the dominant sense of meaning making and masking sound’s ability to operate within 127 gap between looking and knowing, re-framing what is seen and producing its own knowledge of what is unseen but heard. Operating as a medium within the same regime of white supremacy that produced lynching, the cinematic practice of wedding “real” people to “real” words onscreen abetted the construction of the racial “reality” of both visual and “sonic color-lines.” 14 As Alice Maurice’s work on race in early cinema has shown, the notion of a “black voice” was absolutely essential to the illusion of synchronous sound, especially in the early 1930’s, when the new sound technology remained clunky, unsettling, and distracting to audiences accustomed to silent films. White audiences frequently rejected the voices of white actors as “unrealistic,” and many a silent film star’s career ended because their singular “real” voice could never match the infinite array of voices the audience had imagined emanating from their onscreen body. However, because of the delineation of a sonic color-line through the longstanding proliferation of minstrel performance, dialect writing dating back to the nineteenth century by authors like Joel Chandler Harris, and radio shows like Amos and Andy (1929-1960), white audiences felt they knew intimately what the “black voice” sounded like, having essentially constructed its fantasy for their own consumption. 15 It is not surprising then that the first “talking” film was The Jazz Singer (1927), which featured minstrel performer Al Jolson in blackface, and that there was a proliferation of musical films with all-black casts marketed to white audiences during this period. 16 Filmmakers utilized the intertwined fantasies of 128 “black voices” and “black bodies” to construct the audio-visual film as realistic. As synchronous technology improved and the illusion of depth was enhanced through better microphone placement—causing the cinematic spectator to feel enclosed and encapsulated by the film—the realism of sound took on two valences: that of appearing not to deviate from Mary Ann Doane describes as the “ideology of the visible” (59) while at the same time carrying meaning of its own. 17 As I will explain through an extended analysis of Wright’s early fiction, his use of aural imagery intervenes in the “ideology of the visible” while exposing sound’s invisible ideological and psychological freight. The Discipline of Listening: “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” “It would have been impossible for a stranger to detect anything. The maids, the hall-boys, and the bell-boys were all smiles. They had to be.” —Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” Wright’s autobiographical essay, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” (1937/1939) wrestles with the “ideology of the visible” as it manifested itself in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s. In his episodic account of his coming-of-age under the violent and exacting thumb of white supremacy, Wright depicts a South so utterly saturated with racism that its presence became almost invisible; the folkways of Jim Crow presented such a totalizing façade of racial control that it was “impossible for a stranger to detect anything,” especially if they took the “smiles” they saw solely at face value. 18 Wright’s essay, however, exposes the veneer of the infamous Southern 129 Magnolia Myth by representing a “listening ear” traumatized by the vigilant brutality just under its surface. Comprised of ten vignettes narrated in flashback, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” is an autobiographical sketch detailing the persistent trauma of Wright’s early life in the South. It was first published in 1937 in American Stuff: WPA Writers’ Anthology and was later reprinted as the opening piece in Wright’s first collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1939); “Big Boy Leaves Home” followed directly after. Simultaneously a bildungsroman and a primer of racial codes, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” characterizes Wright’s youth as a successive series of trials in which the potential stakes become increasingly higher: physical punishment, terror, job loss, arrest, castration, lynching. While a visual color-line undoubtedly structured Jim Crow, Wright’s ability to survive the trials he is subject(ed) to hinge on his successful navigation of the sonic color-line. Wright’s life literally depends on apprehending when “you were supposed to laugh” (12) and when you were supposed to be silent (12). He must not only know when “t’ say sir to a white man,” but to say it with the correct tone dictated by the situation: “sharp” to a potential boss (5), “neutral” to an angry white co-worker (7) or “with as much heartiness as [he] could muster” to a white hotel watchman who claimed to have killed two black men in “self defense” (13). I want to focus my analysis on the first lesson of Wright’s “Jim Crow education” (8)—a physically and aurally violent primal scene of racial instruction— 130 because it functions as filter through which the other episodes are understood. It also bears striking resemblance to Douglass’s description of his passage through “the bloodstained gate of slavery” that I discussed in chapter one; however, Wright learns the violent lesson not at the whim of the slave master but at the hands of his mother, who beats him after learning that he has been in a fight with white boys in the neighborhood. In this recollection, Wright represents himself as simultaneously Aunt Hester at the joist and Douglass hiding in the closet, the object of violence and the subject who is forced to listen while quashing his impulse to fight back. The beating he receives from his mother is especially traumatic for Wright because of the rejection he describes experiencing from her. Until the day she “grabbed a barrel stave. . .stripped [him] naked, and beat [him] until [he] had a fever of one hundred and two,” he had imagined his mother as his ideal listener—what Kaja Silverman describes as an “acoustic mirror” (1988)—a sympathetic ear who reflect Wright’s desires back to him. He recalls waiting for his mother to come home from work, bleeding profusely after being hit behind the ear with a broken bottle, and being so sure of her comfort that he “could just feel in [his] bones that she would understand. I know she would tell me exactly what to do next time” (4). He wanted her words to surround him, comfort him, and encourage his impulse to fight back against the white boys that had brought broken bottles to hurt black boys engaged in a harmless cinder battle. When she finally arrived, he grabbed her hand and “babbled” out his story to her freely (4). The sound of babbling is significant 131 both as an indicator of intimate exchange between young son and mother, and as the only time in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” where Wright represents himself as being out of control of his speech. Not only can uncontrollable words get one hurt or killed under the strictures of the sonic color-line, but they also mark a special type of terror for a writer who trades in carefully organized words. Silverman’s arguments concerning the of the maternal voice are helpful to understanding this scene, particularly in light of the many psychoanalytic takes on Wright 19 and my own reading of Wright as cinematic. In The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1988), Silverman contends that the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and classic cinema spectatorship hinges on the commonplace yet “powerful cultural fantasy” of the maternal voice surrounding her newborn infant (72). The “sonorous envelope” 20 encapsulating the infant finds its cultural analogue in the darkened space of the theater; both experiences similarly blend the subject’s desire for protection with fear of entrapment. Silverman’s image also echoes Wright’s aspiration to “‘enclose’ the reader’s mind” with his words as well Wright’s description of his mother in the scene under discussion here. She does fulfill his expressed desire for her to “tell him exactly what to do” and her words do in fact surround him, but they are diametrically opposed to what he wants so badly to hear. While he does not represent his own “babble” on the page, he repeats her statements word-for-word as a litany of betrayal: 132 She would smack my rump with the stave, and, while the skin was still smarting, impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I was never to throw cinders anymore. I was never to fight white folks again. And they were absolutely right in clouting me with the milk bottle. Didn’t I know she was working hard every day in the hot kitchens of white folks to make money to take care of me? When was I going to learn to be a good boy? She couldn’t be bothered with my fights. She finished by telling me that I ought to be thankful to God as long as they didn’t kill me (5). 21 From the perspective of Wright as child, her words do not respond to the call of his babble, they engulf and overpower it. Wright’s mother betrays him by exercising control over her words and Wright himself. He is trapped simultaneously within the radius of the blows of the barrel stave, the “sonorous envelope” composed of the fearful, scolding words of his mother, and the symbolic order of “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” Characterizing her scolding words as “gems of Jim Crow wisdom,” Wright depicts his mother as doubly castrating him. For one thing, listening has an overdetermined relationship with the feminine in Western culture; being forced to listen to his mother symbolically emasculates him. 22 Furthermore, as Silverman describes, “castration also refers to the fact that the symbolic order precedes and anticipates the subject, providing it with the ready made desires and meanings” (Silverman 86). The experience of listening to his mother’s words causes him to permanently view the world—and his place in it—utterly differently. The child Wright laments that the “charm of [his] cinder yard was gone” and struggles to ignore the “leering” phantoms of “monstrous white faces” that he now imagines surveilling him, even as he sleeps (5). 23 The older-narrator Wright looks back in 133 disbelief that he could have viewed a cinder yard as any type of Edenic space. Though this aural primal scene, Wright apprehends the spatial logic of segregation, ensuring that ‘even today when I think of white folks, the hard sharp outlines of white houses surrounded by trees, lawns, and hedges, are present somewhere in the background of my mind. Through the years they grew into an overreaching symbol of fear (5). 24 While the fear engendered by his mother’s inoculation against white violence does in fact help him to survive the South—he mirrors his mother’s symbolic emasculation of him with whites’ actual castration of one of his co-workers later on in the essay— he remains hostile toward black maternal figures in both his life and his fiction (Kady: 1976, Mootry: 1984, Jones: 1985, DeCosta-Willis: 1986, Walker: 1988, Harris: 1990, Tate: 1998). Although she does not specifically discuss “The Ethics of Jim Crow,” Claudia Tate’s psychoanalytic reading of Wright’s oeuvre is helpful to understanding this scene. Tate argues that Wright’s repressed hostility toward his mother becomes inextricably intertwined with his contempt for racism, as “racism creates the privation that conditions both the love and the brutality of the mother-son bond” (105). Even retrospectively, Wright hears his mother’s protection as betrayal. While his ability to apprehend the racial order and survive it depends upon the knowledge his mother instills with her “gems of Jim Crow wisdom,” Wright’s representation of the “listening ear” is quite ambivalent. Listening is at once key to aural literacy—a protective, resistant apprehension of the world—and a type of sonic subjection in which the ear operates as a conduit for and of racial discipline. 134 Witnessing the Sonic Color-line: “Big Boy Leaves Home” “I was born too far back in the woods to hear the train whistle, and you could only hear the hoot owls holler.” —Richard Wright, quoted in Margaret Walker’s Daemonic Genius “Heard images haunt the mind as much as visual images.” —Elizabeth Alexander, “Can you be BLACK and look at this?” When recalling Roxie, Mississippi—the small town of Wright’s birth and early years (1908-1911)— friend and biographer Margaret Walker recalled that Wright always used sound to anchor his memory there. The first image Wright recalled is the dense silence of exile, the sound of “being too far back” from the freedom, industry, and connection promised in the train’s whistle. 25 This longing for the unheard is met by the second image, of menacing nature in the form of the “holler” of the hoot owl, symbolic of surveillance and danger lurking in the night. As Alexander reminds us, “heard images” are powerful and the sounds of Roxie did in fact haunt Wright’s mind, as Walker writes, “His birthplace in the Mississippi woods was like a big black hole that followed him in his memory all the days of his life, and it reappears in his fiction, his nonfiction, and his poetry” (13-14). The auditory space of this “big black hole”—simultaneously the maternal womb, the darkened theater, and the southern night—first appears in “Big Boy Leaves Home,” a story Wright published in an anthology titled The New Caravan in November 1936 and later included as the first fictional work of Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938. 135 What I have delineated as the “listening ear” figures prominently in “Big Boy Leaves Home,” a story that, like “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” also uses sound to signify on key moments in Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass. Reprinted in a collection whose title—Uncle Tom’s Children—reflects a sustained thematic interest in slavery’s continued legacies, it is not surprising that the bildungsroman “Big Boy Leaves Home” discursively returns to the “bloodstained gate” of Douglass’s coming of age. Wright’s story reconfigures the “black hole” of the closet where Douglass listens to Aunt Hester’s torture into a pressure cooker; in the climactic scene of “Big Boy Leaves Home,” young Big Boy hides in a dark, underground kiln where he overhears his friend Bobo being lynched by a white mob. Wright’s story actually atomizes, reconstructs, and reassembles many key moments from the opening chapters of Douglass’s Narrative: the pastoral landscape fenced-in for whites only, the murder of Demby at the water’s edge, the scream of a woman, the scene of enforced listening to brutal violence, all book-ended by the sound of singing voices, rising out of the covering woods. The aural imagery of slavery— singing voices, barking bloodhounds, terrified screams, pastoral insect drones and bird songs 26 —echoes throughout “Big Boy Leaves Home,” revealing the ways in which black male subjectivity continued to be wrought by terror in a Jim Crow regime founded on and nostalgic for antebellum power dynamics. Although terror permeates “Big Boy Leaves Home,” the five-part story opens in an Edenic setting, depicting Big Boy and his friends Larry, Bobo, and Buck 136 playing hooky from school on a warm afternoon. Singing and laughing, the boys stumble upon a fenced off swimming hole in part one —the private property of Old Man Harvey—and decide to sneak in. Within moments of removing their clothes and diving in the cool water in part two, a young white woman named Bertha spots the boys and screams for her boyfriend, Old Man Harvey’s Son, who arrives on the scene bearing a rifle. He kills two of the boys immediately and is about to shoot Bobo when Big Boy wrests the gun from his hands and kills him instead. The two boys separate, fleeing the scene in part three. Knowing retribution from the whites is certain, the boys’ families try to save them, arranging for them to hide overnight in a dark, underground kiln on the outskirts of town, where a laundry truck will pass by in the morning to smuggle them North. Big Boy makes it to the kiln first in part four and hunkers down in the darkness, listening to the sound of an impending storm and waiting anxiously for Bobo to arrive. The night’s stillness is suddenly broken by the shouts of the lynch mob intermingled with the howls of bloodhounds; they have captured Bobo and proceed to tar and feather him while Big Boy listens, just feet away. Miraculously, he survives the night and part five opens to the sound of the rumbling Magnolia Express Laundry truck headed to Chicago. The story ends with Big Boy falling asleep to the sound of the engine, leaving readers to wonder not only how he will fare on his own in the city, but when, how, and if the South’s “dirty laundry” will finally come to light. 137 In section one, Wright uses aural imagery to construct a sense of wholeness and a private space of black male pre-adolescent community, an Edenic site of “easy laughter” and joy away from the “listening ear” of white surveillance. The story begins with the boys enveloped in the pleasant sound of each other’s voices, a quartet “blending in harmony” (17): “Your mama don wear no drawers. . .,” the boys sing, each trying to improvise the most risqué lines (17). Wright does not distinguish between the speaking boys for several pages; he depicts their voices as unified, each one an “echo” of the other (17). This scene is composed almost entirely of sound— continuous dialogue, song, laughter, and a train whistle—and the aural imagery gives the scene a private interior sense reminiscent of the “sonorous envelope” of the maternal. In contrast to his own coming of age in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” Wright presents a fantasy of male identity construction that excludes and resists the maternal, which Higashida describes as “another instrument of Jim Crow socialization” (401). The boys carve out this Edenic afternoon only by disobeying their mothers; upon returning home, Big Boy’s father asks him, “Didn’t yo ma send yuh t t school?” (35). The boys’ echoing voices construct a type of womb that enables a type of male communal (re)birth without the maternal. Their intertwined voices sing, “Yo mama don wear no drawers/Ah senna when she pulled em off/ N she washed em in alcohol,/N she hung em out in the hall/N then she put ‘em back on her QUALL!” reducing the figure of the “mama” to her sexual, reproductive body (18). The sound of “shrill, cracking, adolescent” voices singing these sexual lyrics 138 calls attention to the fact that, while this space seems Edenic, it is not innocent nor completely inclusive. The boys have already been initiated into the raced and gendered economy of what Lola E. Jones calls “Southerntown, U.S.A.” (102). Jones’ reading of the story gives a twist to Lawrence Buell’s assessment of it as a reinvention of the “classic American male-bonding-in-nature story” (13), by suggesting that this song effectively sets the tone of “Big Boy,” placing the objectification of black female sexuality at the core of the text, despite Wright’s narrative attempt to banish black women to its margins. In addition to sounding out a masculine space, Wright’s use of aural imagery in the opening tableau amplifies the fragility of the boy’s community and the ephemerality of their claims on the southern landscape, especially in relationship to the established literary tradition of the (white) American Southern pastoral that Uncle Tom’s Children protests. The term “pastoral” comes from Classical Latin and refers to tending livestock; it came to have religious overtones when combined with the Christian symbol of Christ as shepherd (OED). The pastoral literary tradition dates back to Virgil’s Eclogues, and the genre functions to resolve tensions between an idealized past and a changing present. The past of the pastoral is associated with the natural world—especially imagery of the garden, sometimes posited as Eden, but not always—and with community: the flock, the village, the homeland (MacKethan). This nostalgic, often closed world is set against an invasive, conflicted, and 139 threatening present, often represented by urbanization, technological change, and population shifts due to im/migration. While the American Southern pastoral tradition has roots in colonial travel writing, I am most concerned with the cultural production of white writers of the immediate post-bellum and Reconstruction periods and their lingering representational legacies, the “pastoral scene of the gallant South” that Billie Holiday indicts in “Strange Fruit” (1939) and to which Wright refers in Uncle Tom’s Children’s epigraph: “Is it true what they say about Dixie? Does the sun really shine all the time? Do Sweet Magnolias blossom at everybody’s door?” Maureen Anderson describes the pastoral as a “genre addressing Southern political issues” (2), namely the end of chattel slavery and the potential shift in power during Reconstruction with the entrance of blacks into the body politic. During this era, southern white writers used the pastoral to reconstruct slavery as an idyllic time destroyed by the unjust “war of Northern Aggression.” 27 They sought to idealize, preserve, and further mythologize the “Old South” and plantation slavery as a simpler and “more healthful, life-sustaining time” for both whites and blacks. (MacKethan). These stories combined stock representations of pure, honorable paternal whites and cheerful, servile, and subservient blacks with an idyllic rural landscape full of golden afternoons, plentiful crops, lush Magnolia blooms, and the serene quiet of nature. As I discussed in chapter one, what historian Mark M. Smith calls “plantation quietude” was an important marker of the pastoral space (19). 140 Smith argues that even in the antebellum period slaveholders imagined a quiet, “idealized and romanticized” (30) plantation life in opposition to a noisy industrial North. This process only intensified after the war, when white postbellum nostalgia further stylized and idealized the plantation soundscape. Within the cultural logic of the southern pastoral, harmony and quietude functioned as aural metaphors for a racist social order in which blacks and whites occupied their “natural” respective places. Wright’s story begins with Big Boy and his friends using their own harmony to contest white claims to the landscape. The black boys use their voices to stake out their own space—however temporary—within a hostile southern countryside in which they are always already “TRESPASSIN” (24). As the boys shift their singing from “Yo Mama” to “a good ol’ song” (19)—the slave spiritual “Bound for Glory,”—Wright connects the boys’ stolen afternoon with a long tradition of African American expressive culture, “stolen sounds” that have carved out community, history, and shared space in the face of white regimes of power for many years. The opening tableau of “Big Boy Leaves Home” can thus be read as a proto-version of what Anissa J. Wardi terms an “African American Pastoral,” which (re)places black experience at the center of the South and simultaneously redresses the black body as both enslaved and ancestral, abused by racism but nurtured by folk culture (36). However, in Wright’s short story, Big Boy and his friends cannot ultimately escape the representational machinations of the white southern pastoral and the 141 profoundly unequal power relations of 1930s Mississippi supported by it. Racial violence always hovers at the edges of Wright’s Edenic scene; these young boys already have been initiated into white terror—at least in the abstract sense. They dream of “goin Noth some day”(27) and the threat of lynching already controls their behavior. When Big Boy first suggests that they “go to the creek fer a swim,” the boys refuse: ‘N get lynched? Hell naw!” (20). In order for the boys to enjoy the beauty of the woods, they must literally close their eyes to what they already know of the world; the scene is full of moments where Big Boy’s eyes are “half-closed” (22) and the boys “feig[n] sleep” (19) or “dro[p] the lids of their eyes softly against the sunlight” (18); their eyes are fully closed as they splash each other with water (25). However, once Big Boy’s group reaches the fence demarcating Old Man Harvey’s Swimming Hole—a Jim Crow version of Colonel Lloyd’s forbidden plantation garden in Douglass’s Narrative—the “sonorous envelope” of their temporary Eden begins to dissipate. After crossing this threshold, they become conscious that they can no longer sing and play with abandon and begin to police each other’s sound. “‘Don holler so loud!’” one boy says after the water fight. “‘Yeah,” another seconds, “they kin hear yo ol big mouth a mile erway!” (26). The fence literally marks a sonic color-line; crossing it places the boys within white earshot, forcing them to realize that the sound of their voices has shifted from pleasurable harmony to potentially dangerous noise. The boys no longer hear solely 142 the echo of themselves as themselves, but also the noise of themselves as white “listening ears” might hear them. The sonic color-line also demarcates the ability to wholeheartedly enjoy the sounds of southern quietude as white privilege. Ironically, in the moment just before Bertha’s scream completely obliterates the boys’ peaceful afternoon (and their lives), they are finally able to hear and see the Mississippi landscape as beautiful rather than threatening: “They grew pensive. A black winged butterfly hovered at the water’s edge. A bee droned. From somewhere came the sweet scent of honeysuckles. Dimly they could hear sparrows twittering in the woods” (27). Note that even at the height of their pleasure and relaxation the landscape remains just out of earshot; the boys are only able to hear the sparrows “dimly.” The appearance of natural sounds is significant here, as, except for the sound of the Northbound train (which I will discuss shortly), Wright has heretofore represented the entire soundscape of “Big Boy” as constructed by the boys: their laughter, talking, singing, stomping, and playing. The “droning bees” and the “twittering” sparrows are the first aural images of nature that Wright uses in “Big Boy” and the only pastoral sounds that Big Boy hears without terror. The “droning” of the insects—a leitmotif Wright uses throughout the rest of the story in connection with white terror— signals that the boys have let their guard down and sonically foreshadows the white woman’s scream. At this precise moment, the sounds of the natural landscape simultaneously mark the culmination of the boys’ pleasure and herald its demise. 143 The sound of a white woman screaming—whether heard, rumored, or imagined—exerted immediate power in the Jim Crow South to both black and white “listening ears.” To white ears, the sound of the (white) female scream enacted, enabled, and excused the practice of lynching by creating what Ida B. Wells called a “plausible screen of defending the honor of [the South’s] women” (61). In the hierarchy of the southern soundscape that Wells describes in Southern Horrors (1892), the scream of rape emitted from a white woman’s mouth trumps all other sounds: “this cry has had its effect. It has closed the heart, stifled the conscience, warped the judgment and hushed the voice of the press and pulpit on the subject of lynch law throughout this ‘land of liberty’ (61). The aural screen of the white female scream effectively covered lynching’s political agenda; white men used the practice in combination with segregation and disenfranchisement to maintain their political ascendancy in the face of rising African American social, economic, and legal power (Weigman: 1995, Smith: 2006). Robyn Weigman describes this historical narrative as the “mythology of the rapist” and argues that it was constructed alongside the mythology of the southern pastoral; dominant white representations of black masculinity oscillated between the nostalgic “simple, docile Uncle Tom” of the antebellum past and the “violent sex offender” of the Post-Reconstruction present. Used to justify segregation and lynching, the latter representation effectively limited black men to an “extreme corporeality” that denied them their citizenship rights (96). 28 The aural image of the scream also objectified white female sexuality as the 144 express property of white males (MacLean 114) and circumscribed white female identity as fragile, while simultaneously functioning as a screen muffling the actual cries of the black men who were lynched as well as the black women who were frequently subjected to physical and sexual violence (including lynching) at the hands of white men with little or no recourse, legal or otherwise. 29 In “Big Boy Leaves Home”—and later, I will argue, in Native Son—Wright exposes the white female scream as the dominant cultural soundtrack embedded within visual representations of lynching. 30 To the young naked black boys taking a forbidden dip in Old Man Harvey’s pool, the scream of a white woman means castration and/or death. Upon seeing Bertha on the embankment, Big Boy’s voice drops to a fearful whisper: “It’s a woman. . .A white woman!” (27). The italics Wright uses as an aural inflection on the term “white” echo the language of his mother’s “gems of Jim Crow wisdom”—“I was never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again” (4)—suggesting that these boys have had their first lesson in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” 31 Even before Bertha screams, the boys “instinctively cove[r] their groins” and freeze. Intended to shield Bertha from what the “mythology of the rapist” has trained her to see as a threat, covering up also functions to shield the boys from the castration that the same cultural narrative promises them. In contrast to the improvisation of the opening tableau, the soundscape to this scene seems predetermined, at one point Wright describes Big Boy’s words as “coming mechanically” (28). In this pregnant 145 silence, Bertha’s scream—and the violence it enacts—seem inevitable and unstoppable. No matter how hard the boys try to explain that they merely want to get their clothes, Bertha refuses to listen to them; she stands mute “with her hand covering her mouth” as if waiting for her cue. As soon as Big Boy makes a move toward his clothes—in Bertha’s narrative a move toward her—she starts screaming. Wright repeats “the woman screamed” three times in a matter of sentences, constructing the sound as the sonic backdrop for the violence that ensues. To the white male listening ear, this scream demands, enables, and excuses immediate violence against these black boys, no questions asked. In fact, Old Man Harvey’s son, Jim announces his presence not with his voice but rather with the “CRACK!” of his rifle. Wright’s choice to use “CRACK!” to represent the rifle’s sound has multiple resonances. At the very minimum, “crack” means to snap or split asunder, and the rifle’s violence has shattered any remaining peace the boys may have had. “Crack” is also an onomatopoetic term dating back to Old English. It originated to describe a “sharp or explosive noise, said of thunder, cannon, a whip, a rifle” (OED). The etymology of “crack” posits the repeat of Jim’s rifle as the latest echo within a long line of symbolic instruments of power and domination in Western culture. To amplify this point, Wright couples the “CRACK!” of the rifle with the visual image of an army officer’s uniform, making the links between white masculinity, citizenship, terror, and the law frighteningly clear. This audio-visual image shows the extent to which the boys are isolated from and made vulnerable by 146 American nationalism, as the “CRACK!” of Jim’s rifle has been legitimized by the dominant power structure. Furthermore, around the time that Wright penned “Big Boy,” the term also found new life in the colloquialism “to crack down”—meaning to repress or take strong measures against—which had made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary by 1940. Wright’s usage also gives a deadly twist to the colloquial term for poor whites, “cracker.” The sound of the rifle also covers the “crack” between seeing and knowing, as the “CRACK!” of the rifle guarantees that what Jim allegedly sees—a rape scene—will be the official narrative “known” by the town. The symbolic instrument of power has been made actual, and killing the boys with the “CRACK!” of the rifle ensures their silence. Wright’s soundscape depicts this power differential by amplifying the stark contrast between the deafening sounds of white terror and the quiet sounds of the boys’ deaths. The first “CRACK!” of the white man’s rifle/voice is met with the “grunt” of Lester’s exhalation; the second “CRACK!” with the “bubbling” of the creek as it swallows Buck’s body (28). Big Boy apprehends that the boys’ deaths will be secreted away and the murderer will go unpunished. He decides to wrest the violent power from Jim’s hands; the final “CRACK!” signals Jim’s death at Big Boy’s hands. For Big Boy, however, the power is only temporary. Bertha’s screams fill the air once more, signaling the lynch mob that will soon be after them. 147 In section three of “Big Boy,” which details the boys’ flight home, Wright uses aural imagery to amplify the tension of what Patricia Yaeger calls the “unseen everyday” (xii), exposing the terror inherent in the southern landscape for black listeners. The sound of the “rhythmic jingle of a wagon”—a sound invested with rural placidity in dominant depictions of the pastoral South—not only causes the boys to “f[a]ll to the ground” as if in a war zone, but reminds readers that they have been in one all along (31). Sounds do not have to be thunderously loud to terrorize ears already alert to danger. In fact, Wright uses an aural montage of minute household sounds to emphasize the vulnerability of black domestic space. Far from being a safe haven, the cabin is a pressure cooker; the constant threat of unseen white violence threatens to explode at any moment. Part of what makes this scene in “Big Boy” so powerful is that Wright restricts readers to the “listening ears” of Big Boy and his family. There is no omniscient narrator to alert readers to the actions of the white community outside their door; the violence is impending, but its particulars are unknown. Any sound that breaks the silence potentially signals the approach of the lynch mob. Typical sounds of traffic and community, such as footsteps and door knocks, become laden with terror and fear as they travel through the “listening ears” of Big Boy. With each knock, the family freezes: “They were silent, listening,” straining to hear if the person at the door is friend or foe (36). Each time new “feet c[o]me pounding on the steps,” bodies freeze and eyes travel to the lone shotgun leaning up against the 148 corner of the room until the identity of the newcomer is established (37). These repeated sounds combine to create a mounting pressure within the small house, which Wright literalizes with aural imagery: “They were quiet, thinking. The water kettle on the stove sang”(39). The singing kettle does not ease any pressure, however, it merely directs more attention to the intensity of the situation. Time is running out for Big Boy. If his extended family cannot find a place for him to hide, the violence will certainly explode. Representing Big Boy’s “listening ear” allows Wright to subtly and effectively link the pastoral quietude of the southern landscape with the racial horror undergirding the placidity of its surface while dramatizing the violence of having to listen on both sides of the sonic color-line. In this reworked southern pastoral, the history of slavery, racism, lynching and the struggles against them are as endemic to the landscape as are the trees, rivers, birds and cricket songs (Wardi 36). Big Boy always hears the brutality intrinsic in that quietude. As he lowers himself into the earthen kiln that will be his hiding place for the night, Big Boy is almost tempted into relaxing by the bucolic “view from his hole [that] was fringed by the long tufts of grass” and the birds floating serenely past in the gathering dusk (42). Big Boy refuses to be seduced by the “view from his hole,” however, remembering that the boys once turned the kilns into giant pressure cookers: “Pssseeeezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. . .” (43). The explosive sound reminds him that the space of the kiln is also the space of the kettle, and the landscape becomes more visually and sonically threatening. He 149 notices the “dying light” and the “heavy” air while listening to the lazy drone of the wasp as it transforms into the cricket’s “fitful song” (43). Like the “droning bees” that earlier signaled Bertha’s presence, the cricket’s “fitful song” heralds the coming of the mob. Just before depicting the arrival of the mob, Wright sheds light on the role that visual representation plays in the public memory of white violence. As Big Boy lies in the kiln waiting for Bobo, he fantasizes about fighting back against the mob like he did Jim Harvey, this time with the “Booom!” of his father’s shotgun (44). Wright’s choice of sound to represent Big Boy’s gun is telling here as well, as the term “boom” does double duty as onomatopoeia—replicating a deeply resonant sound like a canon or large bell—and as an aural metaphor for something that is suddenly pushed or forced upon the public attention, like a “booming business” (OED). Big Boy imagines how his act of resistance will be brought to the public attention: N’ the newspapersd say: NIGGER KILLS DOZEN OF MOB BEFO LYNCHED! Er mabbe they’d say: TRAPPED NIGGER SLAYS TWENTY BEFO KILLED! He smiled a little, that wouldn’t be so bad would it? Blinking the newspaper away, he looked over the fields (44). Big Boy can fantasize about shooting the men—smiling a little at making himself the subject in the headline rather than merely its object—but he is unable to imagine himself outside of the politics of representation that publicly limit him to the role of “NIGGER” and “LYNCHED” body. The capitals Wright uses to signify the visual 150 language of the headline makes it hard to “blink away” the connections between the representational machinations of the newspaper and the practice of lynching itself. Given the violent visuality of the headlines, it is not surprising that Wright represents the tarring and feathering of Bobo primarily through Big Boy’s “point-of- audition”—his listening ear—rather than his point of view. By utilizing this technique, Wright refuses the familiar panoramic view of the lynching photograph and forces the reader’s experience through the more intimate and less controllable field of audition. In a highly cinematic scene, Wright changes the dynamics between sight and sound by providing very little visual imagery with an intensified soundscape. While a visual image captures a static moment in time, allowing the viewer the twin privileges of voyeurism—seeing without being seen—and control— choosing to look or not look—sound events unfold over time to a “listening ear” that cannot help but overhear. Precisely because he is so dangerously invested, Big Boy’s” listening ear” presents a powerful interpretive filter through which to represent lynching’s soundtrack. I contend that it is Wright’s use of aural imagery that provokes readings of this scene like Farah Jasmine Griffin’s, which argues, “Big Boy experiences the lynching as if he were the victim” (31). Utilizing Big Boy’s “point of audition” enables Wright to intervene in the gap between seeing and knowing while give narrative shape to the terror of “the white brutality that [he] had not seen” (Black Boy 172, emphasis mine). As film critic Elizabeth Weis writes, Overhearing is a primal phenomenon that invokes anxiety. Freud thus prefigured the very cinematic axiom that a threat that is heard but left unseen 151 can allow the audience to imagine something more terrifying than anything a filmmaker could embody in a specific image (100). This anxiety is intensified in the case of “Big Boy Leaves Home,” as Wright uses sound to explore the terror of the unseen threat itself, a white supremacy that constructs itself as invisible—and therefore everywhere—refusing to embody itself in a specific image. Due to its highly controlled visual design, lynching photography rarely allowed for an exploration into the white spectators proudly gathered around the lynched body. This “proud gaze,” as Dora Apel describes it, assumes an audience that will “recognize the virtue of their deed, an audience that regards the lynched blacks, not the white mob, as criminals” (“On Looking” 49). Wright’s narration removes white readers of “Big Boy” from the comfortable, distanced position of the voyeur, using sound to place them into the moment-by-moment experience of the terrified potential victim Big Boy, a vantage point “not seen” by lynching photographs and newspaper coverage. By representing Big Boy’s “listening ear,” Wright re-frames lynching as criminality rather than justice and constructs whiteness as terrorizing. Furthermore, Wright’s use of aural imagery posits that sound was a key element in constructing and enforcing Jim Crow spaces in the 1930s. The lynching scene in “Big Boy” associates whiteness with the oppressive quietude of the southern pastoral and the terrorizing noise of the lynch mob. The ear can blend multiple sounds simultaneously—as opposed to the eye that must oscillate between the lynch victim and the lynch mob, viewing them as discrete entities—and Wright’s layered 152 soundtrack mixes Bobo’s “shrill screams” with the mob’s joyful singing and the “cricket cries” of the countryside, exposing them as an interdependent system. By amplifying the sounds of the mob rather than emphasizing the sight of the lynched body, I argue that Wright’s narrative describes lynching as a technology fundamentally about white racial identity construction rather than black. The unseen—but heard—subtext of lynching is its fascism. Benito Mussolini coined the term “fascism” in the early 1920s from the Italian “fascio,” meaning union or league; the Latin root is “fasces,” meaning “bundle” or “group.” 32 Wright had been following the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Fascist movement in Germany closely since 1932—especially the rising oppression of Jews—and was continually struck by the “familiar emotional patterns” he encountered in the United States (“How Bigger” 519). While Wright discusses fascism largely in connection with Native Son’s Bigger Thomas, I find the lynching scene in “Big Boy Leaves Home” inflected with his professed interest in the “construction of a society in which there would exist among all people (German people of course!) one solidarity of ideals” (519). Far from being natural, this state of oneness—in which German people experience themselves as “all people” by violently excluding “Others”—is deliberately and systematically constructed. Within the context of U.S. nationalism, lynching functioned as a fascist practice, a means through which white people performed a racial identity, experienced the oneness of community, and constructed themselves as “all people” through violent exclusion of racial others. 153 Wright represents the fascist subtext of lynching through its soundtrack: dialogue, music, and ambient sound. First, the dialogue Wright represents through Big Boy’s listening ear blends the voices of the lynchers together in an indistinguishable mob. Throughout the lynchers’ exchange, Wright does not provide any physical description of the men, nor does he use aural cues to distinguish between any of the speakers outside of changing paragraph: Say, whuts tha yuh got? Er pillar. Fer whut? Feathers, fool! Chris! This’ll be hot if we kin ketch them niggers! Ol Anderson said he wuz gonna bring a barrela tar! Ah got some gasoline in mah car if yuh need it (46) While there are many speakers in this scene, there is only one voice. By melding the speakers this way, “Big Boy” reveals that part of the attraction of lynching for whites is the feeling of being one working part of a large group with a violent common goal; each of the men carries one of the lynching implements, for example. Wright juxtaposes the mob’s excited chatter with the aural image of a pack of bloodhounds “barking their throats out” to underscore this point (47). In addition to revealing the speakers’ desired relationship to each other, the dialogue exposes the speaker’s disavowed connection with the black community they terrorize. Wright represents the voices of the white speakers with the same dialect spelling as he uses for his black speakers, suggestive of cultural intermingling and shared speech in this small, Mississippi town. Although Wright’s use of dialect 154 as a whole has been criticized—most famously by Zora Neale Hurston 33 —this scene breaks the longstanding American literary convention that black speech must be exaggerated and set off on the page as erroneous and alien next to “purified” speech that is grammatically correct according to dominant white standards. Especially strong among practitioners of the southern pastoral tradition like Joel Chandler Harris, this custom was an “attempt to encode an essential blackness in the written representation of speech, an attempt to make the lines of writing into color-lines” (Jones 23). By blending the sound of the voices of the lynch mob with the voices of the community they are terrorizing, Wright argues that white racial identity is a construction based upon an anxiety of sameness with black people, rather an essential difference from them. The interchange and intermingling of white male voices amplifies an erotically charged homosocial subtext to the lynching spectacle; as one voice says, “this’ll be hot.” However, Big Boy’s listening ear also detects a strong female presence at the scene. Wright uses aural imagery to represent the white woman’s crucial—and multiple—roles in the disciplinary technology of lynching. While the figure of the white woman operated as the symbolic catalyst for a lynching, that did not mean white women remained distant and aloof from the violence. In “Big Boy,” white women gather at the site of the lynching as both eager spectators and gleeful participants, often blending into the male frenzy. For example, in another scene of undifferentiated dialogue in which the men discuss the fact that Bertha is coming to 155 watch the boys die, another woman’s voice screams out, “‘Jack! Jack! Don’t Leave me! Ah wanna see im!’” A nearby voice responds, “‘They’re bringing him over the hill, sweetheart!’” ‘AH WANNA BE THE FIRST T PUT A ROPE ON THA BLACKBASTARDS NECK!’” (48). Her seemingly helpless cry is undermined by her desire to approach and look at the victim. The automatic term of endearment “sweetheart” uncannily sticks out among the brutal shouts for blood, placing conventions of southern gentility at the heart of the practice of lynching. Furthermore, the indeterminacy and abrupt shifts in the dialogue blend the woman’s desire to look with the desire to lynch. The third speaker shouting for “FIRST[S]” could very well be her. The musical track accompanying the dialogue also implicates white women in racial violence, aligning them with white masculinity. Their presence at the lynching sanctifies the violence there, giving it almost religious overtones: They had started the song again: ‘We’ll hang every nigger t a sour apple tree. . .’ There were women singing now. Their voices made the song round and full. Song waves rolled over the top of the pine trees. The sky sagged low, heavy with clouds. Wind was rising. Sometimes cricketcries cut surprisingly across the mob song. A dog had gone to the utmost top of the hill. At each lull of the song his howl floated full into the night (48). The white singing voices in this violent scene—interspersed with “hard laughter” (47)—also invert the Edenic opening sequence of “Big Boy,” which depicted Big Boy and his friends singing and laughing together in the same forest. While the lyrics are destructive, the imagery Wright uses to describe the sound is constructive, a potent aural image that shows how “whiteness” generates and naturalizes itself 156 through the violent literal and metaphoric negation of blackness. In the song’s reprise, the added presence of the female voices makes the song “round, full,” creating the auditory image of a complete and unified social body and enveloping the crowd within it. Furthermore, the necessary presence of the women for the song’s newly robust harmony indicates the centrality of white (hetero)sexuality to the construction of white supremacy. Within the dynamics of lynching, the prescribed role of the white female is as the “keeper of the purity of the race,” the literal and symbolic bearer of the white phallus and the legitimizing claims to paternity and power that it bestows (Weigman 97). The expectant, pregnant imagery of the “round, full” rolling sound waves of the song are echoed in his description of the natural environment—the “rising” wind and the “sagging sky, heavy with clouds” that also signify the literal and metaphoric storm to come (48). In a move reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), Wright undercuts the seeming harmony of this union by inverting the image of prayer—of song ascending to the sky—in order to show the cultural narratives of white legitimacy, paternity, and purity are dependent upon and consecrated with violence. 34 Wright’s description also echoes Douglass’s famous description of the slave songs in the opening pages of his narrative, in which he provides instructions for those who want to learn about the slavery’s horror: “place [your]self in the deep pine woods” of Colonel Lloyd’s plantation and listen to the singing of his slaves. Those who aren’t moved, have “no flesh in [their] obdurate heart[s]” (263). Signifying upon Douglass, 157 Wright presents the music of the “obdurate heart” itself. Big Boy’s listening ear operates “within the circle” of whiteness, and suggests to readers that if they really want to understand white racism, they need to listen to the process through which whiteness constructs, performs, and consumes itself. The aural imagery of “Big Boy Leaves Home” does direct the ears of Wright’s white audience to the sounds of the suffering of black souls, but also demands that they listen to the callousness and horror of their own. In addition to and intermingling with the dialogue and music, Big Boy’s listening ear is also confronted with ambient sound: footsteps, hissing rain, howling dogs and cricket cries which “cut surprisingly across the mob song” (48). The repeated imagery of the howling dog—both an aural echo of slavery’s bloodhounds and a symbol of the white mob’s atavistic violence—further indicts the female voices as complicit with white masculinity and the violence necessary to produce and maintain its power. The sound of crickets is typically representative of the quietude of a particular place, and the ability of this sound to cut across the lynch mob’s raucous song suggests precisely how loudly the oppressive stillness of the southern landscape signifies to Big Boy’s listening ear. 35 The pressure has been steadily mounting within these shifting natural sounds from the beginning of the story; the lazily “droning bees” and “twittering” sparrows of the afternoon have given way to the “fitful song” (43) of the crying cricket that sings Big Boy’s pain, fury, and terror. In this context, the “cricket cries” finally expose the romantic 158 representation of the idyllic pastoral quietude of the South—constructed in the antebellum period and revived as nostalgia during and after Reconstruction—as thin sonic insulation muffling the sounds of white terror that created it. 36 While aural imagery permeates the lynching passage, Wright’s lack of visual description continually subverts a sustained look at Bobo’s body. The few visual cues that do appear challenge the limp corpses depicted in lynching photographs by portraying Bobo’s movements: “struggling,” “twisting,” and “turning” (49). In spite of his fear, Big Boy makes several attempts to look at what is happening to his friend, but he can only catch glimpses of an indeterminate “long dark spot” (48, 49) that he assumes is Bobo. The highly symbolic depiction reflects how the mob views Bobo. His humanity is invisible to them underneath the “blackness” they have literally and metaphorically poured over him; they use the tar to construct him as a representation of “blackness” made in their own image. The fact that the “long dark spot” transmogrifies into a “writhing white mass” (2X on 49)—a phrase that could also be used to describe the mob—furthers this reading. Throughout the passage, Big Boy disassociates the visual image of the lynched body from the memory of his friend Bobo. When Big Boy describes hearing screams, the sound is disembodied: “A scream quivered” or “the scream came again,” and simply “screams, one on top of the other, each shriller and shorter than the last” (49, emphasis mine). Disembodying the screams has several simultaneous effects. First, the screams seem to be emanating from everywhere, intensifying their horror. These screams bear the 159 representational weight of thousands of lynchings—both as a communal expression of black outrage and as an aural symbol of its standardization as a practice. Grace Elizabeth Hale writes, “over time lynching spectacles evolved a well-known structure, a sequence and pace of events that southerners came to know as standard” (203). Second, by refusing to locate the sounds directly with Bobo, Wright emphasizes lynching itself as a technology for producing these screams, which Wright’s aural representation figures as an object of desire—and of sexual climax— for the gathered mob. Wright’s description apprehends and amplifies the erotics underscoring lynching’s violence (Weigman: 1996, Carby: 2006). “Headin fer Up Noth!”: From Big Boy to Bigger Thomas “In the distance, he heard the approach of a train. It jarred him back to a sharp sense of danger.” —Richard Wright, “Big Boy Leaves Home” “Now and then a street car rattled past over steel tracks. He was sick of his life at home.” — Richard Wright, Native Son Unlike Wright’s hometown, the setting of “Big Boy Leaves Home” is not out of reach from the train’s whistle. Sometimes “mournful” (19), often “roaring” (40), the sound of the train permeates the soundscape of the story, alerting Big Boy to the “sharp sense of danger” of his very existence in rural Mississippi and inspiring thoughts of “headin fer up Noth!” (27). Wright identifies the train’s whistle as a keynote of black southern life, a sound that because it is “ubiquitously there suggests the possibility of a deep and pervasive influence on our behavior and moods” 160 (Schafer 9). A complex sound freighted with meaning, the train’s whistle is at once a sign of the imposition of industrial time on the rural landscape—for Big Boy the time of day is synonymous with the number of the train that he hears—as well as the lure of the North as a place of refuge from the South’s arbitrary and cataclysmic violence. Even before the violence enacted by Bertha’s scream, the train’s whistle is a harbinger that pierces the fragile harmony of the boy’s song, a regular reminder that surviving the terror and racial violence of the South largely means leaving it, especially for young men. As the trajectory of Wright’s fiction shifts from exploring black life under Jim Crow to detailing the daily existence of southern migrants in Northern urban centers like Chicago, the soundscape necessarily changes to reflect the new environment: zooming cars, piercing alarm clocks, and clanging street cars, “ratt[ling] past over steel tracks.” The aural image of the northbound train transmogrifies into the sound of public transportation moving bodies around the city on fixed tracks. Within Native Son the sound of the streetcar—no less ubiquitous— reminds Bigger of his lack of possibilities in segregated Chicago. Although he is “sick of his life at home,” Bigger has no place left to go. Like Big Boy, Bigger is a southern migrant driven North by racial violence. However, Chicago proves not to be the Promised Land that Big Boy and his friends envision when they sing of “a train bound for Glory” (19). Wright’s grim depiction in Native Son suggests that life in the segregated urban North allows black boys to 161 grow “Bigger”—Thomas, 20, left Mississippi at age 15 —but continues to prevent them from becoming full-fledged men. 37 With stunning precision, Wright’s writing from this period illustrates how the “‘Jim Crow education’ of blacks in the South and the multiple, somewhat more subtle forms of racism in the North worked together in an attempt to arrest the psychological development of black American men” (Dawahare 455). 38 I argue that one of the key ways that Wright links Southern and Northern racism—creating a depiction of what Griffin calls the “South in the city” (83)—is through his use of aural imagery. He continues to refine the point-of- audition technique in Native Son, using Bigger’s “listening ear” to broadcast the horrific topography of his life in Southside Chicago. While the sounds have certainly changed from the rural setting of “Big Boy,” Wright embeds a similar sense of danger in the new landscape by using the same descriptive palette: droning bees become droning furnaces, whirring rattlesnakes transform into whirring fire hoses, howling dogs resound in Chicago’s howling winds; the “fitful song” of the cricket is amplified a hundred fold in the “terror-song” of the police siren. Like his earlier work, the soundscape of Native Son is not an omniscient catalogue of all the sounds audible in the North’s mean streets, rather its imagery represents Bigger’s apprehension of the environment that envelops him. 39 As Damon Marcel DeCoste remarks, Bigger is “ a very acute observer of the realities of American racism” (130). In the reading of Native Son that follows, I will show how the “listening ear” becomes an even more critical aspect of the process of observing race as migrants 162 move North, especially in apprehending the sonic color-line at work in the urban cacophony of the late 1930s. Crossing the Sonic Color-Line: Native Son (1940) “Here my Jim Crow education assumed a quite different form. It was no longer brutally cruel, but subtly cruel.” —Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” “In the South life was different; men spoke to you, cursed you, yelled at you, or killed you. The world moved by signs we knew. But here in the North, cold forces hit you and push you. It is a world of things.” —Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices When Wright moved from rural Jackson, Mississippi to the city of Memphis, Tennessee in 1925, he noticed an immediate difference in the racial atmosphere. The regulations of “Jim Crow” life were still in effect, only their daily expression shifted from “brutally cruel” to “subtly cruel.” Wright noticed this process only intensified upon moving to Chicago in 1927, where life seemed less racially oppressive on the surface, but remained resolutely intolerant underneath. He compared the vagaries of Northern racism to Chicago’s infamous Hawk winds: “cold forces [that] hit you and push you.” Although these forces couldn’t be seen, their icy touches and perceptible sounds guaranteed that they would be apprehended and known. The sonic color- line— an audible site where racial difference is produced and policed—is one of these unseen forces that Wright examines in his first novel Native Son (1940) through the “listening ear” of Bigger Thomas. 163 In Native Son, Wright tells Bigger’s story as a three-part story entitled “Fear,” “Flight,” and “Fate.” In section one of the triptych, Bigger’s mother gets him a job as a chauffeur to the extremely wealthy Dalton family. His first night on the job leads to the accidental murder of Mary, the young liberal daughter who gets so drunk that Bigger has to carry her upstairs. When her blind mother comes in to check on her in the middle of the night, Bigger panics at the thought of being caught in a white woman’s bedroom and suffocates Mary in order to muffle her potential scream. To avoid detection, he smuggles her body downstairs, dismembers it, and places it in the furnace. After her body is eventually discovered in section two, Bigger flees with his girlfriend Bessie through the cold streets of snowy Chicago, hiding in abandoned buildings as the police cordon tightens. While still in flight, he rapes then kills Bessie and leaves her body at the bottom of an airshaft. The police eventually surround him on the roof of a building as an angry white mob gathers on the streets below. In section three, “Fate,” the novel details his trial and eventual death sentence. The triptych frame also structures Bigger’s spatial relationship to his adopted home, an alien relationship made more discernable through sound than sight. Like a giant ear that can never close, “unprotected by trade or profession, faith or belief; opened to every trivial blast of daily or hourly circumstance,” Bigger moves through the South Side (“How Bigger,” 529). Unlike the Edenic opening scene of “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Native Son opens with a cacophony of noise that envelops Bigger and his family in horror rather 164 than pleasure. Inside the echo chamber of their single room kitchenette, the family is inundated with screaks, screams, squeals, skitters, and the “Brrrrrrriiiiiiinnnnnng” of the alarm clock that rattles Bigger from his fitful, stolen sleep (1). Time is always already “running out” for Bigger, Wright’s restless and unemployed anti-hero, who is barely surviving at the shadowy margins of Chicago’s highly segregated economy. As he and his family reluctantly arise, the piercing howl fuses with the high-pitched squeal of a predatory rat that skitters across the cold wooden floor and contrasts with the human screams of his mother and sister as they scramble for safety. Bigger begrudgingly fills the role of male rescuer, trapping the black rat and violently killing it as it screaks for its life and attempts to scuttle away. The clanging alarm, the shrill scream, and the horrifying shriek of the doomed black rat resonate with the unequal power relations shaping Bigger’s life and prefigure the ending of Wright’s novel. Born into noise and defined as dissonance by the powers that be, Bigger himself will be hunted, trapped, and eventually doomed to a living death behind the clang of the prison’s iron door; he will skitter, scuttle, and screech for his own life just like the black rat he kills to save his family. What is most striking about the clanging of this alarm, however, is how Wright chooses it to “convey the motif of the entire scheme of the book,” using it to “sound, in varied form, the note that was to be resounded throughout [the book’s] length (“Bigger” 534). He turns a signal sound of danger into the keynote of Native Son, emphasizing the constant trauma and extreme stress “bearing hourly” upon 165 Bigger’s existence while simultaneously creating a dissonant tone that puts the reader on constant alert (534). Bigger struggles to hear beyond the “clanging” of the alarm which reverberates throughout the text, in the “far away clang” of passing street cars (91, 351, 353), the “clanging of the shovel against iron” as the reporters unearth Mary’s charred bones from the furnace (250), and the bell he hears while fitfully dreaming in the Dalton home, which “clanged so loud that he could hear the iron tongue clapping against the metal sides” (189). In horrific symmetry, the clanging alarm echoes the “clanging” of the cell door at the novel’s end (391,487,502). Just as the novel’s opening tableau offers a microcosm of the quotidian unrelenting fear in which the average black migrant exists, that emotion is experienced most profoundly through the sense of sound. The spaces of white privilege, in contrast, emit measured sound. The airplane that Bigger and his friends spy streaking through the sky as they remain planted on the street—which Houston Baker describes in “Richard Wright and the Dynamics of Place in Afro-American Literature” as the ultimate sign of white mobility (1990: 86)—moves “noiselessly” as it trails its white plumage of exhaust (16). As Bigger ambles toward the Dalton home on “quiet and spacious” Drexel Avenue, he crosses the threshold of the sonic color-line and a hush falls all around him: “The streets were empty, save for an occasional car that zoomed past on swift rubber tires. This was a cold and distant world; a world of secrets carefully guarded” (49). Unlike public streetcars, which 166 clang their way down fixed tracks, private automobiles are quiet, headed wherever they please at any speed. 40 Sonically, then, the stillness of Drexel Avenue is neither calm nor welcoming, but rather a muffled, secretive silence that requires the oppression and repression of racial and socioeconomic Others, in contrast to its manicured, affluent architecture. The Daltons’ silent mansion literally depends upon the noisy rat-infested kitchenette for its existence—as Mr. Dalton owns the company that leases Mrs. Thomas her room—and is predicated upon the fiction of Otherness, not doubleness. In the political economy of Chicago’s South Side at mid- century, which had become blacker and blacker through the migratory call for laboring bodies, the Dalton’s silence is not merely the absence of sound, but an act of power in the face of an increasing black population. Like an auditorium, which uses absorbent material to suppress echoes, the entire Dalton home is muffled, padded, and deadened against the noise of the outer world. When Bigger arrives, that subdued silence is so loud as to be frightening. When he pushes the buzzer, “he was startled to hear a soft gong sound within” (50, emphasis mine) then later, the “slow ticking of a clock” and a “faint sound of piano music which floated to him from somewhere” (51). Native Son melds audio with visual here, as these tones are both heard and seen throughout the house’s “smooth walls” (50), its “softly lighted hallway” (50), “dim lights,” “rug so soft and deep” (51), and its terrifying “big white cat, pacing without sound” (52). This mute cat, whose obsessive gaze haunts Bigger throughout the novel, is the photographic 167 negative image of the squealing black rat that stalks the Thomas family in their kitchenette. The cat, as the rat’s natural predator, is ultimately more deadly. Similar to the quietude of the southern pastoral, the muted sound of white domesticity enacts racial terror to young black male ears. As Bigger moves through this cold, alien world, which he describes as “so utterly different from his own” (51), he begins to feel “conscious of every inch of his black body” (52). Again, sound and space offer epistemological access to the self. Bigger physically embodies noise, which sound historian Peter Bailey describes as “sound out of place” (195). During his struggles to get through the uncomfortable interview with the frequently “wordless” Mr. Dalton (59), the house itself tries to muffle, mute, and consume Bigger: he was sitting on the very edge of his chair. He rose slightly to sit farther back; but when he sat he sank down so suddenly and deeply that he thought the chair had collapsed under him. He bounded halfway up, in fear; then. . . he sank distrustfully down again (51). Bigger can only be aware of his bodily and psychic alienation, discerning even unconsciously that the Dalton home will always be a site of labor for him, even though he lives in as a chauffeur. Despite Wright’s rich aural description, readings of Bigger’s arrival in the Dalton home have largely focused on its visual aspects (Nagel: 1969, Butler: 1997), such the ‘racializing gaze’ of Mr. Dalton (Tuhkanen: 1999) and the literal blindness and metaphoric colorblindness of Mrs. Dalton (Elmer: 1998); left out is a discussion of Mrs. Dalton’s “intense listening” (68), and how her aural perception is itself 168 racialized. Bigger associates Mrs. Dalton’s hyperdeveloped “listening ear” with the power of “unseen” racial terror, describing her as a “ghostly white blur” and as “someone whom he could scarcely see” (69). Although her liberal political leanings theoretically suggest that she would have a sympathetic “ear” to African Americans, Wright characterizes her embodied identity as a white woman as a filter that profoundly shapes what she hears: “To Bigger her face seemed to be capable of hearing in every pore of the skin” (68). As a result, her embodied listening ear works to racialize Bigger even though she quite literally cannot “see” race. The way in which Mrs. Dalton listens to him gives Bigger the uncanny “feeling that she could see him even though he knew that was blind. His skin tingled” (68). The tingling of his skin suggests that Bigger is equally as conscious of his body under Mrs. Dalton’s auditory surveillance as he is in the sights of Mr. Dalton’s gaze. As Bigger continues to observe her listening, however, he realizes that she does not actually perceive him, but rather her expectations of him; she listens intently to/through the dominant cultural narrative that dictates—to paraphrase Elizabeth Alexander—the parameters in which his body moves (100). Her listening ear has been formed against the default silence of the opulent Dalton home and she is attuned to the sound of herself as normal. She detects Bigger’s presence by the noise he makes in the stillness of the kitchen: “Mrs. Dalton had turned and listened to the sound of his feet as he had walked. She knows exactly where I’m standing, he thought” (68). At first, Bigger views her ability to follow him as a type of 169 omniscient trick, but he quickly realizes that he has unwittingly stepped into her prefabricated pattern. As Bigger stands in her kitchen drinking some water, “he realized that she had been standing there waiting to hear the sound of the glass as it had clinked on the sink” (69). Her precise expectation of where and when Bigger’s glass will hit the sink is only the beginning, Bigger realizes, as she proceeds to prod him to go to night school just like “the last man who worked here,” as if the two were interchangeable (69). When Bigger does not conform immediately to the answer she expects—an enthusiastic and immediate “yes, mam” (69)—her displeasure is audible and she indicates that the conversation is not over. Confronted with the preconceived desires and structured meanings that Mrs. Dalton’s listening practice communicates, it is not surprising that Bigger immediately connects her with his mother, whom Wright casts as castrating figure not unlike the depiction of his own mother in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” 41 While Bigger feels both women seek to control him, he realizes Mrs. Dalton is much more threatening. With his mother, he has a battle of wills—“his mother wanted him to do the things she wanted him to do,”—but the far more powerful Mrs. Dalton seeks to obliterate his will entirely: “he felt that Mrs. Dalton wanted him to do the things that she felt that he should have wanted to do” (70). As Bigger imagines himself through Mrs. Dalton’s “listening ear,” he sees only two options: become inaudible by mimicking her expectations—walking where she wants him to, putting 170 the glass down precisely when he finishes, going to night school—or to be exposed as noise, a disruptive and dangerous sound out of place. Bigger is never more “out of place” than the night of Mary’s murder, when Mrs. Dalton walks in on him in the “dark and silent” inner sanctum of her daughter’s bedroom in the middle of the night (95). This scene is presented largely through a highly sexualized gothic mélange of sound 42 —creaky floorboards, soft rustles, pounding hearts, mumbled prayers, last gasps, and expectant silences—a soundscape that records and transmits Bigger’s terror and titillation at the situation he finds himself in. Although Bigger is in Chicago rather than Mississippi, he realizes immediately that the sound of a white girl’s scream would have the same damning effect upon the Dalton’s ears: “Frenzy dominated him. . .he had to stop her from mumbling or he would be caught. . .she must not move or make any sound that would betray him” (97-98). As he presses a pillow onto Mary’s face to bury the potential scream in her throat, Bigger imagines that Mrs. Dalton can hear every minute sound his body makes. Conscious of himself as noise, “Bigger waited tensely, afraid to move for fear of bumping into something in the dark and betraying his presence” (97). Ultimately, he evades her exacting ears by mirroring her: “with each of her movements toward the bed his body made a movement to match hers, away from her, his feet not lifting themselves from the floor, but sliding softly and silently over the smooth deep rug” (98). In a type of mimesis reminiscent of “The 171 Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” Bigger follows the lessons Mrs. Dalton taught him in the kitchen, making himself inaudible by dissolving into her preconceived patterns. The hushed interior space of the Dalton home serves microcosmically, just like the Thomas family’s noisy kitchenette. The authoritative and oppressive silence of the mansion is not contained by its exterior walls. After Mary’s murder, the streets of Chicago fill with snow, a substance that Bigger likens to “magic whiteness without sound” (135). This blizzard, a “sort of great natural force,” climactically symbolizes the ultimate reach of white control over the city: “All around him were silence and night and snow falling, falling as though it had fallen from the beginning of time and it would always fall till the end of the world” (211). Wright’s Native Son uses sound to underscore that whiteness is a normative and proprietary material presence—the snow that attempts to cover everything—as well as an oppressive, abstract structure of privilege with tremendous economic, political and psychic rewards—a silent “natural force” (129). In addition to using sound to conceptualize the power dynamics of whiteness, Wright also uses Bigger’s point of audition to communicate his profound feelings of entrapment from the kitchenette to the jail cell. There are two simultaneous overlapping Chicagos in Native Son, the vibrant “noisy crowded [city] filled with the sense of power and fulfillment” experienced by those not bound by the color-line, and the limited, segregated Chicago of Bigger’s experience (“How Bigger” 516). In order to (re)create Bigger’s sense of isolation—which dogs him on either side of the 172 spatial color-line—Wright pairs Bigger’s vibrant visual experience with a very limited palette of sound. Wright describes many of sounds Bigger apprehends in Native Son by using a repetitive combination of five adjectives: “clanging,” “rattling,” “rumbling, “creaking,” and “droning.” For example, “drone”—with all the meaningless and repetitive labor the word implies—is heard not only in the furnace that houses Mary’s bones (140, 180, 177, 213) but also in the fire hose that is used to capture Bigger (311), the voices of the mob (384), the preacher (328), and the courtroom lawyers (385). The metallic “rattling” of the coal down the furnace chute (134) also recurs several times in the narrative, in the sound of the passing street cars (20), in the gusts of wind that rock the city the night Bigger is captured (268) and in the horrifying noise of Bessie’s murder (276). Wright’s repetition constructs a limited, enclosed world enveloping Bigger Thomas, constructing his subjectivity as both a product of his urban environment and an interactive process of apprehending it through his “listening ear.” Bigger’s limited—and limiting—sonic experience of the city contests representation of the urban North as space of visible freedom and equal rights. 43 In “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Wright constructs a soundtrack to contest the violent visual representation of lynching. In Native Son—which examines a Northern space of de facto segregation—Wright presents us with a soundtrack that enables readers to hear the spectacular capture and sham trial of Bigger Thomas as lynching. The fact that Wright based Native Son on the newspaper coverage of the 173 1938 Robert Nixon case supports this reading. Nixon, described in the press as a “Negro Vagrant” was arrested in Chicago and accused of murdering a woman with a brick; under duress, Nixon confessed to crimes as far away as Los Angeles. “The subsequent trial of Nixon in Chicago” writes Arnold Rampersad, “was reported in sensational and frankly racist detail by local newspapers, notably the Tribune” (594). Margaret Walker copiously collected the clippings for Wright, as he was in Harlem writing for The Daily Worker that year. Robert Nixon was executed in 1939. Whereas Big Boy imagined newspaper headlines objectifying him, Bigger actually sees himself visually stereotyped, demonized and dissected by the swift and powerful media machine. “AUTHORITIES HINT SEX CRIME” accuses one set of headlines (281). “24-HOUR SEARCH FAILS TO UNEARTH RAPIST” shout another (322). The day he is to go to court, the newspaper reads: His lower jaw protrudes obnoxiously, reminding one of a jungle beast. His arms are long, hanging in a dangling fashion to his knees. It is easy to imagine how this man, in the grip of a brain-numbing sex passion, overpowered little Mary Dalton (323). The newspaper reduces Bigger to a hyperbolized stereotype of a debased, savage animal, allowing the readership to “imagine” him guilty based on this horrific depiction alone. Native Son implies that the hungry white American power structure constructs Bigger—through films like Trader Horn 44 and newspaper articles filled with lurid lies and stereotypical representations—in order to devour him. When whites cross the “sonic color-line” in order to capture Bigger, he hears the deafening white silence of the snowy landscape accede to the apocalyptic “terror 174 song of the siren,” the overwhelming noise announcing the arrival of eight thousand white policemen in the South Side. In a sonic performance of white authority, the police force gathers all of its audio resources to frighten and intimidate the black community into submission. Bigger’s capture is an excuse for white power to be publicly performed through an orchestration of horrific sound that is so penetrating it does not merely keep people in their places; it literally pins them there. The imperialist din is so ear-splitting, Bigger appears to be captured by sound itself: He listened; there were throbs of motors; shouts rose from the streets; there were screams of women and curses of men…The siren died and began again, on a high, shrill note this time. It made him want to clutch at his throat; as long as it sounded it seemed he could not breathe. . .a medley of crashing sounds came, louder than he had thought that sound could be: horns, sirens, screams. There was hunger in those sounds as they crashed over the roof- tops and chimneys (298). Policing “noise” functions here like a sonic “lynch mob,” and Bigger begins to suffocate and clutch at his throat as the sound profile of the police cordon encapsulates him. Sound is an important modality through which white supremacy is orchestrated and performed; Native Son reveals that the extremes of controlled silence and controlling noise are important contours of the “sonic color-line.” The noise of the police capture accedes to the “roaring mob” of spectators gathered outside Bigger’s trial, the aural image that threatens to dominate the third section of Native Son. Their “mighty roar” echoes throughout the courtroom during Bigger’s trial (361), the “roar of [their] voices” penetrates the walls of Bigger’s jail cell (351, 389), and the “roar gr[ows] louder” (389) when he is led through the 175 ferocious mob on the way to the courtroom. The description here is highly reminiscent of the dialogue Big Boy overhears as Bobo is lynched: “as soon as [Bigger] was visible the roar reached a deafening pitch and continued to rise each second. . .‘You black ape! Shoot that bastard!’”(390). Even more troubling is the fact that the f vociferous noise of this would-be lynch mob penetrates the space of the courtroom during Bigger’s trial. When Buckley, the state’s attorney, first takes the floor: “The room was quiet as a tomb. Buckley strode to the window and with one motion of his hand hoisted it up. The rumbling mutter of the vast mob swept in. The court room stirred” (433). With this action, Buckley essentially (re)constructs the courtroom as a giant echo chamber filled by the mob’s anger and hate. Buckley never speaks with a lone voice, rather his words are always already encompassed in and authorized by the deadly power of the whites in the street who want to see Bigger dead. Their rumbling surrounds the building, forcing its way through every partly-opened window and even reverberating through the structure itself: “Bigger heard the faint excited sound of the mob voices coming through the concrete walls of the building” (351). It is not surprising that the judge turns a deaf ear to Max’s attempt to speak on Bigger’s behalf, his voice, as he feared, unable be heard “above the hungry yelping of hounds on the hunt” (446). 1 By “Jim Crow,” I am referring to the systematic and formally legislated regime system of racial terror, segregation, and economic/political/social/civil inequality in the United States between the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision in 1896 and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1950s, especially following Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. Although the term is usually reserved to describe the southern United States during this period—where whites used legislation, custom, and violence to attempt a totalizing form of racial segregation from the “cradle to the 176 grave”—I believe that strident forms of racism also practiced in the North must be examined as part of an overall American racial regime. As Richard Wright describes in “How Bigger Was Born,” “the Southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and impersonal commodity profit machine” (515). These powerful connections between the Jim Crow South and the segregated North are still overlooked; most recently the 2003 PBS special The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow chose to focus specifically on the South because racism was “most virulent” there (xiii). This chapter specifically focuses on how Richard Wright uses aural imagery to articulate “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line in the 1930s and early 1940s. 2 In a private conversation shortly before his presentation with Natasha Barnes at the University of Rochester in September 2005, James Allen, curator of the Without Sanctuary exhibit of lynching photographs, leaned in and very quietly told me that he has never come across a sound recording of a lynching. He remarked that the Library of Congress is said to possess one, but no one has been able to actually obtain it. The “actual” soundtrack of a lynching—as opposed to songs or literary depictions—exists only in rumor and remembrance. Grace Elizabeth Hale (1998: 227), Edward Ayers (1992:159), and Mark M. Smith (2006: 59) cite Mell Barrett’s recollection of a childhood encounter with an Edison recording of a lynching at a county picnic in 1896, but these are the only references I have come across. Neither text addresses the aurality of the spectacle of lynching. Although this could be partly attributed to less advanced portable audio recording technology—Goldsby has an amazing reading of how Kodak’s Brownie “point and shoot” cameras were crucial to the popularity of lynching photography in A Spectacular Secret (2006)—I don’t believe the lack of lynching recordings can be reduced to this issue. After all, as sound historian Jonathan Sterne writes in An Audible Past (2003), the representational medium of sound recording was developed alongside photography in a post-Victorian American culture saturated by an obsession with memorializing death. Home recording technology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was marketed specifically to capture the voices of the dying for posterity. Early anthropologists were also defining the “modernity” of their own cultures by making field recordings of “primitive” cultures they perceived to be “dying out using hand-cranked phonographs as early as the turn of the nineteenth century (311-325). 3 I was also inspired to read the lynching photographs in this way by Paul Gilroy’s article “Between the Blues and the Blues Dance: Some Soundscapes of the Black Atlantic” (2003), in which he examines a photograph of an audience gathered at a reggae concert in South London. Although the photos bear no direct relation, Gilroy’s reading calls attention to the limited way in which critics have previously treated images of spectatorship as solely recording “looking.” While viewers of the picture are limited to looking because of the photographic medium, the people depicted in the photographs were not. Fred Moten’s reading of the moaning embedded in the images of Emmett Till’s funeral also considers the sound of visual images. 4 Read together, Wright’s early work exemplifies what Farah Jasmine Griffin has termed the “African-American migration narrative,” a story detailing the catalysts driving African Americans to leave the South for the North and their experiences navigating the theoretically “freer” spaces of cities like Chicago while negotiating the possibilities and limitations of the racialized and gendered power dynamics continuing to operate in these urban spaces (1). 5 For an extended discussion of the difficulty of re-framing lynching photographs in anti-lynching movements before and after this period, see Leigh Reighford’s “Lynching, Visuality, and the Un/making of Blackness” (2006). 6 W.E.B. Du Bois was a founding member of the NAACP in 1909 and served as a member of the Board of Directors, editor of The Crisis and Director of Publicity and Research from 1910-1934. 177 James Weldon Johnson was Executive Secretary from 1920-1930. Walter White was the organization’s Executive Director from 1931-1955. 7 The last remaining defendant was released after World War II, after being held for 15 years on false charges. 8 In one article dated August 12, 1937, entitled “Huddie Ledbetter, Famous Negro Folk Artist, Sings the Songs of His People,” Wright intertwines the story of the Scottsboro boys with one of “most amazing cultural swindles in American history”: Alan Lomax’s musical and economic theft from Ledbetter (Leadbelly) (7). The article also previews a Federal Writer’s Project “moonlight sail” in honor of the Scottsboro boys, in which Leadbelly is to premiere his blues song “The Scottsboro Boys Got Here” for the boys’ mothers, who became fervent (inter)national activists against American fascism and racism. 9 Wright’s poem is a first person reflection on lynching, in which the speaker stumbles upon the visual remnants of a lynching—bleached bones, bloodied clothes, a discarded lipstick—and then imagines himself being lynched. The imagery becomes very sound-driven as the tense of the poems shifts from past to present; the speaker’s vice is drowned out by muttering wind, yelping hounds, and the roar of the mob. All of these images resurface in “Big Boy Leaves Home” and Native Son. 10 For further discussion of these exhibits and the complex range of their representational strategies, see Margaret Rose Vandyres’s “Hanging on their Walls: An Art Commentary on Lynching, The Forgotten 1935 Art Exhibition” (1997), Dora Apel’s Imagery of Lynching (2004), and Helen Langa’s “Two Anti-Lynching Art Exhibitions: Politicized Viewpoints, Racial Perspectives, Gendered Constraints” (2006). 11 In The Auditory Mirror, Silverman argues that the “notion that the cinema is able to deliver ‘real’ sounds is an extension of that powerful Western episteme, extending from Plato to Hélène Cixous, which identifies the voice with proximity and the here and now—of a metaphysical tradition which defines speech as the very essence of presence” (43). 12 Murch’s sexualized description of the tension inherent in the audio/visual relationship is especially interesting because of the association between seeing and masculinity and listening and femininity in Western culture (Silverman: 1988, Jütte: 2005, Sterne 2003) and the troubled gender politics of Wright’s fiction. 13 Walker goes on to describe how Wright would see movies repeatedly with critical eyes and ears, “studying each film as if both real life and fiction, [until] he began to see through the thin and transparent plots, the good guys with the white hats, and the villains with the black hats, the increasing action emphasized by the tempo and rising crescendos in the music, the tragic finale, denouement, and fate of so many hapless victims of violent crimes” (221, emphasis mine). 14 In Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work, Walker describes Wright’s frustration with racial representation in Hollywood: “From the Stepin Fetchits and Hattie McDaniels to the Buckwheats and Topsies, all blacks portrayed in such movies as Birth of a Nation, Little Rascals, and Gone With the Wind, convinced Dick Wright he wanted no part of Hollywood for the making of the movie Native Son” (222). Griffin also positions Wright’s fiction against the “nostalgia of Hollywood in films like Gone With the Wind (1939) and Stormy Weather (1943)” (28). 178 15 For an excellent discussion of the construction of linguistic color-lines through dialect writing in the nineteenth century see Gavin Jones’s “‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’: W.E.B. DuBois and the Language of the Color-Line” (1997). 16 Douglas Gomery notes that The Jazz Singer itself opened to lukewarm reviews, but the music was so popular that Vitaphone contracted with Jolson for $100,000 to make three more films based on the strength of these segments alone (14). 17 By 1939—the year that Wright completed his first draft of Native Son and Hollywood released Gone With the Wind—Technicolor had pushed the spectacle of cinematic realism to an entirely new level, but one, as cultural critic Priscilla Ovalle notes, no less dependent on racially marked bodies and, I would add, sounds. In her unpublished manuscript, “Shake Your Assets: Dance and the Hollywood Performance of Latina Sexuality,” Ovalle describes how the “process of positioning different bodies on the cinema screen gained momentum as cinema moved towards Technicolor and yet another technological advancement sought ‘vivid’ personalities – one of many codes for ethnic – to pose as the ‘natural’ subjects of color film” (7). In “GWTW,” an essay written to accompany the Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photographs in America, Hilton Als imagines what it would be like to see Gone With the Wind remixed with an alternate soundtrack, its sweeping orchestral score and falsified slave dialects giving way to the spare anticipation of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” performed for the first time at the Café Society around the same time that GWTW premiered in segregated Atlanta. See Tara MacPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003) for a detailed reading of the role that the literary and cinematic versions of Gone With the Wind played in constructing (white) Southern nostalgia. 18 In this epigraph, the “smiles” of the black service staff—metonymic for the visual economy of racial subordination and reminiscent of Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” (1895)— protect their interiority while conforming to (en)forced stereotypes of black servitude. This language is also very similar to descriptions within slave narratives, which try to disrupt the normalized view of slavery for white Northern audiences. As Harriet Jacobs writes, “If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings” (383). 19 Psychoanalytic readings of Wright began shortly after Native Son was published, with Frederic Wertham’s “An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son” in 1944. Several have followed, most famously including “Race, Rage, and Desire: Savage Holiday by Richard Wright” in Claudia Tate’s Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (1998). Furthermore, Walker’s biography of Wright gives an account of his deep interest in psychoanalysis. She includes a helpful bibliography of Wright’s extensive reading on the topic in Daemonic Genius (379-381), as does Tate (206 n7). 20 “Sonorous envelope” is actually Mary Anne Doane’s term, from “The Voice in Cinema” (1980). Silverman examines it extensively in chapter two, “The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Paranoia and Consumption” (240). 21 In both “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” and “Big Boy Leaves Home”—throughout Uncle Tom’s Children, actually—Wright uses italics to suggest a specific aural inflection of the word “white” by his black characters. This practice connects these works to his discussion in 12 Million Black Voices. 22 Robyn J. Stillwell connects the image of listening as feminine with both psychoanalysis and film theory: “Sound—particularly hearing—is historically associated with irrationality and emotion, traits 179 magnified by its subset music; irrationality, emotion and music have all been associated with the feminine, making the equation of sound and femininity implicit in our culture. This alliance is deeply woven into psychoanalytic theory, with positive but also profoundly negative implications for female subjectivity, and therefore into psychoanalytic film theory” (182). 23 My reading of this scene has caused me to view the inscription of Wright’s Native Son (1940) with a different eye, especially in conjunction with the subject matter of that novel: “To My Mother,” it reads, “who, when I was a child on her knee, taught me to revere the fanciful and the imaginative.” 24 This language is later echoed in Wright’s Native Son, when Bigger stands outside the “high iron picket” fence of the Dalton home, “filling with fear and emptiness” (49). 25 As I will discuss shortly, the train whistle would come to be an important aural image for Wright, especially as a signal for freedom, possibility, escape. The train whistle also has a long and important resonance in African American music, as both theme and musical motif, especially in blues. See Farah Jasmine Griffin’s Who Set You Flowing? (1995), “Here Come My Train” in Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998) and Houston Baker’s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-America Literature (1984). John Lovell, Jr.’s Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (1972) traces the presence and influence of the train back to slave spirituals. There is also a growing body of work that examines the trope of the train in Duke Ellington’s body of work, such as Joel Dinerstein’s Swinging the Machine (2003). 26 For recent discussions on slavery and sound see Mark M. Smith’s Listening to Nineteenth Century America (2001) and Shane White and Graham White’s The Sound of Slavery (2005). 27 Writers in the vein of the Reconstruction-era Southern pastoral include Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, George W. Cable, Grace King, and most infamously, Thomas Dixon, whose novel The Clansman was the basis for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1915. 28 For more analysis of white womenhood and lynching, see Shawn Michael Smith, “Afterimages: White Womanhood, Lynching, and the War in Iraq” (2006), Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood (1987), and Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: A Red Record of American Literature 1900-1912 (1996). For a discussion of the role of white women in the Klu Klux Klan of the 1920s, see Kathleen M. Blee’s Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920’s (1992) and Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Klu Klux Klan (1994). For a more general analysis of the iconography and mythology of the white Southern woman through the contemporary moment, see Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003). 29 Hortense Spillers describes this as “ungendering” in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1994). In addition, Wright describes himself as ungendered in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” through the repeated of trauma of being forced to listen to the screams of black women in pain—from white male physical and sexual abuse—and not being able to help or defend them. One day, while polishing brass as a clothing store porter, Wright sees the boss and his twenty-year-old son grab a black woman off the street and drag her into the store. A policeman, representative of white authority, tellingly looks the other way while phallically “twirling his night-stick” (8). Fearful, Wright “watches out of the corner of his eye” while continuing to work, despite the fact that he hears “shrill screams coming from the rear of the store” (8). 30 Pertinent to the notion of the soundtrack, the female scream also has an important resonance in the history of the cinema, where Philip Brophy argues that it is “one of the most iconic sound effects in 180 cinema” next to the sound of a gun being fired (52)—not surprisingly the two dominant sounds in the scene under discussion here from “Big Boy Leaves Home.” Jacques Chion pushes this argument further, claiming that “since the cinema first discovered women screaming, it has shown great skill in producing screams and stockpiling them for immediate and frequent deployment” (75). I want to examine this notion of the cinema as a technology designed to produce a (white) woman’s scream, particularly in connection with lynching as a technology enacted by a (white) woman’s perceived scream. These narratives converge in the implied sounds of the white female scream at the climax of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915)—America’s first full-length feature film—in which the Klan rides in to save the young white heroine from rape and lynch her would-be assailant. For a concise analysis of the impact of the film on American cinema and culture see Ed Guerrero’s Framing Blackness (1993: 13-18). 31 Wright also uses this sound as a leitmotif throughout the story. When Big Boy’s father rushes home after hearing that something has happened to his son, all Big Boy’s mother has to say is “‘Saul, it’s a white woman!’” to describe their son’s trouble. The sound of his mother’s voice intoning the word white—almost as if the scream is embedded in the tone—causes Big Boy to react as if struck: “Big Boy winced. The old man compressed his lips and stared at his wife. Lucy gaped at her brother as if she had never seen him before” (34). 32 The visual symbol for “fasces” is a bundle of sticks tied around a rod, a phallic image intended to suggest strength through unity. A single rod is easily broken, but a bundle is much more difficult to break. 33 In her 1938 review of Uncle Tom’s Children, Hurston wrote, “since the author himself is a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling thing. One wonders how he arrived at it. Certainly he does not write by ear unless he is tone deaf” (32). 34 In Hawthorne’s story—an indictment of sanctimonious Puritans—Goodman Brown follows the Devil into a pine forest, where he sees the holiest members of his church community engaged in Satanic worship led by his Deacon. In the light of flaming pine trees, “Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as the pious love, but joined to words which expressed all that our nature can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more. . .Verse after verse was sung, and still the chorus of the desert swelled between, like the deepest tone of the mighty organ. And, with the final peal of that dreadful anthem, there came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts, and every other voice of the uncontroverted wilderness, were mingling and according with the voice of the guilty man, the in homage to the prince of all” (469). 35 In an interesting connection, “cricket cries” were used as part of a recent attempt to provide lynching photographs with a soundtrack at a recent Without Sanctuary exhibition at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta Georgia in 2000. After moving through an anteroom were “Strange Fruit” played softly, Apel describes, the “exhibition proper also had a subdued soundscape, with the piped in sounds of chirping crickets, followed by clips from four grieving black spirituals. . . the black voices of lament provided a sense of subjectivity that worked as a counterweight to the largely faceless black corpses and smug white mobs in the photos” (“On Looking” 56). Big Boy provides this sense of subjectivity—and agency, I would add—in Wright; he chooses instead to focus readers’ ears on the terror-inducing smugness of the white mob. 36 In Listening to the Nineteenth Century historian Mark Smith describes the active construction of the Southern soundscape as the “sweet purl of nature” (84) by slave masters as essential to the functioning of white power during slavery: “slaveholders imagined themselves custodians of a seamlessly tranquil society where calm reigned and tranquility was heard” (20). By orchestrating the 181 quietude of the plantation, slavemasters attempted to naturalize slavery, placing it in tune with both the rhythms of time (plantation bells and horns) and with nature (the sounds of planting and harvesting). Although much was made of natural sounds, Smith argues, the sound of the plantation was not simply natural, it was a constructed sense of pastoral, where mechanical sounds like the train are selectively incorporated as desirable and as having their proper place and time in a highly ordered, organized, and tidy world (40). In attempting to stir emotions in support of abolition, antebellum journalists often described the south as “at once worryingly silent and horribly piercing” (157). 37 In Roderick Ferguson’s recent critique of Wright in Aberrations in Black—which reads his work against dominant sociological narratives of black sexual pathology and licentiousness produced by the “Chicago School” in the 1920s and 1930s—he remarks that “we may only look to Bigger’s name as a registrar of anxiety about feminization and castration” (44). 38 In addition to Dawahare (1995) and Griffin (1995), Higashida (2003) reads “Big Boy Leaves Home” and Native Son as related narratives. 39 Several critics argue that Wright’s conception of Bigger’s point of view is the supreme achievement of Native Son (Tremaine 1986: Reilly 1990). I am the first to discuss Bigger’s “point of audition.” 40 “The opposition between the steel of the streetcars and the ‘swift rubber tires’ of automobiles” Alessandro Portelli argues, “divides two universes of sounds and two types of space (the crowded streetcars and the privacy of the automobile)” (234). 41 In the opening scene, Bigger’s mother describes him as the “most no-countest man I ever seen in all my life!” (7) and tells him “we wouldn’t have to live in this garbage dump if you had any manhood in you” (7). 42 Although he does not discuss sound, Robert Butler has characterized Native Son as gothic in two essays, “Farrell’s Ethnic Neighborhood and Wright’s Urban Ghetto: Two Visions of Chicago’s South Side” (1993) and “Urban Frontiers, Neighborhoods, and Traps: The City in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, and Wright’s Native Son” (2000). James Smethurst’s recent essay “Invented by Horror: The Gothic and African American Literary Ideology in Native Son” (2001) challenges Butler’s reading, asserting that Native Son is actually an anti-gothic novel that uses gothic conventions in order to critique them as a type of false consciousness and a device that mystifies the social and racial order of capitalism. 43 The “roaring” of the Dalton’s furnace is another significant recurring sound in Native Son. This blisteringly hot machine is one of the most active elements of Wright’s audible terrain, moaning (146), humming (171), whispering (236, 241), and singing (175, 178) with the torrid, “droning” rage that Bigger himself cannot express. Most often, however, this furnace simply roars with a consuming fear and a hungry ferocity that cannot be silenced and often blots out sound entirely (105, 107, 133, 137, 185, 248, 251). Until the discovery of Mary’s bones by the news reporters, this sound haunts Bigger, reminding him both of Mary’s murder and the explosiveness of the anger he felt toward her and Jan Erlone the night of her death. James A. Emmanuel argues that the furnace “metaphorically dramatizes part of the black man’s American experience” (26) and Wright’s descriptions of Bigger certainly support this reading: “he himself was a huge furnace now through which no air could go; and the fear that surged into his stomach, filling him, choking him, was like the fumes of smoke that had belched from the ash bin” (251). 182 44 For a wonderful reading of the cinema scene—and the physical space of the theater itself—that contextualizes theories of black spectatorship within segregation, migration, and modernity, see Jacqueline Stewart, “Negroes Laughing at Themselves?: Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity” (2003). 183 CHAPTER THREE Echoes in a “Vacuum Unheard”: Listening, Segregation, and Distortion in Ann Petry and W.E.B. Du Bois “So much goes on in a Harlem air shaft. You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love, you hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker. You see your neighbor’s laundry. You hear the Janitor’s dogs. The man upstairs’ aerial falls down and breaks your window. You smell coffee. A wonderful thing that smell. An air shaft has got every contrast. One guy is cooking dried fish and rice and another guy’s got a great big turkey. Guy-with-fish’s wife is a terrific cooker but the guy’s wife with the turkey is doing a sad job. You hear people praying, fighting, smoking. . .I tried to put all that into ‘Harlem Air Shaft.’” –Duke Ellington, Program for “Harlem Air Shaft” (1940) “A fight started on the third floor. Its angry violence echoed up the stairs, mingled with the voices on the radio. The conversations that were going on behind the closed doors that lined the hall suddenly ceased. The whole house listened to the progress of the fight. And, Lutie thought, the whole house knows, just as I do, that Bill Smith, who never works, has come home drunk again and is beating up his wife. Living here is like living in a structure that had a roof, but no partitions, so that privacy is destroyed, and even the sound of one’s own breathing becomes a known and familiar thing to each and every tenant.” –Ann Petry, The Street (1946) “I could not forget that even in New York, with all its opportunity for human contact, with its unrivaled facilities for a center of world thought and culture, it was nevertheless no heaven for black folk. . . by careful choice and delicate prevision I may in New York foot a path of broad cultural contact and wide physical freedom; it would be difficult to find a quiet, clean place to live.” –W.E.B. Du Bois Dusk of Dawn (1940) While composer Duke Ellington and writer Ann Petry both represented African American life in 1940s New York City to wide audiences, the Harlems depicted in these epigraphs are considerably divergent. In the program to the swing number “Harlem Air Shaft”—one of Ellington’s many musical meditations on the neighborhood 1 —he uses rich description to portray the air shaft of a Harlem tenement as a vivid, boisterous space rather than an oppressive one, a collective 184 where “every contrast” exists simultaneously and relatively harmoniously. Ellington—born and raised in a black middle-class neighborhood in Washington D.C.—adopted Harlem as his inspirational home in the early twenties. In this passage, he describes an anonymous tenement capable of replicating in perfect microcosm “the full essence” of African American Harlem, constructing and validating an iconic image that remained perpetually unchanged even after the brutal economic downturn of the 1930s. Ellington’s air shaft is also a gendered space of nostalgia, in which husbands bring home dinner for their wives to cook and lovemaking always follows close on the heels of a fight. Despite the verticality of his spatial schematic—gossip “floats down” and smells waft up—Ellington’s description of the air shaft is actually rather flat. A fight is of no more consequence than a smoke; a broken window is forgotten with the delicious smell of coffee. In Ellington’s written description—and in the song itself, where a vociferous solo trumpet weaves in and out of driving brass and dynamic woodwinds—the air shaft represents a type of sonic democracy; the walls of Ellington’s “brick and glass chute became one large mixing board with no one at the controls” (Von Glahn 149), at least until Ellington steps in, using the sound of “all that” to alchemically transform the tenement into a “great big loudspeaker” that broadcasts the “essence of Harlem” all over the country and beyond. The image of the loudspeaker is both metaphoric and literal; by 1940, Duke Ellington’s music was incredibly popular and he had completed two European tours. 185 Rather than a loudspeaker—which broadcasts its sound outward—sounds do not escape Lutie Johnson’s tenement. While both passages begin with a fight and contain the ubiquitous—but important—image of the radio, the similarities abruptly end there. Although she herself is a burgeoning jazz singer, Petry’s protagonist cannot imagine her Harlem tenement—on 116 th Street between 7 th and 8 th Avenues—as anything but a giant echo chamber whose “angry violence” circulates and resonates throughout. Unlike an “air shaft” whose four walls are open to the sky, Lutie describes the circulation of the building’s sound through the stairwell, an enclosed space that is all “roof but no partitions.” Petry’s tenement is also highly gendered, but its domestic sounds are not romanticized, nor do they share equitable space; some sounds drown out or mask others or intermingle in a kind of sonic stratification. The cloistered space of the tenement house creates dense layers of sound amplifying the raced and gendered struggles for power that take place within and without its brick walls. Lutie, who moved to 116 th street after the breakup of her own marriage, hears the sound of Bill Smith beating his wife “mingl[e] with the voices on the radio,” suggesting the violence of both sounds as they struggle for dominance in the stairwell. While Ellington depicts his “Harlem air shaft” as cozy, comfortable, and communal, a natural space “with no one at the controls,” Petry examines the tenement as a constructed site of oppression with white supremacy “at the controls,” an echo chamber deliberately enclosing its residents to limit their movements physically, socially, and economically. To Lutie, the familiarity of the 186 tenement is (en)forced, constricting, and deleterious; so suffocating that even the sound of her breath is stolen from her throat. On one hand, it seems that in order to broadcast a nostalgic view of Harlem to the world, the sounds of violence, frustration, and anger must be suppressed and contained within that tenement space. On the other hand, the endless echoes of violence circulating within are isolating and distorting; Lutie is unable to hear her neighbors as anything but dangerous threats. Lutie’s very name reflects this struggle between expression and suppression: a “lute” is both a musical instrument and a metal tool for spreading concrete, specifically for making a porous surface airtight. I use Ellington as a foil here to amplify Petry’s struggle to represent a Harlem that she felt was invisible, hidden, and deliberately forgotten in the rapid cultural, technological, and political shifts of the 1940s. “The shadow of the past hangs heavily over Harlem,” she reflected in 1949, “obscuring its outlines, obliterating its true face” (“Harlem” 110). In its contemporary moment, the “truth” of Petry’s own representation of Harlem was rarely disputed: Alain Locke’s yearly review for Phylon described the novel as a result of the “best artistic intentions to tell the truth vividly, honestly, objectively” (21); the New York Times called it “decidedly convincing” (Poore 31) and “utterly believable” (Butterfield 117). The critical characterization of Petry’s work as an uncomplicated, transparent window into black life has itself functioned to obscure her literary accomplishment as well as her connection to a larger current of black intellectual and philosophical inquiry about 187 the nature of truth in a white supremacist society. What Petry explores in her wartime fiction is not “the truth” of Harlem, but rather the material, social, and psychological devastation wrought by the very idea that “the truth” of Harlem can be so readily depicted and consumed. Ironically, what has obscured Harlem the most— for her protagonists as well as for her readers—is the absolute certainty with which it has been represented by the dominant culture: “Harlem has been studied and analyzed by sociologists, anthropologists, politicians,” Petry wrote, “it has been twisted to the right and to the left; prettied up and called colorful and exotic, defamed and labeled criminal” (“Harlem” 166). In her early writings, Petry uses realist techniques to dramatize the difficulty of apprehending, representing, and communicating truth in a society whose very structures of knowledge function to silence “Others” while simultaneously obscuring the depth of their partiality and racialization. 2 Petry’s imagery of obscurity, shadows, confusion, and distorted perception is much more reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois than Ellington. As I have discussed in the introduction, Du Bois was himself engaged in exploring the profound epistemic change from a world whose “fundamental facts were clear, unquestioned and unquestionable” (25) to a society that “deliberately and continuously deceive[s] not simply others, but ourselves as to the truth about them, us, and the world” (151). Dusk of Dawn is Du Bois’s personal reflection and philosophical interrogation of the mechanisms that enable “unknown, unapprehended Truth” to thrive in the midst of 188 unprecedented technology for the communication and dissemination of ideas. 3 Although writing in different genres—fiction and social theory, respectively—I argue that both Petry and Du Bois re-theorize how race works in the 1940s, using aural imagery to represent the contours of its pervasive, persistent, and palpable invisibility. Despite the veneer of freedom and opportunity held out by the North in the late 1930s and early 1940s, “it was nevertheless no heaven for black folk” as the epigraph from Du Bois states. Only with “careful choice and delicate prevision” could he construct a semblance of the type of freedom a white man with similar education, prestige, and social standing would have unthinkingly enjoyed, along with a “quiet, clean place to live” (emphasis mine, 317). Like Petry’s protagonist Lutie Johnson, Du Bois does not romanticize the “noise” of segregated life, but examines the political, economic, and social structures that propagate it while demarcating “quiet” as an invisible and unquestioned white racial privilege. In The Street, Lutie describes how de facto segregated urban neighborhoods operated as the “North’s lynch mobs. . .the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place” (323). If color-lines are heard—not just seen—the processes of racialization can continue to operate in covert and extralegal ways, even when a society enacts laws and propagates cultural representations that turn a “blind eye” to perceived racial difference. As I briefly mentioned in the introduction, this is the first study that examines Petry in concert with Du Bois. Reading them together not only broadens the 189 respective ways in which each has been considered as a writer and a thinker, but also allows for a unique examination of what Raymond Williams describes as the “structure of feeling” at this crucial historical moment of tremendous technological, social, and political change. Both writers attempt to capture an intellectual infrastructure that itself is in transition in the early 1940s, or to borrow Williams’s words, the “pre-emergence” of new cultural formations, “active and pressing but not yet fully articulated” (126). 4 At what was in some ways the height or tipping point of legalized urban segregation, Petry and Du Bois try to navigate the shifting complexity of American racial formations and perceptions, deliberately obscuring the “clarity” of the past and exploring the “mist and murk” of their present moment (Du Bois xxix). Exploring Petry and Du Bois together allows us to place segregation at the heart of the rhetoric of technological innovation—as well as the discourse of colorblindness stemming from World War II—rather than as anachronistic or ancillary to it. “The continuing existence of racism,” Paul Gilroy argues in The Black Atlantic, “ . . .requires us to look more deeply into the relationship of racial terror and subordination to the inner character of modernity” (71). Tracing the connections between Petry and Du Bois enables a unique entry point into the relationship between race and mass media in the 1940s, one that is always mindful that advances in mass communication during this period came with concurrent innovation in technologies for mass destruction and genocide. For example, 190 emerging in connection with their particular figurations of the aural dimensions of race and racism, one of the primary associations between Petry and Du Bois is their critique of the ways in which white-controlled sonic mass media—particularly radio—distorted black and white life under the loudly-proclaimed guise of objectivity, national pride, and a newly-professed colorblindness. Radio was one of the key mass mediums through which colorblind racial formations were constructed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, at the exact moment when the United States began preparing for war. To mobilize Americans—particularly African Americans— around the prospect of fighting racism and fascism abroad, the United States government attempted to make domestic racism rhetorically invisible. 5 I argue that the overwhelming presence of aural imagery in Du Bois and Petry’s texts amplifies the ways in which race and racism remained audible during this period, particularly through the radio. In their work, the “sonic color-line” is not simply a horizontal boundary between white and black neighborhoods and social spaces, but an encapsulating atmosphere that profoundly isolates black people within American society and—as Petry’s work in particular reveals—men and women from each other. The links I draw in this chapter between Du Bois and Petry are suggestive rather than exhaustive; the cultural history and close readings I present are intended to clear critical space for thinking the two of them together and lay the foundation for a sustained exploration of their substantive intellectual and literary relationship. To 191 begin this examination, I contextualize both writers within American radio culture of the early 1940s, more specifically the emergence of colorblind discourse during this period. Then, I examine Du Bois’s figuration of the color-line as a plate-glass vacuum enclosure in Dusk of Dawn (1940) alongside Petry’s aural image of segregation as an echo chamber in The Street (1946). To show the depth of Petry’s engagement with Du Bois during this period—how she critiques and extends his ideas while amplifying her own interrogation of the invisible, aural dimensions of race and gender—I conclude with close readings of her wartime writings that emphasize her representation of Harlem as a soundscape: the little-known short story “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” (1943) 6 and her million-selling novel The Street (1946). In Petry’s fiction, seemingly ethereal sounds—a siren’s wail, the still of the night, echoes of a radio broadcast—have devastating material effects. It is not enough for characters like Lutie to simply listen to the sounds of the sonic color-line; constant apprehension of the raced and gendered boundaries of her life suffocates and eventually subsumes her. She learns too late that, due to the distortion of the sonic color-line, listening can confuse perception as much, if not more, than it clarifies it; in order to comprehend the overarching system of race she must listen through the seeming transparency of the sonic color-line rather than to it. 192 American Radio and the Rise of Colorblind Nationalism “Let us remember always that although our religious beliefs are close to our hearts, although we are proud of our ancestry, in a larger sense we are not Jews or Gentiles, whites or blacks. We are the people of the United States.” –Vice President Henry A. Wallace, CBS Radio Address (October 7, 1943) “Hitler will tell you what he thinks of you. American white men will shake hands with you, laugh with you, then shoot you.” –Anonymous African American respondent, Office of War Information Survey (1941) The “sonic color-line” has important consequences for a society where “colorblindness” was just beginning to gain political and social currency. By colorblindness, I mean the belief that if individuals and institutions could overlook race, it would cease to matter in American life and all groups would have equitable access to the privileges, opportunities, and freedoms afforded by citizenship. It is also important to keep in mind Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield’s interrogation of colorblindness as a fundamental “white indifference to the racialized dimension” of the seemingly “neutral” category of citizen (89). During the late 1930s and early 1940s, public discourse concerning race and democracy began to shift, while the hierarchies of material and economic dis/advantage associated with race stayed in full effect by becoming subtler; racism hid itself within this newly- proclaimed transparency of race. Even as radio shows like Americans All, Immigrants All (1938), I’m an American (1941), and Freedom’s People (1941) began to assert a new type of colorblindness over the airwaves that strategically included the “claims of African Americans to full rights and citizenship along with those of Americans of European descent” (Hilmes 250), 7 segregation only 193 intensified. In 1939, the New York Times radio commentator Orrin E. Dunlap could still declare without irony that he believed the American microphone “breathes sound freely” because listeners retain the ability to listen to Amos and Andy (X12). 8 Newspaper radio commentators like the Times’ Dunlap—who wrote over 600 articles about radio during his tenure there—worked hard to construct the American radio as a vehicle for truth, equality, and justice, especially in contrast to the perceived propaganda machines of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and a totalitarian Japan. The association between truth and broadcasting only intensified with the advent of World War II in Europe. “America’s radio is out in the open,” Dunlap wrote in his November 19, 1939, article entitled “The Pilgrim’s Pride,” and lofty aerials, symbols of freedom, dot the hills from coast to coast. They are not long-range nozzles through which to spray propaganda. These wires are electrified in the ‘public interest, convenience and necessity’: not for any single group or the government alone. . .Equality is the keynote (X12). Dunlap’s particular version of colorblindness extols Amos and Andy on one hand, and then proclaims “equality” as radio’s keynote with the other. In order to depict the radio as a self-evident agent of truth and a transparent purveyor of unmediated, unrestricted voices speaking to and for all Americans, he ignores the increasing corporate consolidation of radio 9 and the fundamental role of advertising dollars in determining content while constructing a narrow vision of the “public” that treats his own subject position as its unmarked default. 10 In terms of race, there was a profound disconnect between the idealized discourse of equality and actual radio representation. African American participation in the 194 production of radio broadcasts was extremely limited on the local scale, and nonexistent on a national scale. 11 African Americans owned few radio stations, if any, during this period and had little access to radio’s other means of control— advertising sponsorship—because of the intensity of national consolidation of the airwaves in the mid-1930s. In spite of this lack of representation, African Americans were overrepresented as radio listeners, especially because the interlocking forces of racial discrimination, segregation, and poverty frequently barred them from other forms of public entertainment. Radio critic Kathy Newman describes African American radio listeners as the “forgotten fifteen million.” She argues that radio did not begin targeting advertising to African Americans—let alone running ads for black businesses—until 1949, with the advent of the first radio station devoted to black programming, WDIA in Memphis, Tennessee (2003). African American representation on white-controlled stations remained limited and limiting. The first hour-long network show with an all-black cast, the Urban League’s “The Negro and National Defense,” did not air until March 30, 1941, and was explicitly connected to the war effort. Special union contracts had to be made with performers like Duke Ellington because CBS would only allow the Urban League to use the airtime if the network did not have to pay the artists. In August 1945, the War Department prohibited the broadcast of “The Glass,” which the New York Times described as a “radio script dealing with employment discrimination against Negroes and the Negro Soldier” (“Ban” 16). Furthermore, rather than 195 employ black actors, radio stations frequently hired white people to “sound” black— most famously in Amos and Andy—by speaking in their version of “black” voices, or as Alain Locke described radio dialect, “cornfield voice[s]” (qtd. in Savage 74). Characterized by Savage as “aural blackface,” black voices were constructed and exaggerated to sound like the end man of a minstrel show no matter what the character’s regional location or education level (7). Black actors were frequently refused radio jobs unless they were willing to “sound” black as white producers and audiences understood it. 12 While Dunlap was loudly claiming the inclusiveness and equality of the airwaves in his radio column throughout the 1940s, John Hutchen’s brief feature on Roi Ottley’s New World A’ Comin’ (1944)—a watershed program about black life that premiered on progressive local New York station WMCA— describes a vastly different racial soundscape: To nine radio listeners out of ten the Negro is one of several stock characters—the comical servant, the vaudeville hoofer, the flashy loafer, or old Uncle Tom bowing and scraping under the magnolia trees—and his home is usually the Harlems of the musical comedies (X5). Hutchens, however, locates these stereotypes in radio’s listeners, ignoring the role of the medium itself in constructing and propagating racialized aural imagery. While the representations that Hutchens describes appear in utter opposition to Dunlap’s colorblind discourse, the two worked quite well together in the process of “wartime racial realignment” as Michele Hilmes describes it in Radio Voices (1997): “for blacks, a rhetoric of inclusion [was] deployed strategically that denies racial distinctions in favor of a transcendent democratic national identity; for whites a 196 discourse of fear that depends upon racial distinctions was used to motivate white participation” (256). In the wake of American participation in World War II, radio, then, functioned as an invisible technology of the sonic-color-line, propagating racialized aural representations and mediating racial discourse while simultaneously depicting itself as free, open, and incapable of racialization. As the next two sections reveal, both Petry and Du Bois intervene in the ideology of commercial sound reproduction and transmission, exploding the idea that radio is a “neutral, transparent conveyance of ‘real’ sound. . . ‘merely’ a conduit or a medium” (Lawrence 3). In addition to the critiques embedded in her fiction, Petry reviewed radio programs for her column in People’s Voice. The association between transparency and aural media especially frightened Du Bois; according to biographer David Levering Lewis, Du Bois had become profoundly impressed with the “enormous power of radio for good and evil” after touring the Third Reich in 1936 (460). “The most immediate danger of white culture,” Du Bois writes in Dusk of Dawn, is perhaps least sensed, is its fear of Truth. . .when in other days the world lied, it was a world that expected lies and consciously defended them; when the world lies today it is to a world that pretends to love truth (151-152). As frustrated as Du Bois felt at the apparent opacity of his historical moment, the only thing more dangerous was a false sense of clarity. 197 “Screaming in a Vacuum Unheard”: Du Bois, Radio, and the Sonic Color-Line “It is the vacuum tube that has given voice to radio: it has made it sing and talk.” —Orrin E. Dunlap Jr., “Magic in Simplicity,” New York Times (July 16, 1939) “Then the people within may become hysterical. They may scream and hurl themselves against the barriers, hardly realizing they are screaming in a vacuum unheard and that their antics may seem funny to those outside looking in.” —W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (1940) While writing Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois served as an unpaid and unacknowledged advisor for “The Negro” episode of the radio show Americans All, Immigrants All (1938), along with literary critic Alain Locke. The twenty-six part national series was co-sponsored by CBS, the Federal Security Agency, and the U.S. Office of Education to simultaneously represent the histories of various immigrant groups in America while incorporating them into a larger narrative of American unity. Designed in part to enact a new model of assimilation that would ideologically unite the nation in preparation for impending war, the show was controversial both because of its inclusive ideology and in spite of it. 13 Invited begrudgingly by the U.S. Commissioner of Education at the urging of the show’s creator Rachel Davis DuBois (no relation), Du Bois and Locke were asked to provide commentary on the script about black life in America, which Davis DuBois admitted was “pretty bad” (qtd. in Savage 37). 14 Historian Barbara Savage describes Du Bois’s participation as unprecedented in radio broadcasting, especially because “at the time Americans All was aired, African Americans and their organizations had virtually no access to this powerful, centralized, highly capitalized medium” (37). While a few of Du Bois’s 198 revisions to the script were made—including his suggestion to end the show with a segment on contemporary black achievement rather than Booker T. Washington— none of them actually made it on air during the live broadcast. “The final script for ‘The Negro,’ as broadcast by CBS,” describes Levering Lewis, “omitted, bowdlerized, and backtracked” (461). At the last minute, CBS added a live musical number, “Black Boy” sung by Showboat star Jules Bledsoe—later panned by Locke as a “mammy interpolation” in correspondence to Davis DuBois (qtd. in Savage 41)—which lasted for a full third of the thirty minute program. 15 The final segment on contemporary black life was never aired. Du Bois, exasperated but resolute, reminded Davis DuBois that it certainly could have been worse; after all, “it’s not so much what you actually get in as what you keep out” (qtd. in Lewis 461). Du Bois’s frustrating experience with the highly controlled cultural traffic across the invisible—yet palpable—“sonic color-line” of network radio could only have contributed to his feeling that, by 1940, black people in the United States were “screaming in a vacuum unheard” (131). It is at this point in Du Bois’s career as a socio-cultural critic that he theorizes the racial divide in the U.S. as having an aural dimension in addition to a visual one. In a text he describes as an “autobiography of a race concept,” Du Bois replaces the visual metaphor of the veil that is so prominent within The Souls of Black Folk (1903)—flexible and yielding even as it is opaque and obscure—with the impenetrable, invisible, and distinctly aural image of the vacuum. 199 Although I have discussed the theoretical dimensions of the “sonic color- line” in connection with Du Bois in the introduction, I revisit a key passage from Dusk of Dawn here as part of a conversation among black intellectuals during the 1940s concerning radio, racial representation, and aural media of which both Du Bois and Petry are a part. Written in his seventy-second year, Dusk of Dawn intertwines Du Bois’s personal recollections with the socio-political history of race in the United States. The text is largely chronological, spanning from his life as “A New England Boy [in] Reconstruction” to his global political activities during the Depression. Du Bois, however, pauses his narrative to devote three chapters (“The Concept of Race,” “The White World,” and “The Colored World Within”) to the “history of the development of the race concept” (97). In “The Concept of Race,” Du Bois refines his notion of “race” through the overlapping lenses provided by his scientific education and study, genealogical exploration of his interracial family tree, and travels in America, Europe, and Africa. Even as he exposes biological notions of race and the absolute difference supposedly demarcated by the “sonic color-line” as utter fallacies, Du Bois remains acutely aware of the persistence and retrenchment of racism on a global scale. To explain how race continues to operate in spite of any and all contrary evidence, Du Bois offers a schematic of the United States as a racial vacuum that is evocative of a soundproofed radio studio: It is as though one, looking out from a dark cave in a side of an impending mountain, sees the world passing and speaks to it; speaks courteously and persuasively, showing them how these entombed souls are hindered in their natural movement, expression, and development; and how their loosening 200 from prison would be a matter of courtesy, sympathy, and help to them, but aid to all the world. One talks on evenly and logically in this way, but notices that the passing throng does not even turn its head, or if it does, glances curiously and walks on. It gradually penetrates the minds of some of the prisoners that the people passing do not hear; that some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world. They get excited; they talk louder; they gesticulate. Some of the passing world stops in curiosity; these gesticulations seem so pointless; they laugh and pass on. They still either do not hear at all, or hear dimly, and even what they hear, they do not understand. Then the people within may become hysterical. They may scream and hurl themselves against the barriers, hardly realizing in their bewilderment that they are screaming in a vacuum unheard and that their antics may seem funny to those outside looking in. They may even, here and there, break through in blood and disfigurement, and find themselves faced by a horrible, implacable, and quite overwhelming mob of people frightened for their very existence (131). In Dusk of Dawn, the souls of black folk are no longer merely imprisoned, but “entombed,” socially dead to the “throng” of American economic, political, and cultural life. “Throng” is a term frequently used in reference to a mass audience; part of what is so disturbing about this passage is the rapidity with which the “passing throng” devolves into an “overwhelming mob” when any black people manage to escape the bounds of the “invisible but horribly tangible plate glass” of the sonic color-line. While this glass has been constructed by ideologies of white supremacy—the topic of Dusk of Dawn—its visual clarity allows the separation between the races to seem natural to whites outside the cave. Whites have shunted blacks into confined and segregated spaces outside of the mainstream, and, at first, it appears that the only way out of this “dark cave” is through appeals to the logic that seems to drive the world outside its mouth. There are no visible boundaries apparent between black and 201 white—no dark, frothy veils to lift—which makes the confinement in the cave and the failure of logical argument all the more curious. Du Bois replaces the opacity of the veil with the even more dangerous illusion of clarity in combination with profoundly distorted hearing. Under this model, blacks are not only visible, they are hypervisible, constantly on display to the “curiosity” of the white gaze as if in a zoo, a storefront display or a television screen—a technology in its nascent stage in 1938. Because no sound can escape the chamber, whites can only see the people within, recasting their suffering as “pointless” gesticulations that amuse and entertain. The “throng” of whites outside “laugh and pass on” as the hysteria mounts within. Whites are now both blind and deaf to the realities of black life, a willful configuration of the senses that allows them to maintain their power and privilege without acknowledging its human costs. Any literary, artistic, and political projects of counter-representation are gravely complicated by the fact that whites have not only been culturally conditioned to see and hear the world differently but they have labeled this configuration of the senses as universal, objective truth and propagate it as such. As a result, life within the glass is like living inside a “vacuum unheard.” The futile screams of the imprisoned circulate endlessly in the suffocating plate glass chamber, causing “hysteria,” “bewilderment,” and frenzied attempts to escape at any cost. Just like the specificity of the “plate glass” I discussed in the introduction, Du Bois’s use of “vacuum” is likely not inadvertent, especially given his own interest in 202 science and technology. “The triumphs of the scientific world thrilled me,” he writes in Dusk of Dawn, “the X-ray and radium came during my teaching term, the airplane and the wireless” (50, emphasis mine). Furthermore, he uses the term “vacuum” twice in this chapter, the first use occurring just pages before this passage, when he describes how “colored Rillieux invented the vacuum pan” that re-energized the Carribbean sugar trade of the nineteenth century (121). 16 Du Bois uses the “vacuum” here to call explicit attention to the centrality of African Americans in narratives of modernity, a history overlooked and unheard. 17 A definition and a brief cultural history of the term “vacuum” increase the resonance of Du Bois’s description of the sonic color-line. Asphyxiating to humans, a vacuum is a space empty of all matter, a void that is simultaneously a place and no place at all. Ironically, use of the term as a metaphor for isolation became widespread with the rise of telephone, recording, and radio communications technology, all of which used vacuum tubes—in combination with electricity—to transmit and receive sound. Predominately constructed from glass, a vacuum tube amplifies, modifies, or switches a signal by controlling the movement of electrons in an evacuated space. While vacuum tubes were lauded for their ability to produce clear, high-quality sound, they were frequently used to distort sound as well, very apt for how Du Bois uses the term. A New York Times article from October 8, 1939, for instance, describes how vacuum tubes were used to scramble President Roosevelt’s 203 overseas calls, thwarting potential spies and making them “unintelligible” to anyone with an average radio (“Roosevelt Protected” 47). The “vacuum tube” was both culturally ubiquitous and synonymous with modernity and progress in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In April 1939 the World’s Fair opened in Queens, New York, just a few months after Americans All, Immigrants All was broadcast and as Du Bois was finishing Dusk of Dawn. One of the featured attractions was the “Communications Zone,” which celebrated the power of radio by building a giant “bulbous structure” built by the Radio Corporation of America that, according to the WPA Guide to New York, “resemble[d] a radio tube that is resting on its side” (640). In Swinging the Machine (2003), Joel Dinerstein argues that the 1939 World’s Fair was a key nexus where the ideology of the “melting-pot”—a metaphor from an earlier technological era—began to give way to a brand of “multiculturalism” that (in)fused diversity with technology. Scientist Albert Einstein—visible at the fair as “one of America’s most well-known and best-loved immigrants” (Dinerstein 286)—brought the narratives of technological progress and American multiculturalism together when he opened the fair to “tens of thousands” with a display of how the power of cosmic rays can be harnessed. The April 20, 1939, New York Times claimed the feat was a “tribute to the vacuum tube” (Kaempffert 53). Du Bois’s imagery of the racial vacuum tube reveals the centrality of African Americans to narratives of American modernity, even as they were actively silenced 204 by them. The despairing image of the color-line as an impenetrable and entrapping glass enclosure resonates throughout his autobiography; Du Bois describes himself as “hemmed in” (19), “thrown in upon myself” (19), “limited in action and provincial in thought and dream” (136) and feeling the “bonds tightening around [his] feet” (130). He repeatedly represents dominant white society as the “great enveloping mass of culture” (25), “the surrounding group” (137), and the “white environing world” (136). Levering Lewis describes Du Bois’s experience as the “enforced invisibility of the most visible national minority” (446); Maria Farland argues that Du Bois was forced to turn to more literary projects like Dusk of Dawn because his efforts as a professional scientist were effectively hindered. A central theme of Dusk of Dawn is Du Bois’s own struggles against the “hidden mechanisms of exclusion” that kept minority workers out of careers in professional science and limited their influence as public figures. The “norms and values of a racialist science,” Farland writes, were “inculcated not merely through ideological beliefs and discourse, but through forms of institutional and professional interaction—the parameters and tacit rules that govern knowledge production itself” (1041). 18 Du Bois details study after study that was paid for and never published; the sole copy of one of his manuscripts was even destroyed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor because it “touched on political matters” (86). By 1940, he was becoming increasingly isolated both personally and professionally, as reflected in his rather cynical stance in Dusk of Dawn, where he depicts himself as able to observe and “exemplify” the ethos of his 205 contemporary society, but unable to do but “little to create [his] day or greatly change it” (4). The plate glass constructed between white and black worlds is therefore both a product of “unconscious habit and irrational urge” (296) as well as conscious, deliberate, and strategic misinformation. In his chapter entitled “The White World,” Du Bois argues that the dominant culture feels that “propaganda assists the truth and hurries it on; it may at times exaggerate and distort, but all this is for a defensible end, and newspapers, radio channels, and news distribution agencies should be owned and used for this end” (158, emphasis mine). While the U.S. government began to circulate the language of racial inclusion throughout American media outlets, the physical, cultural, social, and economic isolation of black people into segregated ghettos only intensified. “The democracy which the white world seeks to defend does not exist,” Du Bois writes, “It has been splendidly conceived and discussed, but not realized” (169). By exemplifying segregation through the image of the vacuum, Dusk of Dawn reveals the paradox at the heart of mid-century American culture: the truths that seemed the most transparent, obvious, and natural were often the most dangerously distorted and falsely constructed. 206 Petry and the Echo Chamber of Race and Gender “Lions have no historians.” —W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn “She thought of the animals at the zoo. She and Bub had gone there to see the lions and tigers being fed. There was a moment, before the great hunks of red meat were thrust into the cages, when the big cats prowled back and forth, desperate, raging, ravening. They walked in a space even smaller than the confines of the cages made necessary, moving in an area just the length of their bodies. A few steps up and turn. They were weaving back and forth, growling, roaring, raging at the bars that kept them from the meat, until the entire building was filled with the sound, until the people watching drew back from the cages, feeling insecure, frightened at the sight and sound of such savagery. She was becoming something like that.” —Ann Petry, The Street Ann Lane Petry embarked on her writing career shortly before Dusk of Dawn was published, arriving in Harlem in 1938. Like Du Bois—who grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts—Petry was born and raised in a small, predominately white community, Old Saybrook, Connecticut. After earning her doctorate in pharmacy in 1929, she worked in Old Saybrook and nearby Lyme until moving to New York with her husband George, an army serviceman. An aspiring writer and community activist, Petry became deeply involved in the intellectual community and cultural life of Harlem while her husband was fighting in World War II. Both the war and working class life in Harlem would become major themes in her fiction. She reported on the neighborhood for the Amsterdam News through 1941 and wrote a weekly column for Adam Clayton Powell’s People’s Voice through 1943. While working as a journalist, she helped found the consumer advocacy group Negro Women Incorporated, volunteered at the Harlem Community Arts Center, and 207 became involved with an experimental after-school program for children of working mothers. Petry combined her journalistic edge with creative techniques honed in writing courses at Columbia University; she attributed her “ear for dialogue” to her membership in the American Negro Theater, where she worked with Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and Canada Lee (Reynolds 79). In a 1948 piece for The Writer called “The Great Secret,” Petry describes a diverse group of influences: H.L. Mencken, Anthony Trollope, Gustave Flaubert, and Somerset Maugham, to name only a few. Her 1950 essay, “The Novel as Social Criticism,” locates her work in an international cohort of political writers that not only includes Richard Wright—the writer that she has been inordinately compared to throughout her career—but Willard Motley, Alan Paton, E.M. Forester, Sinclair Lewis, and Lillian Smith. Despite such a rich public life and prominent writing career, Petry has largely been pigeonholed as a practitioner of the “Wright school.” Book of the Month Club recognition, literary awards, critical acclaim, and phenomenal sales had made Wright the preeminent African American literary figure throughout the late 1930s and 1940s, or as Gene Andrew Jarrett describes: “during the second World War, no black novelist could parallel Wright in stature and influence” (133). Critics in the mainstream media began indiscriminately linking Petry to Wright immediately after The Street was published in 1946. For example, in spite of the fact that The Street is neither a bildungsroman nor an autobiography, the Washington Post’s anonymous reviewer claimed that the novel “might have been entitled ‘Black Girl’ as a 208 counterpart to Richard Wright’s ‘Black Boy,’” and is quick to add that it is “not as well written as Wright’s books” (S4). More recent critics have exposed how Petry’s contemporary criticism led to a lack of careful scholarly attention to her own literary voice (Andrews: 1995, Hicks: 2003, Wesling: 2006), her link to a tradition of African American women’s writing that includes Harriet Jacobs (Christian: 1985, Park and Wald: 1998, Wesling: 2006), her many writings not set in New York City (Ervin: 2006). As I argue here, her deep engagement with prominent social critics and theorists of race like Du Bois has also been ignored, along with her role in the intellectual and cultural debates concerning sound, race and the mediated regimes of “truth” in the 1940s. 19 Before I proceed with more comprehensive close readings of “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” and The Street, I want to examine a key passage from The Street that exemplifies Petry’s use of aural imagery in her writing and extends and critiques Du Bois’s theorization of the vacuum of racial segregation. Like Du Bois, Petry writes about the sociology and psychology of race, using fiction to explore how her characters are “formed and shaped by the sprawling inchoate world in which they lived” (“The Novel as Social Criticism,” 33). Near the end of The Street, Petry’s protagonist Lutie Johnson is frustrated, confused, and isolated. She has lost nearly everything: her husband, son, dreams of becoming a singer, hopes of ever leaving the tenement on 116 th Street, and, ultimately, her way in the world. None of the paths Lutie has followed led her anywhere near the American Dream she so 209 eagerly sought—neither the thrift and work ethic of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, nor the unabashed capitalism of her wealthy white former employers in Lyme, Connecticut. Bandleader Boots Smith has just informed Lutie that she will not be paid as a singer unless she consents to sleep with Junto, the white man who owns her building and the entertainment venues on the block. Hemmed in by interlocking oppressions of race and gender, Lutie feels increasingly distant and trapped. Although Only a few hours had elapsed since she stood in this same doorway, completely unaware of the dim light, the faded, dreary paint, the filth on the floor. . . time and Boots Smith and Junto had pushed her right back in here, deftly removing that obscuring cloud of dreams, so that now tonight she could see this hall in reality (313). 20 The opening of this scene lays out one of the major themes Petry’s fiction, the interplay between surface appearance and what Meg Wesling describes as the “opacity of everyday life” (117). Lutie’s description of the “obscuring cloud of dreams” is reminiscent of Du Bois’s appeal to the spiritual “My Way is Cloudy” in Dusk of Dawn and signifies that she is groping to find her way forward. The cultural narratives that seem to offer Lutie a clear path to success—particularly the “obscuring cloud” of the American Dream— are precisely what keep her from seeing her circumstances “in reality.” She palliates her “faded, dreary” life in the Harlem tenement by truly believing she will escape through hard work and effort; although she deals almost daily with sexual harassment she still believes deep down that she will be treated equitably, even by the likes of Boots Smith and Junto. 210 She started up the stairs. They went up and up ahead of her. They were steeper than she remembered them. . . She became uneasily conscious of the closeness of the walls. The hall was only a narrow passageway between them. The walls were very thin, too, for she could hear the conversations going on behind the closed doors on each floor (312). The stairs of the tenement—a warped version of the proverbial ladder of success in the mythos of American capitalism—grow steeper and more insurmountable with every step. 21 Lutie’s movements are even more circumscribed within the claustrophobic space of the stairwell, as the “closeness of the walls” presses in upon her and the sound of conversations “behind the closed doors” surrounds her. No longer trusting the duplicitous sense of sight to guide her, she begins to listen while ascending the stairs: Radios were playing on the third and fourth floors. She tried to walk faster to get away from the medley of sound, but her legs refused to respond to her urging. ‘Buy Shirley Soap and Keep Beautiful’ was blared out by an announcer’s voice. The sounds were confusing. Someone had tuned in the station that played swing records all night, and she heard, “Now we have the master of the trumpet in Rock, Raleigh, Rock’ (312). 22 The “medley of sounds” is one of Petry’s figurative techniques; her characters hear the sound around them as layered, complex, and “confusing.” Within the context of this scene, the radio makes clarity even more difficult for Lutie to obtain. As she literally ascends the stairs, the radio blares several contradictory and conflicting messages about how best to climb the metaphoric ladder of success. An advertisement for Shirley Soap—famous for its skin lightening formula—urges her to “Keep Beautiful,” reminding her of her primary worth as a woman in a patriarchal society, and the limiting standards of white female beauty that further circumscribe 211 her movement. Her “legs refuse to respond” as she tries to escape the sound of the radio; layered over the soap ad is the sound of “Rock, Raleigh, Rock,” a swing song. By 1944, the year in which The Street is set, swing had moved far beyond its roots in African American urban culture and into the phase Dinerstein describes as a large- scale corporate “whitefacing” of the art form (173). Benny Goodman was dubbed the “King of Swing” by the recording industry in the late 1930s—which Petry alludes to through the radio announcer’s reference to the “master of the trumpet”— the “Lindy Hop” had already appeared on Broadway by 1943, and government sponsored “swing bands” were entertaining the troops at home and overseas. There was such a flood of recordings that a radio station could easily play “swing records all night.” This program taunts Lutie—a thwarted jazz singer—with her lack of agency in the American culture industry. As Lutie continues to stumble her way up the stairs, Petry adds another layer of sound to her representation of Lutie’s “listening ear”: [The song] mingled with the sounds of a revival church which was broadcasting a service designed to redeem lost souls: ‘This is the way, sisters and brothers. This is the answer. Come all of you now before its too late. This is the way.’ As she walked along, she heard the congregation roar, ‘Preach it, brother, preach it.’ Suddenly a woman cried loud above the other sounds, ‘Lord Jesus is a-coming now.’ The congregation clapped their hands in rhythm. It came in clear over the radio. And the sound mingled with the high sweetness of the trumpet playing ‘Rock, Raleigh, Rock’ and the soap program joined in with the plunking of a steel guitar, ‘If you wanta be beautiful, use Shirley Soap.’ ‘A fight started on the third floor, Its angry violence echoed up the stairs. . . (312-13). 23 212 A third program joins the radio chorus and fights for Lutie’s attention; the sounds of a distant revival church offer yet another “clear” path to ascension, joining with the “high sweetness” of the nightclub and the advertising jingle of the capitalist marketplace. A woman’s voice—whether from the radio or the building Petry does not say—beckons to Lutie as a fellow “lost soul” in need of easy, in-home salvation. As this passage illustrates, many of the most dangerous and misleading sounds within the tenement are piped in from the outside—“clear over the radio”—and Lutie can no longer rely on her “listening ear” to help her discern the truth. Like Lutie, the sounds cannot to escape the building; they echo throughout the narrow stairwell, surrounding and confusing her. The “echo” is a recurrent aural image in Petry’s fiction from this period and a term, like vacuum, that resonated with aural technology of the 1940s. 24 The etymology of “echo” dates back to the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus 25 —and has long held an association with the female voice, especially a loss or suppression of voice or the limitation of female agency as a response to or imitation of men. This is a major theme of Petry’s writing and I will return to this myth in the following section. In Petry’s contemporary moment, “echo” was especially used in reference to new innovations in war technology that used echolocation to estimate distances, sound out unfamiliar terrain, and “see” in the dark. 26 Within evolving recording technologies, an “echo chamber” was a confined space designed to reverberate sound. The use of the echo chamber represented an interesting paradox in the quest 213 for fidelity in recording; essentially an echo chamber was an auditory illusion designed to make recorded music sound more “real” to listener’s ears by recreating the effect of a live concert hall. In the radio of the 1930 and 1940’s, echo chambers were increasingly used as distortion effects, especially on science fiction programs. For example, Richard O’Brien’s article “A Cradle of Drama” from the July 30, 1939 issue of the New York Times defines an “echo chamber” as a “weird labyrinth made of concrete, which makes an ordinary voice sound as though it were emanating from the Grand Canyon or at least Madison Square Garden” (X10). Echo chambers altered “ordinary” sounds and made them strange, confusing even the source of one’s own voice. 27 They not only distorted sound, but also made listening a challenging and unreliable process. Not surprisingly, the use of echo chamber as a metaphor actually began within the media industry, describing a situation where information propagated by one media outlet is picked up and repeated with such frequency by like-minded sources that the most extreme version of the story is eventually declared “the truth.” In the following sections, I further explore how Petry uses the aural image of the echo within “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” and The Street to represent the lived space of segregation and its deleterious and distorting psychological effects. Within Petry’s spatial configuration of segregation—an echo chamber rather than a vacuum tube—voices are not only silenced, they are surrounded and drowned out by layers of competing, conflicting, and overwhelming sound. 214 Echo and the Siren’s Song: Ann Petry’s “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” “The Bronx, where Borough President Lyons loudly led the call for louder sirens, was baffled. Brooklyn was just a bit tense. Queens was cool but alert. The lower East Side was both indifferent and confused; Harlem was nonchalant.” —New York Times description of first air raid testing (December 10, 1941) “Then the siren went off. He jumped nearly a foot when it first sounded. That old air raid alarm, always putting it off on Saturdays. Yet it made him uneasy. He’d always been underground in the subway when it sounded. Or in Harlem where the street noises dulled the sound of its wail.” —Ann Petry, “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” (1943) When New York City tested its air raid sirens for the first time after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the system was far from perfect. Many who heard the siren’s wail ignored it; some never heard it at all. Overall, coverage in the New York Times described city residents as “glassily indifferent,” unwilling to leave their lunches in Times Square or their places in line at Fifth Avenue Christmas sales; one crowded elevated train car collectively refused to evacuate, staring down an Air Raid Warden until he left in a huff (14). Despite this collective apathy, when the Times writer came to characterize the reaction of different New York City neighborhoods, the “sonic color-line” was apparent. Whiter neighborhoods clamored for louder sirens and remained “tense” and “alert.” The largely immigrant Jewish, Irish, and Eastern European East Side—a stronghold of Socialism and labor activity throughout the thirties—was simultaneously “indifferent and confused.” Finally, according to the Times, African American Harlem remained unconcerned with the potential danger 215 heralded by the air raid siren, seeming “nonchalant” in the face of America’s new war effort and the drive to unify the nation. Petry’s short story “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon”—which first appeared in the December 1943 issue of The Crisis—uses the siren’s wail to turn the sonic color-line inside out. Harlem is not “nonchalant” in her literary figuration, but distant from the siren’s auditory footprint. The sounding of the air raid siren was a weekly occurrence in the city until shortly after V-E Day in 1945, and it had the power to invisibly express the order of things in the racially coded society of the 1940s. To live within the range of the siren’s wail meant a person was truly a citizen: considered a valuable part of the nation and protected in the event of danger. It is not surprising that Petry’s protagonist, a Harlem resident, is “uneasy” as he stands at the elevated platform at the 241 st street station—in the North Bronx, near Yonkers— comparing the startling loudness of the siren in this woodsy area with Harlem, where ever-present police sirens and other “street noises dulled the sound of its wail” (368). The stratified aural image of Harlem’s noise drowning out the air raid warning evokes the neighborhood’s marginality while suggesting that the imminent danger for Harlem’s residents was domestic rather than foreign; the daily “noise” of U.S. racism, grinding poverty, and servitude “dulled” the siren’s triumphant proclamation that the war to end all racism and fascism was being fought abroad. Despite having left the physical space of Harlem, the anonymous protagonist of “On Saturday” cannot ultimately escape his entrapment there. Petry relates the 216 man’s tragic narrative through his “point of audition” as he tries in vain to “get a breath of fresh air” on the platform of the 241 st Street train, where the concrete of the city begins to give way to green space. 28 As he waits, the testing of the New York City air raid sirens shatters the winter stillness. The siren’s plaintive wail sparks a battle between his conscious mind—determined to suppress the agonizing memories of the death of one of his children in a tenement fire and the murder of his wife by his own hand—and his subconscious mind, which resurrects and reanimates these tortured moments until he throws himself in the path of the approaching train. 29 The blaring siren, a character in its own right, reverberates through the protagonist’s mind and body, exacting his confession to the murder and ultimately heralding his suicide. Through the overwhelming and enveloping central image of the siren, Petry examines the emotional power of sound and experiments with the stratified aural imagery—the layered sounds of competing narratives—that forms a leitmotif throughout The Street. Branded a “true crime story,” “On Saturday” has not received the critical consideration that its complexity warrants. Except for a brief mention in Hillary Holladay’s critical biography of Petry for Twayne’s United States Authors Series (1996), it has been virtually ignored. Holladay describes the story as straightforward crime fiction, mentioning the aural image of the siren as a sign only of the influence of naturalism in Petry’s work. “On Saturday,” has only been reprinted once, in mystery novelist Paula Woods’s anthology Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black 217 Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction (1995), which further frames the story as gritty crime fiction. However, in a 1947 interview for The Crisis, Petry herself describes the story as a more complex fusion between her interest in the psychological power of sound and her desire to deepen understanding of the Harlem life she covered while a reporter for the People’s Voice. She told interviewer James Ivey: One Saturday I was standing on the 125th Street platform of the IRT subway when a siren suddenly went off. The screaming blast seemed to vibrate inside people. For the siren seemed to be just above the station. I immediately noticed the reactions of the people on the platform. They were interesting, especially the frantic knitting of a woman seated on a nearby bench.... I began wondering how this unearthly howl would affect a criminal, a man hunted by the police. That was the first incident. The second was a tragedy I covered for my paper. There was a fire in Harlem in which two children had been burnt to death. Their parents were at work and the children were alone. I imagined their reactions when they returned home that night. I knew also that many Harlem parents, like Lilly Belle in the story, often left their children home alone while at work. Imaginatively combined the two incidents gave me my story (48-49). I want to widen this limited conversation about “On Saturday” beyond a purely realist framework, reading the story as an important thematic and stylistic precursor to Petry’s major work The Street—especially the aural imagery of the radio, the echo chamber, and stratified urban sound—as well as a complex exploration of the isolating and distorting qualities of the (gendered) sonic color-line in its own right. Petry first alerts readers to the complexity of the image of the siren in the tagline accompanying the story in The Crisis. It reads, “to the average citizen an air raid warning is just another nuisance, but to this worker it brings memories of marital 218 unhappiness and tragic love” (368). This disclaimer alerts readers to be attentive to the layered nature of the sound of the air raid siren; while official discourse attempted to fix the meaning of this sound for the “average citizen” in a nationalist matrix of wartime preparation and readiness on the domestic front, it was also considered a weekly annoyance by many and a horrifying reminder of “tragic love” to Petry’s lone protagonist. 30 While this preview posits the worker’s reading of the sound as aberrant—the syntax of the sentence bars him from the category “average citizen”—it also issues a challenge to readers to listen beyond the surface throughout the story. Petry represents the siren as a densely layered aural image. Within the text, she describes the sound as having a vertical, stratified quality. The siren’s sound begins as a “low weird moan.” However, as it “gained in volume,” it accretes two more sonic layers: “a higher screaming note, and a little later a low, louder blast” (368). On the surface strata, this sound literally describes the weekly testing of the air raid siren, during which “all except duly authorized persons must immediately leave streets, parks, and open spaces, and proceed to the nearest cover” (“Air Raid Orders,” 1). Such orders were enforced by deputized civilian “Air Raid Wardens,” to the tune of six months in jail or 500 dollars in fines. 31 However, the authoritative sound of the air raid testing also resonates with other powerful sirens of law enforcement: of the police patrolling the streets in their “radio prowl cars”—as they were called in the 1940s—and of the fire trucks that clang their way the tenement 219 fire; the protagonist describes this as the “sound of death—cops and ambulances and fire trucks” (368). Symbolically, Petry’s air raid siren recalls the mythic sound of the “siren’s song.” Even though the sound of the air raid siren is harsh, mechanical, and grating, it exhibits a similar enthralling and destructive force to the music that drew Greek sailors to their deaths. After all, at the end of the story, Petry’s protagonist throws himself in the path of an oncoming train after listening deeply to the air raid siren’s wail. 32 Related to the Greek myth, “siren” was also a term for an extremely beautiful but dangerous woman in the parlance of the 1940s—a duplicitous seductress. Petry’s narrative, filtered as it is through the consciousness of the angry husband who only confesses to murdering his wife at story’s close, shows how deceptively easy it is to point the finger at Lilly Belle as a femme fatale to blame for all of the death and destruction in “On Saturday.” While Halliday describes Lilly Belle as “rather unsympathetic on the surface,” she does not question the narrator’s reliability and she offers no deeper reading than to suggest that Lilly Belle is “pathetic deep down” (11). I read “On Saturday” as precisely about the pretext of such dominant cultural narratives about young black women during this period—as good time girls, irresponsible mothers, devious Jezebels and/or “pathetic” victims—and how these representations converge to silence women while at the same time calling them to account for the circumstances of ghetto life. Dominant representations like these have obscured communication between black men and women; blaming Lilly 220 Belle—as Petry’s narrator is quick to do—destroys them both while hiding the larger systemic and economic forces at work in racial segregation. Therefore, I contend that the “moaning,” “sobbing,” “talking” siren also represents the uncanny return of the suppressed voice of Lilly Belle herself, protesting her murder, exacting her husband’s confession, and communicating to him that the entire family was fatally “locked in” to their dark, narrow, and dangerous tenement apartment long before the fire (369). The last line of the story especially supports this reading, describing how “even after the train stopped, there was a thin echo of the siren on the air” (369). Here Petry evokes the Greek myth of Echo, the story of a woman whose power to speak for herself was revoked by the gods, dooming her disembodied voice to repeat the words of her lost love Narcissus long after her physical form had wasted away. 33 Placing “echo” alongside the lingering cultural image of the “siren,” suggests the simultaneous presence and absence of the female voice in the story. It also encourages a re-reading of “On Saturday” that is attuned to Lilly Belle’s silence in conjunction with the siren’s wail. Before a full reading of the story, it is important to note that the name Lilly Belle is itself a rich, highly stratified symbol with layers of competing meanings. Within Western symbolic systems, the lily is both a funeral flower as well as the Easter bloom symbolizing Christ’s resurrection, suggesting both her death and return in the siren’s wail. The term is also associated with purity—directly contesting the image of her infidelity—however, this purity is also associated with whiteness, or as 221 the Oxford English Dictionary tellingly describes, “the white of a beautiful complexion.” This represents the dominant white supremacist cultural codes of beauty and female respectability that Lilly Belle is refused access to, a theme that Petry explores in great depth in The Street. 34 The second half of her name, “Belle,” is French for “beautiful” and is used colloquially to describe the reigning ‘beauty of a place’ according to the OED. The homonym “bell” is a sonic term, referring to the sonorous, tolling instrument but also the curved mouth of a trumpet or megaphone, such as the air raid siren. Taken together, “Lilly Belle” is also reminiscent of “Southern Belle," especially considering the popular song “Lilly Belle May June” released by Decca records in 1935. While released somewhat earlier than the 1943 publication date of “On Saturday,” it is not improbable that the song would still be played almost ten years later due to wartime shellac rations and recording bans that forced bars, clubs, and radio shows to recycle old standards until 1945. Performed by Django Reinardt and The Quintet of the Hot Club of France, but written by Earle T. Crooker and Henry Sullivan, the song is a minstrel-style piece of antebellum nostalgia. 35 The lyrics plead to Lilly Belle, a female singer who has migrated to the North, to remember the South fondly and to “make the Yankees understand” that “on the old plantation/ life is one long celebration” by “sing[ing] them a song/ of moonlight and roses/over the radio.” After a lengthy guitar solo by Reinhardt— showcasing his musical virtuosity while simultaneously signaling and silencing the woman’s disobedience—the song ends with an ominous stanza threatening Lilly 222 Belle May June: “Better learn what you croon/ Shut Your Mouth/ and come back South again.” The heavily-loaded name of Petry’s character, then, suggests depth far beyond what she is given by the protagonist’s narration. Her name also contains echoes of what Farah Griffin calls the “south in the city” (52), linking the segregated space of Harlem and the confining narratives of black femininity to older historical, cultural, and economic roots. Throughout the flashback at the core of “On Saturday,” the protagonist repeatedly silences Lilly Belle. Even before she speaks, he discredits anything she may say with his frowning judgment on her appearance: “even sleeping she was untidy and bedraggled” (368). 36 When he recalls threatening to “kill her” if she ever left their kids home alone again, his memory cuts her off mid sentence as she protested, “I’m goin’ to have me some fun—”. The day of the fire, it is the landlady Cora who tells him that “Lilly Belle wasn’t home,” and her words echo and re-echo throughout his consciousness as “r[a]n blindly down the stairs” (369, emphasis mine). His judgment and vision become obscured as he fixates on the phrase “wasn’t home” and repeats it to himself all the way to the hospital. Once there, he remembers being so taken by the sight of the black veil Lilly Belle is wearing that he only “half-heard” her explanation. He quotes only snippets of the last line: “‘But I ran into Alice—and when I came back,’ she licked her lips as though they were suddenly dry” (369). Lilly Belle’s husband is so sure he has her figured out that he even presumes to know why she licks her lips. 223 The main character is repeatedly unwilling and/or unable to hear anything Lilly Belle says, a figurative deafness that has dire consequences for both of them. The morning of the murder, he lays in bed eavesdropping on a conversation between Cora and Lilly Belle, which came “clear to his ears like a victrola record or the radio” (369). Ironically, there is nothing clear about this simile. Considering the unreliability of radio as a conveyor of truth throughout Petry’s fiction, not to mention the heightened emotions of the situation coupled with the image of the Victrola— which gestures at the blues narrative of love lost—this sentence suggests that the protagonist hears the exchange as if it were melodrama rather than reality. Furthermore, the word “clear” is highly ambiguous; while it could mean “unclouded” or “unobstructed,” it also refers to the more neutral, “traveled to” or “all the way to.” The conversation, in fact, is quite obviously obstructed. The narrator only hears one side, the landlady Cora’s accusation that Lilly has been “never been no damn good” and her threat that if Lilly Belle doesn’t “quit runnin’ to that bar with that dressed up monkey, and stayin’ away from here all day long, [she’s] gonna tell that poor fool [she’s] married to” (369). When Cora finished, “Lilly Belle said something that he couldn’t hear” in response. The protagonist—cued by radio plots and his own suspicions—fills in Lilly Belle’s side of the story himself, once again presuming to know her motivations. Even though he neither hears nor sees the women, he describes how Cora “said [her words] fast as though she wanted to get them out before Lilly Belle could stop her” (369). Lilly Belle remains silent and the 224 protagonist never confronts her; he just assumes Cora’s accusations to be true and strangles her as a result, permanently taking her voice. Lilly Belle’s “long black veil that billowed about her as she moved” (369) is an especially significant image of opacity at the climax of the story, especially as a rejoinder to Du Bois’s reference to the veil in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois’s “veil” was a metaphor for racial blindness caused by the color-line, a figurative panel that the white power structure places upon black people to obscure their humanity and render them socially, economically, and politically invisible. As whites cannot see through the veil of “blackness” they have constructed through fear, fantasy, and stereotype, this willfully distorted vision enables them to continually dehumanize black people, characterizing them as abstract “problems” rather than individual human beings. However, the subsequent—and double-edged— consolation of solitary confinement within the veil is a striking clarity of insight into the artifice of the color-line and the empty but vicious truth of the concept of “race.” Although it is “almost a burden beyond the measure of their strength,” this “second- sight” equips black people with incisive powers of social critique to deconstruct the workings of the color-line in American society (5). 37 Petry’s use of the veil in “On Saturday” suggests that Du Bois’s schema does not account for gender as a field of power operative within the category of race. She describes Lilly Belle’s veil in highly sexualized terms, as the “soft stuff” that “clung and caught on the rough places” of her husband’s hands (369). Lilly Belle’s wedding veil becomes both a 225 mourning veil and her shroud as her husband “knots the veil tightly around her throat” (369). Within the veil of race, there is further blindness, mishearing, and miscommunication; the twist ending of “On Saturday” shows that the oppressive power dynamics of gender must be examined alongside—and interlocking with— race. It is only by being forced to listen deeply to the song of the siren that the narrator realizes the extent of his actions and his culpability in Lilly Belle’s murder. The auditory image of the siren physically assaults him, blurs his distinction between public and private space, forcibly silences him, and completely transforms his perception of the incident. As the veil surrounds Lilly Belle, so does the siren’s wail envelop the protagonist—sounding “everywhere around him” and stealing his voice as he stole hers. Before the siren begins its “low weird moan,” the man is “on his way to work in the Bronx” as if it is any old Saturday and he had not murdered his wife just that morning (368). The visual imagery he sees at the train station—the glinting metal of the tracks and a Coca-Cola ad featuring a happy domestic scene— begins to spark his memory and causes him to feel the phantom image of “something soft clinging to his hands”—foreshadowing the story’s ending—but he still able to “cove[r] his eyes with his hands” and “shut it out” (368). Once the siren howls, however, the sound completely takes him over, demanding that he listen, and “plucking at him, pounding at his ears. It was his heart and it was beating faster and harder and faster and harder” (368). The siren’s wail displaces the narrator’s sense 226 of self, turning his chest cavity into an echo chamber where his hijacked heart beats “faster and harder” to this new tempo, dragging his mind back to the past that he was trying so desperately to escape. Through the violent imagery of the siren’s assault, Petry traces an important gendered contour of the “sonic color-line,” sound’s ability to create selective and unseen patterns of restricted movement as well as intense feelings of entrapment and isolation. The siren’s song begins to physically abuse him as he tries to cover his ears to no avail. An invisible but formidable adversary, the siren’s sound starts “making a pounding pressure in his chest. It was hitting him in the stomach” (368). He is unable to move toward the comfort of the other people huddled at the opposite end of the platform because the abusive sound waves of the siren—a conspicuously audible but unseen force of control— violently “pinioned him where he was” and “hit him all over until he doubled up again like a jack knife,” causing him to drop his lunch pail (368). As the siren physically assaults the main character, it troubles the distinction between public and private space. The man remains remote and ensconced in his personal memories even though surrounded by people at the train station. He is physically standing in the Bronx, but psychically back in Harlem. As he begins to remember the horror of the fire, the man’s memory reveals how vulnerable that space is to surveillance—by the police, firemen, landlady, gossiping neighbors, priest across the street, and potentially to certain readers, who extradiegetically sift 227 through the material and psychic damage of the fire along with him. Furthermore, the siren is simultaneously inside and outside of the man’s body—at once an external force and an internal voice. The siren compels the protagonist to become a giant echo chamber; the sound was “vibrating inside him—[until] all the soft tissues in his stomach and lungs were moaning and shrieking with agony” (368). The man’s surroundings and inner state become intertwined in a chorus of moans, shrieks, and screams. He is both subject to sound and a subject of sound, snarled in a mutually constitutive relationship with the environment that threatens to obliterate him. Just as he silenced Lilly Belle, the siren silences him. The protagonist notices with horror that the siren has snatched his ability to speak, making his isolation almost complete: “he moaned, ‘make it stop.’ And then in alarm, ‘I can’t even hear my own voice. My voice is gone” (368). His words stolen, the man is forced to listen to the siren’s voice and he experiences an almost trancelike state of memory. The siren’s wail exemplifies what Fred Moten describes as “deep sound,” a sound that “requires the kind of listening that activates rather than fragments the whole of the sensorium” (123). Listening to the siren’s relentless howl moves the man into a state of synaesthesia, where all of his senses begin to blend and notices that “it’s almost as though I can smell that sound, he told himself. It’s the smell and the sound of death—cops and ambulances and fire trucks—” (368). 38 In fact, the man’s visual perception is completely reconfigured and reordered by his hearing; suddenly he 228 “couldn’t see the tracks anymore” and then the tracks reappear, pulsating with the bleat of the siren and the throb of his heart. The stratified image of the siren’s scream forces the main character to listen deeply through its layers until he relives the events of the fire and the murder, but from an entirely different point of view. With the siren’s “noise tearing inside him, he could see himself as clearly as though by some miracle he’d been transformed into another person” (368, emphasis mine). The image of doubling itself has a doubled meaning. On the one hand, the narrator describes the effects of Du Boisian double-consciousness, a “second-sight” that allows him to see the racial formation of the United States more clearly. The wailing moan of the siren functions as what Du Bois dubs the “revelation of the other world” in The Souls of Black Folk, and it reconfigures the protagonist’s senses, steals the voice of “his true self consciousness,” (5) and divides him into two selves. His conscious self, isolated and “standing there with the sound of the siren around him,” must watch his psychic twin relive the fateful day of the tenement fire: “[H]e could see himself coming home on Monday afternoon. It was just about three o’clock. . .his lunchbox was empty and he could see it swinging light from his hand” (368). Petry calls attention to this uncanny doubling by repeating the phrase “he could see himself” over nine times as the protagonist works his way through the vivid and visceral memory (369). On the other hand, this phrase also leaves open the possibility that the siren’s noise is Lilly Belle’s voice “tearing inside him,” hijacking his heart beat, stealing his voice, 229 shifting his consciousness and forcing the narrator to see things from her point of view, a kind of “third sight” or “triple vision.” 39 The renewed sight—brought on by the palpable but unseen sound waves of the sonic color-line—enables the protagonist to realize precisely how circumscribed the lives of his family have been in Harlem. Through this memory, the narrator essentially confesses to the murder of Lilly Belle and realizes the action has not given him release in any form. In fact, as he recalls tightening the veil around her throat, he feels the “cold hard knot that formed inside him when he saw that she was dead” (162). While Lilly Belle was a visible target for his rage, he realizes she was not the root cause of it; the murder only entangles him further in the system of oppression. The imagery of constriction is intensified by the siren, which begins to howl with renewed vigor, adding a new layer onto the sound: “The station trembled as the train approached. As it drew nearer and nearer the siren took on a new note— a louder sharper sobbing sound. It was talking. ‘Locked in. They were locked in’” (369). At last, he hears Lilly Belle and the children through the grieving, “sobbing” talk of the siren. The train—often a symbol of mobility and potential freedom in African American literature, music, and culture (Wright: 1939, Griffin: 1995, Davis: 1999, Dinerstein: 2003)—offers no escape to the protagonist, it sympathizes with the siren instead: “as it thundered in, it took up the siren’s moan. ‘They were locked in. They were locked in.’” The repetition of “locked in” throughout this section suggests that the protagonist becomes aware that the “invisible walls of oppression locking his 230 family into tenement life are manifested in the locked door preventing his children’s escape” (Holladay 11). Whereas the veil can be removed or lifted, the echo chamber of the sonic color-line is both more nebulous and insidious; its unseen force seems to emanate from everywhere simultaneously. The protagonist is literally unable to hear anything else but the siren’s song; unable to change the past or escape the radioactive insight of the present, he throws himself into the path of the approaching train. Believing everything he hears—or thinks he hears—drives him to self-destruction. The moan of the siren in “On Saturday” manifests what Moten has called the “condition of impossibility of a universal language” (211). Moten identifies the moan as an iconic aural trope within the African American artistic imaginary, a resounding force that is intent on “releasing more than what is bound up in the presence of the word” (211). He traces this sound through Aunt Hester’s scream in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, to Emmett Till’s funeral photograph published in Jet in 1955, to the howls at the end of James Brown’s “Cold Sweat.” To this genealogy, I add the howling siren of Petry’s story, a sound that marks the absence of Lilly Belle’s voice as well as her husband’s inability to hear her. It also sounds out the invisible but material boundary blocking the protagonist from immersing himself in the crowd at the train station. However, as the siren manifests Lilly Belle’s presence, the sound also speaks to the converse of Moten’s statement; the moan is “also the possibility of a universal language” (211, emphasis mine). The 231 “thin echo” sounds out an elegy for Eloise, Lilly Belle, for the protagonist, and for the now orphaned children still “locked in” to segregated Harlem. The images of the echo and the stratified sound of the siren in “On Saturday” suggest the materiality of invisible structures of oppression, particularly the interlocking processes of racialization and gendering. Petry continues to use aural imagery to critique dominant regimes of truth in The Street, particularly the howling winds, echoing screams, blaring radios, and stark silences that sound out the walls of Lutie’s 116 th Street tenement. “Certainly You Can Holler Loud Enough”: The Street (1946) “Black women represent the most completely marginalized group in radio’s practices.” —Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices “Inside her apartment she stood motionless, assailed by the deep, uncanny silence that filled it. It was a too sharp contrast to the noise in the street. She turned on the radio and then turned it off again, because she kept listening, straining to hear something under the sound of the music.” —Ann Petry, The Street Petry’s first novel, The Street chronicles the story of Lutie Johnson, a beautiful young black woman from New York City who struggles on the edge of poverty. Unhappily separated from her husband—who takes up with another woman while she is working as a live-in maid for the Chandler family in Connecticut—Lutie moves from their home in Jamaica, Queens, to a one-bedroom apartment in a Harlem tenement with her eight year old son Bub. She works hard at her civil service job; 232 scrimping, saving, and attempting, in the style of Benjamin Franklin and Booker T. Washington, to pull herself up by her own bootstraps and attain what she perceives as a respectable middle class domestic existence. 40 However, as she stumbles into one dead-end after another—working alternately as maid, civil servant, and nightclub singer—Lutie begins to realize that the American Dream is not colorblind nor gender neutral; the raced, classed, and gendered walls of her tenement close in on her, regardless of the path she takes. 41 Assailed by men on both sides of the color-line, Lutie fights to retain control over her sexuality while still making economic progress. The building’s super, who has lusted after her since she first asked to see the apartment, tries to drag Lutie down to the basement and rape her, but the neighborhood madam, Mrs. Hedges, rescues her. As revenge for Lutie’s rejection, the super tricks her young son into stealing mail, telling him he is helping America fight communism. Bub eventually gets arrested, and Lutie believes she needs two hundred dollars to pay a lawyer to get him released from the youth home. Not realizing the lawyer is trying to take advantage of her desperate state, she goes to Boots Smith for the money. He tries to convince Lutie to have sex with Junto—the white entrepreneur that owns the majority of the property in their neighborhood—in exchange for the cash, but she angrily refuses. Boots suddenly decides he wants to rape her—“‘let him get his afterward,’ he tells her, ‘ I’ll have mine first” (428)—and Lutie grabs a candlestick in self-defense and bashes him in the face until he is dead. 233 Frightened and feeling that she has failed her son, The Street ends with Lutie fleeing New York City on a train bound for Chicago. Petry uses aural imagery to communicate Lutie’s entrapment within the colorblind rhetoric of the American Dream and the realities of the persistent and enduring power of racism in American society. I disagree with Heather Hicks’s assertion that Petry primarily “depicts the dynamics of 1940’s Harlem in terms of visibility and, more particularly, in terms of looking and watching” (2003: 21). In the opening tableau of the novel, for example, the aural and tactile image of the wind reveals the invisible barriers that constrain Lutie’s steps above and beyond what the eye can see. “It did everything it could to discourage people walking along the street,” Petry describes, “it wrapped newspaper around their entangling them until the people cursed deep in their throats” (2). No space is left untouched in the immense reach of its loud, “violent assault”: “It rattled the tops of garbage cans, sucked window shades and set them flapping back against the windows” (1). The sound of the wind ripping through garbage and intruding through the tenement windows signifies the exposure and lack of private space for the inhabitants of 116 th Street, whose close proximity to each other in overcrowded conditions puts them constantly on display. The wind lifts Lutie’s hair and caresses her neck until “she felt suddenly naked” and its icy fingers find her every vulnerability (2); when she resists the wind’s chilly touch, it violently “smacked against her ears as though it were giving her a final, exasperated blow as proof of its displeasure on not being 234 able to make her move on” (4). Lutie’s experience with the wind is highly sexualized and explicitly gendered, structuring the terms of her physical mobility in the world based on the availability of her body (Wesling 121). Although 116 th Street is a segregated black neighborhood, Petry uses the aural image of the wind—and silence, which I will say more about later—to show its intimate connection to whiteness and masculinity; whites constructed Lutie’s domestic trap through discriminatory laws that enabled them to turn a hefty profit. Although whites are largely physically absent from Harlem—aside from the ostensibly colorblind but nonetheless exploitative Junto, who “treated the white men who worked for him exactly the same way as he treated the black ones” (263)—the traces of their power are assuredly felt there. Much like the thick white snow that blankets Wright’s Native Son and the siren that moans its way through “On Saturday,” the howling wind can be read as a sonic and tactile metaphor for the invisible power of whiteness and its ability to structure and narrow the lives of Harlem’s inhabitants even without an immediate physical presence. While black people are contained and constrained, the ideology of whiteness roams freely everywhere, rattling trashcans, peeking through windows, and pushing itself into eardrums. In addition to the wind, the image of the echo surfaces in the buildings’ doorbell, sounding out the boundaries of what will become Lutie’s residential prison on 116 th Street. 42 When Lutie “reached out and rang the Super’s bell. It made a shrill sound that echoed and reechoed throughout the apartment and came out into 235 the hall” (8). As the sound of the doorbell repeatedly ricochets off the thick, dense walls of the apartment, it portrays the building as a closed, hollow space where not even sound vibrations are allowed to escape. The thick exterior walls of the tenement building function like a giant echo chamber, throwing the grating noise right back at her. The building contains the shrill sounds of segregated poverty within its walls—clanging steam heat, blaring radios, old furniture scraping even older wooden floors, the “hammer blows of time and children” (3)—until its residents can hear little else. Throughout the novel, Petry repeats the phrase “echoed and reechoed” to describe the sonic architecture of the tenement (139, 218, 336, 313, 390). Within the building, everyone hears everything; residents lose their privacy and even their individual identities, as the building wraps all the residents “together in one big package” of segregation, poverty, and dominant conceptions of “blackness” (3). Sound, however, does not escape the building; outside, the street is often “wrapped in silence” (351), signifying the residents’ isolation from any notion of a general public. The stark silence not only enacts each tenant’s profound lack of a public voice, but also the inability or unwillingness of the rest of New York City to hear them. Even though the wind forces itself directly into her eardrums and the doorbell echoes around her, Lutie, at first, either refuses or is unable to perceive the depth of her isolation and silencing within what Wesling describes as “seeming neutrality of public space” (117). However segregated, Lutie still believes herself to be an 236 American citizen with basic protection under the law; she imagines that her voice can and will be heard. She also envisions herself within the patriarchal codes of (white) female respectability, whose honor is desired and protected. When weighing the potential danger of the lascivious super with her need for the apartment, she feels that even in the cramped kitchenette she would be able to “holler loud enough so that if the gentleman [her super] has some kind of dark designs on [her] and tries to carry them out, a cop will eventually rescue [her]. That’s that” (19). While seemingly innocuous, the brief moment with the doorbell actually foreshadows the fact that no matter how loud or how long she screams for help, Lutie remains marginalized and out of earshot. The night the super tries to drag her down the stairs, for example, she screamed until she could hear her own voice insanely shrieking up the stairs, pausing on the landings, turning the corners, going down the halls, gaining in volume as it started again to climb the stairs. And then her screams rushed back down the stairwell until the whole building echoed and reechoed with the frantic, desperate sound” (236). The more she screams, the more confined she feels, as her own screams envelop her and mock her for even attempting to scream. While the sound does finally draw the attention of Mrs. Hedges—who pulls the super from Lutie and comforts her with a cup of tea—she encourages Lutie to sleep with Junto offer for money, which only makes Lutie feel more entrapped. By the end of the novel, Lutie has literally and metaphorically screamed for help several times, but her cries are largely unheard and ignored. Each time, she is taunted by the sound of her own voice echoing the depths 237 of her isolation back to her yet again; after killing Boots, “she couldn’t stop shouting,” even though she has finally realized that “shouting wasn’t enough” (428). Of all the sounds circulating within the echo chamber of Lutie’s segregated Harlem tenement, the ubiquitous “tinny sound of the radio” is perhaps the most treacherous (411). The scene involving the radio that I examined in an earlier section is both typical and unusual; while the radio recurs throughout The Street, Petry does not usually describe it in such depth, choosing instead to represent it quite simply as “the radio,” a shorthand that flattens its sound to ambient noise, however iconic. The radio largely functions as a mechanical aural substitute for something that is unattainable within Lutie’s segregated and cloistered urban space: human companionship, material comfort, new surroundings, and dreams of fame, success, and escape, both permanent and temporary. Radio’s palliative utility, however, is double-edged. While the sound of the radio sometimes makes Lutie feel as if she were “somewhere there was music like that and dancing” (78), it also confronts her with the limits of her life: “listening to the music she thought she couldn’t possibly go on living here with nothing to look forward to” (82). As much as residents of 116 th Street use the radio to invite sounds in, they also turn up the volume in an attempt to keep undesirable sounds out. Similar to the way in which Petry layers the sound of the siren in “On Saturday,” the aural image of the radio contains a stratification of other sounds underneath it that fight to be heard. The night that Bub is arrested and Lutie sobs so loudly that the “thin walls echoed and re-echoed with it” 238 (390), the tenement is filled with the sound of radios flicking on to “drown out this familiar, frightening, unbearable sound, but even under the radios they could hear it” (390). The louder Lutie sobs, the harder the walls reverberate with “music, any kind of music, turned up full and loud—jazz, blues, swing, symphony, surged through the house” (391). While radio was reputed for its ability to bring communities—even nations—together, in The Street radio largely functions to isolate and compartmentalize people, inuring them to their surroundings and each other. ::: Unlike the sonorous world of 116 th street, whose sonic architecture is dense, enveloping, and full of endless echoes, the all-white Connecticut suburb where Lutie worked as a maid is represented as almost completely silent. The sleepy hamlet of Lyme—where Lutie notices “there wasn’t another colored person in sight” (36)—is depicted as a flat, largely visual world of glimmering surfaces, “like something in the movies. . .she had never seen anything like it before” (38). As Mrs. Chandler’s car turns down the densely wooded lane, the initial sight overwhelms Lutie: “she never quite got over that first glimpse of the outside of the house—so gracious with such long lines, its white paint almost sparkling in the sun” (37). Similar to the Daltons’ home in Native Son, the Chandler’s mansion is soundproofed: Lutie notices the muffling of the “rug with pile so deep it looked like fur” and the shining effects of chintz draperies that “gleamed softly at the windows” (38). Lutie repeats the description “perfect” several times as she glances around, making mental 239 comparisons of the Chandlers’ large, quiet airy rooms with the string of noisy, stifling cubicles she had inhabited in Jamaica, Queens. The rich visual detail of this section serves to highlight the extensive time and money the Chandlers have spent making their home a reflection of the “fat sleek magazines” Vogue, Town and Country, Harper’s Bazaar, House and Garden, House Beautiful (50). Ironically, while Mrs. Chandler is literally and metaphorically a “subscriber” to these periodicals, she rarely reads them herself, passing them on to Lutie to pore over, “saying, ‘Here, Lutie. Maybe you’d like to look at this’ (50). Not surprisingly, these magazines have very little to do with the realities of life as it is staged in the “perfect” domesticity of the Chandler home. Their power lies almost entirely in their potent visual representation of the white suburban ideal to nonwhite “Others” like Lutie, who can look but cannot touch. Lutie finds the all-white residential space of Lyme to be both silent and silencing. She immediately begins to modulate her voice and behavior within this “perfect” white suburban world. When Mrs. Chandler asks Lutie if she wants to go on the tour of the house, she responds, ‘yes, ma’am,’…quietly. And [Lutie] wondered how she had been able to say ‘yes, ma’am’ so neatly and so patly. Some part of her mind must have known it already, must have already mapped out the way she was to go about keeping this job for as long as it was necessary by being the perfect maid (37). Petry depicts Lutie’s subtle move to alter the way her voice sounds in the white world as almost subconscious. She slides into pat, established vocal “(stereo)types,” 240 sounding out the “already mapped out” boundary of the sonic color-line within the Chandler home. As she hears her own voice sounding strange, Lutie notes that it is this submission that makes her a “perfect” black object within this house of white perfection. The mute visual ideals of the magazines and the modulated aural (stereo)types of the sonic color-line construct the white suburban world as a space of silence, suppression, and deletion. Silence is the privileged sonic backdrop to a world controlled and ordered by the ideals of white supremacy. In this chapter, Lutie’s experience in the Chandler home firmly connects whiteness with the eradication of the “noise” of (nonwhite) human subjectivity in favor of and in compliance with the flat perfection of the visual image. We learn much later that Lutie does not take Bub with her to work in the suburbs not only because she does not want her son to be labeled the “cook’s little boy,” but because his impulses to express himself would be effectively stifled by white expectations of silence and complicity: “he would have to be silent when he was bursting to talk and make noise” (403). His expression as a growing boy would have to be constantly policed and disciplined under the “listening ear” of her employers. Black children, especially, should be seen and not heard. However, the cracks in the visual façade of white perfection begin to reveal themselves almost immediately upon Lutie’s arrival in Lyme. The Chandlers constantly invoke their money, power, and privilege to uphold the sonic color-line, 241 muffling the imperfections of their humanity from public view. Mr. Chandler drinks heavily, exactly like Lutie’s father; Mrs. Chandler ignores her child and flirts shamelessly with other men, exactly like the white women baselessly accuse Lutie of doing. The night before Christmas, Lutie drifts peacefully off to bed accompanied by the sounds of a violent argument, “thinking it was nice to know that white people had loud common fights just like colored people” (46). When she wakes up in the morning it is to another violent noise, that of Mr. Chandler’s brother shooting himself in the head by the Christmas tree. Interestingly, Petry does not recount this scene in a detailed aural fashion; her description mirrors the cover-up that is soon to take place: “He drew the gun quickly and fired it. Held it under his ear and pulled the trigger” (47). Just like Petry quiets the gunshot in the text, the Chandlers cover up the noise in the press, using their money, pull, and privilege to transform the suicide into an “accident with a gun” in the newspapers (49). Petry depicts the white world outside the sonic color-line as ensconced in a protective—yet suppressive—layer of quiet. While Petry connects the sonic color-line to a particular type of control over physical space, its walls have a portable, ideological contour as well. In The Street, whiteness is enacted (often unconsciously) through the sound, pacing, and intonation of the voice. 43 For example, Lutie remembers a peaceful train ride with Mrs. Chandler where it almost seemed as if they were “just two people who knew each other and to whom it was only incidental that one of them was white and the other 242 black” (51). This vision of potential equality ends abruptly when the women step off the train in New York City; Mrs. Chandler loudly and deliberately dismisses her with a “see you Monday” in a clipped tone that immediately invoked her status and power over Lutie. “The wall suddenly loomed up,” Lutie recalls, and “it was Mrs. Chandler’s voice that erected it” (51). Sound allows the racialized power structure of Jim Crow to travel into public, desegregated places like Grand Central Station, the largest train depot in the North. Even in such an anonymous and transitory space, it was crucial to Mrs. Chandler that her “tone of voice unmistakably established the relation between the blond young woman and the brown woman” (51). Mrs. Chandler is able to wrap herself in the (white) privilege and protection of the sonic color-line wherever she goes; even within space that is legally neutral, Lutie is just as segregated as if she were in her Harlem kitchenette. While onlookers might be fooled into seeing a harmonious depiction of race relations, listeners would hear a different and more resonant kind of truth. ::: While silence is idealized in the context of the white suburbs, it is a dangerous sound on the other side of the sonic color-line. Within the Harlem soundscape, silence does not delineate an absence of sound, but rather it amplifies the sound of absence itself. Neither passive nor peaceful, Petry represents silence as an active, perpetual force of deletion constantly pressing on the walls of 116 th Street and threatening to suffocate its residents. For Lutie, silence is an especially dreaded 243 sound, “dead air” that she repeatedly tries to drown out with the radio. Washing the dishes one night after her and Bub’s meager dinner, Lutie finds that although the “radio was on full blast. . .under it there was a stillness that crept throughout the rooms” (78). She deliberately moves toward the radio, sitting down “close to it, so that the dance music would shut out the silence” (81). Lutie frequently associates silence with enclosure; at various points in the novel, she notices that it “filled the hall” (186). She also describes it as a “somber silence, a curious stillness all around her” (195), and depicts herself as “wrapped in silence” (351). Continually haunted by a “creeping silence that could be heard under the blaring radios” (81), Lutie does not merely exist in a vacuum; even more horrifying, Petry depicts the silence of the vacuum stalking Lutie as prey. Lutie’s repeated attempts to ignore and drown out the silence ultimately backfire; her refusal to listen deeply only strengthens its power over her. The more trapped Lutie becomes—in debt, in the legal system, in the sights of various men in her neighborhood—the louder and more intrusive the silence becomes. Upon visiting Bub in prison, she notices that the “dangerous silence” has followed her there, becoming so strong that it even takes on a smell (409). The silence trails her home to her apartment, becoming visible as well as audible as a “pool” that begins to fill her apartment (411). Like the wind that opened the novel, it chases her up and down 116 th Street, causing her movements to become both circumscribed and erratic. She ducks into the movies, only to find the silence “crouched along the aisles. . . 244 waiting, waiting” (413). At the beauty parlor, Lutie is able to hear the silence “under the words” of the beautician; she leaves fearing that it “would walk down the street with her and into the apartment” (418). While invisible, Lutie apprehends silence as a palpable and pervasive material force capable of constraining her movement. Though she perceives “silence” throughout the text, Lutie does not identify it as racialized until it finally overwhelms her. The creeping silence had appeared to be “formless, shapeless, a fluid moving mass—something disembodied that she could only sense. Now. . . the thing took on form, substance. She could see what it was. It was Junto” (418). The character Junto is fittingly named after Ben Franklin’s secret mutual improvement society founded in 1727, an underground network of white men that provided each other with exclusive business deals and held a large influence over politics without holding any office. In The Street, Junto maintains a low-key persona that allows his economic stranglehold over 116 th street to remain undetected. Like capital itself, Junto is flexible, invisible, and mobile (Wesling 2006). Boots Smith describes him as “all grey” and notes that because he is so nondescript, all those people guzzling drinks at the bar never glanced in his direction. The ones standing outside on the street and the ones walking back and forth were dumb, blind, deaf to Junto’s existence. Yet he had them coming and going. If they wanted to sleep, they paid him; if they wanted to drink, they paid him; if they wanted to dance, they paid him, and never even knew it (275). Junto owns Lutie’s building, he owns the bars and nightclubs his tenants frequent to escape those horrific living conditions, and he does everything within his power to own Lutie as well. The various images of stillness, quiet, and silence converge at 245 the end of the novel, revealing how Junto’s economic, social, and sexual maneuvering has caused Lutie’s “straight” path of hard work to take twists and turns that she never wanted, intended, or ever anticipated. 44 The final image of The Street is silence. Reminiscent of Wright’s Native Son, the segregated urban streets begin to fill with snow as Lutie takes flight. However, Harlem is not barraged by the howling blizzard that assaults Bigger in Chicago, but rather 116 th street receives a quaint dusting: the snow fell softly on the street. It muffled sound. It sent people scurrying homeward, so that the street was soon deserted, empty, quiet. And it could have been any street in the city, for the snow laid a delicate film over the sidewalk, over the brick of the tired, old buildings; gently obscuring the grime and the garbage and the ugliness (436). Whereas the snowfall in Native Son exposed white control over Chicago, the snow that falls in the wake of Lutie’s departure functions to mask it. This snow is “colorblind,” falling everywhere on the city equally, making the worst poverty- stricken streets seem like they could have been “any street in the city.” In addition to the visual illusion provided by its “delicate film,” the veneer of colorblindness distorts and “muffles” sound and shapes people’s movement, driving them indoors off the street. Just below the “gently obscuring” surface, however, lies the same “tired, old buildings” and “ugliness.” Ann Petry’s fiction exposes the distortion of colorblindness by sounding out the treacherous urban terrain below. 1 A sampling of these titles includes “Harlem Flat Blues” (1929), “Drop Me Off in Harlem” (1933), “Jungle Nights in Harlem” (1934), “Harlem Speaks” (1939), “Echoes of Harlem” (1936), “The Boys from Harlem” (1939), “Heart of Harlem” (1945), and “A Night in Harlem” (1962). 246 2 Heather Hicks presents a related—but alternate—take on Petry’s status as a realist in “Rethinking Realism in Ann Petry’s The Street” (2002). 3 According to sound historian and theorist Stephen Connor, the “period between the invention of the telephone and the gathering of the great powers for the Second World War marks that second great wave of technological innovation. . .we think of the twentieth century as the era of modernity primarily because of this shift from industrial to communicational technologies; from technologies that are an elongation of the arm (or the penis) to technologies that are, as Marshall McLuhan has it, an extension of the central nervous system” (204-205). 4 For a comprehensive analysis of Williams’s changing articulation of the notion of “structures of feeling” throughout his oeuvre, see David Simpson’s “Raymond Williams: Feeling for Structures, Voicing ‘History’” (1992). 5 Michele Hilmes documents the radio propaganda of the U.S. government toward this end in Radio Voices (1997). What was most egregious about the government’s approach was its stealth, which she describes as a “hydra-headed approach.” The government wanted to “mold a more unified public response to the war without the appearance of direct organization” and therefore dispersed their messages in several locations (237). 6 “On Saturday” is the first short story Petry published under her own name. Her first short story, a spy romance entitled “Marie of the Cabin Club,” was published under the penname Arnold Petri in the Baltimore Afro-American in 1939. Although she does not use aural imagery in as sustained a fashion as she does in “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” or The Street, sound is integral to this story as well, especially the “miraculous music” of the trumpeter Georgie, Marie’s love interest: “He held the last note so long that she held her breath with it and didn’t start breathing again until it had died away. It left her with the feeling that he wasn’t a man laying a trumpet but a brown god who had bewitched the trumpet, turned it into a special kind of magic” (14). 7 I’m an American was a show on the Blue network that was co-sponsored by the Department of Justice and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It featured famous naturalized Americans explaining what it meant to them to be an American citizen. Freedom’s People was NBC’s answer to the highly successful Americans All, which they had refused to carry because of the fear expressed by James R. Angell, their new education counselor and former Yale President, that it would “stir up the menagerie” (qtd in Savage 25). Developed by Ambrose Caliver, a black employee at the Office of Education, it not only focused explicitly on black history and cultural and scientific achievements, but also dealt with segregation in sports, the military, and the workplace. Although Angell also tried to block this series because he felt it would not be popular “south of the Mason and Dixon’s line” (qtd in Savage 69) it aired during from the summer of 1941 to early 1942. 8 Amos and Andy was the most prominent comedy serial of radio’s first twenty years. Clearly based on derogatory minstrel show conventions and featuring an all-white cast performing in what Savage dubs “aural blackface,” Amos and Andy was immensely popular, profitable, and enduring; at its peak in 1929-1931 it reached over 40 million people nightly and it remained on the air for just over thirty years. The show centered on the lives of Amos and Andy, two recent black(face) migrants from the South who fumble their way toward the American Dream in Chicago, working as taxi-cab drivers at the Fresh Air Taxi Cab Company, Incorporated, so named because their only car had no windows. Hilmes characterizes the show as “objectif[ying] the status of African Americans as a permanently unassimilable underclass” (96); Savage argues that the “cultural incompetence” that drove the humor of the show functioned to undergird a white sense of privilege, superiority, and American insiderness (7). For anecdotal evidence of the immense popularity of Amos and Andy among white listeners drawn from oral histories, see Ray Barfield’s Listening to Radio 1920-1950 (1996: 51, 138-139). 247 Barfield describes how, at the show’s peak in the early 1930s, department stores were so afraid of losing business during “Amos and Andy’s” broadcast that they would pipe it in over their public address systems (51). According to Chip Rhodes, President Coolidge was a rabid fan of the show and “could not be disturbed” during its nightly broadcast (121). For an excellent summary of black protests against the show as well as quotes from letters written to the Philadelphia Courier describing the material consequences of the representations on Amos and Andy, such as white loan officers assuming that black businessman ran their businesses in a “bungling manner like Amos and Andy’s Fresh Air Taxicab Company” see the introduction to Savage’s Broadcasting Freedom (1999: 7-9). 9 The corporate consolidation of radio was profound by the late 1930s and had a dramatic effect on programming. Derek Valliant details how, even by 1935, government regulation helped close 20 percent of the independent stations and ensure that the commercial networks dominated the airwaves: “The independent era model of many producers constituting the ‘American’ sound of broadcasting had been replaced by a commercial network determination of that sound and the parties able to constitute it” (28). 10 The government, too, proclaimed radio’s neutrality, even as it actively used the nations aerials to “spray propaganda” concerning the war effort. “Only through the radio,” President Roosevelt declared in a 1939 government radio series, “is it possible to overtake loudly proclaimed untruths or greatly exaggerated half-truths” (qtd. in Savage 54). 11 For a detailed account of African American exclusion in Chicago-area broadcasting during the twenties see Derek W. Vaillant’s “Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1921-1935” (2002) in which he argues that both national networks and local stations “shared an unspoken agreement that a racialized white identity should continue to serve as the basis of American broadcasting” (30). 12 Savage examines this issue on connection to the radio show Freedom’s People, in which black stage actor Frank Wilson was ironically denied the job of narrator because he sounded “too white” (74). 13 For a thorough treatment of the show’s controversial creation, broadcast, and reception, see chapter one of Savage’s Broadcasting Freedom. For a synthesis of the connections between wartime broadcasting and narratives of immigration, consult the last chapter of Michele Hilmes’s Radio Voices (1997). 14 Du Bois’s biographer, David Levering Lewis traces the friendship, mentorship, and “affective bonds” between Davis DuBois and Du Bois in W.E.B. Du Bois (2000, 460). Davis DuBois and Du Bois had known each other since since 1920. Davis DuBois was politically active and fought against segregation throughout this period; she served on the editorial board of The Crisis in 1931. Du Bois frequently introduced her as the “other Mrs. DuBois” at conferences, relishing the shocked looks he would receive, not so much because he was married, but because Davis DuBois was white (270). 15 That Bledsoe was asked to perform by NAACP President Walter White makes the story even more complex, especially given Du Bois’s strained relationship with the NAACP by this time. 16 Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894) himself existed in somewhat of a vacuum, which is perhaps why Du Bois references him in Dusk of Dawn. He was born in New Orleans to a slave mother and a slave master father, who freed him and sent him to be educated in Paris. While there, he pursued his interest in the workings of the sugar plantation, specifically the ways in which he could make the refining process less dangerous for slaves. Working from the scientific principle that as pressure lowers, so does the boiling point of a liquid, Rillieux discovered that the refining process was easier 248 and safer when cane juice was heated in a vacuum. He patented his “multiple effect pan evaporator” in 1843 and—although “colored Rillieux” remained unsung—the vacuum pan did for the sugar industry what the Eli Whitney’s gin did for cotton processing. He lived in New Orleans until 1855, when laws severely limiting the freedom, education, and mobility of free people of color were enacted in New Orleans. He returned to France, where he felt less direct racism but received even less compensation and recognition for his ideas. At the age of 75 he developed another process for refining sugar beets, but was denied a patent for it. A few years later, his methods were incorporated into the “French Process” of refining, with no credit or compensation given to Rillieux. He died penniless in 1894. Although the Massachusetts Institute of Technology described his invention as one of the finest chemical innovations in American history, Rillieux was not inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame until 2004. 17 In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois writes, “I freely admit that, according to white writers, white teachers, white historians, and white molders of public opinion, nothing ever happened in the world of any importance that could not or should not be labeled ‘white’” (143). 18 Maria Farland’s article makes an excellent case for viewing Du Bois’s literary work—particularly the novel The Quest of the Golden Fleece (1911)—as deft transvaluations of his unpublished data and scientific observations. She also argues that reconstructing the links between science and literature in Du Bois’s oeuvre allows for a reconsideration of his gender in his writing, especially as he oscillated between the very masculine discourse of science and the feminine literary genre of domestic fiction. 19 While I feel that Petry’s work has a deep intellectual engagement with Du Bois, I have yet to locate evidence that indicates any personal connection between the two outside of the 1944 publication of Petry’s short story “Doby’s Gone” in Phylon, the literary magazine Du Bois edited at Atlanta University. She also mentioned Du Bois as a Harlem resident in her 1949 article for Holiday, which included his photo. 20 All quotes from The Street in this section are from a continuous passage, but I have broken it up for clarity and precision of analysis. 21 This segment evokes—and perhaps critiques—Langston Hughes’s 1922 poem “Mother to Son,” in which the speaker declares that “life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” and describes her ascent up a perilous rough hewn staircase. Unlike the close of The Street—in which Lutie’s son is in jail— Hughes’s poem ends hopefully; the mother advises her son to keep climbing, as she is “still goin’ honey” (30). 22 Like critics Yemisi Jemoh (2002) and Jürgen Grandt (2004), I have been unable to find any extradiegetic references to “Rock, Raleigh, Rock.” I do feel that, based on the historical context of swing and the placement of the song within this medley, I can venture some theories as to the nature of the sound. 23 The passage continues with the segment that I have included as the second epigraph to this chapter. 24 Petry uses the phrase “echoed and re-echoed” several times in both “On Saturday” and The Street as well as “Marie of the Cabin Club.” 25 The full story appears in book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphosis and is deftly recounted at the opening of Amy Lawrence’s Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (1991). I offer a brief summary here. Echo, a nymph, has lost the power of speech after she delays the wife of a philandering god in conversation, allowing him to escape being caught in the act. One day, she sees Narcissus in the forest and falls deeply in love, but is unable to communicate with him. She can only 249 echo his words back to him; he rejects her. With her heart broken, Echo hides herself in a cave until her physical body becomes stone; only her echoing voice remained. Narcissus is eventually cursed himself, after rejecting one too many women. One of his would-be lovers asks the gods to make Narcissus himself feel the sting of unrequited love. Narcissus awakens in the woods next to a pool of water; there he sees his reflection and falls hopelessly in love. He pines away after his own image until he wastes away and eventually dies. 26 Echolocation mimics the navigational techniques of dolphins and bats, in which a sound is emitted in the direction of an object and the waves reflected by the object are then analyzed to determine its size, shape, and location. 27 George Mooney’s “A Microphone Almanac” from the June 22, 1941 edition of the New York Times describes the type of production in which a radio listener would come across an “echo chamber”: “The show will be a super-colossal, lavish, super-charged production, using all the tricks and resources, echo chambers and filter mikes, strange sound effects and musical devices possible” (X8). 28 The WPA Guide to New York City, published in 1939, specifically describes the station as a springboard to nature: “from Spring through Fall, groups of hikers mill about the East 241 st street terminal of the IRT White Plains subway, for here begins a two and a half mile trail to sylvan Tibbet’s Brook park in Yonkers” (540). 29 This form of representation is called “subjective sound” when used as a cinematic technique. In “Sound and Empathy: Subjectivity, Gender, and the Cinematic Soundscape,” Robynn J. Stillwell describes that “point of audition” is slightly more common than true point of view camera work, but still used only intermittently by filmmakers. What is especially interesting to me is that she notes that in films where it is utilized—namely by Alfred Hitchcock—it has a dramatically different effect: “while point-of-view puts us in the subject position of a character in control, point-of-audition puts us in the subject position of a character who has lost or is losing control” (174). 30 The hypocrisy of the rhetoric surrounding World War II is a theme that surfaces throughout Petry’s writing, especially in relation to African American communities in the United States. The truths of U.S. racism—segregated army troops, poverty-stricken ghettos, Jim Crow laws, racially restrictive covenants, and lynching—all have to be disavowed in order to construct the narrative that the war to end fascism and racism was triumphantly being fought abroad. Or, as Boots Smith would later say in The Street, “For me to go leaping and running to the draft board, a lot of things would be different. Them white guys in the army are fighting for something. I ain’t got anything to fight for” (259). In 1940s Harlem, where people like Boots and the narrator of “On Saturday,” are struggling to escape racism, grinding poverty and servitude, this civilian call to patriotism is barely heard over the other street noises that more immediately shape their survival and (in)form their impressions of how the world works. 31 For more complete air raid instructions and a glimpse into the culture of fear surrounding World War II, see Fiorello La Guardia’s “What to do in Event of Air Raid Here,” printed in the New York Times on December 12, 1941 (21). 32 The sirens were mythical creatures, part bird, part female, that lived on a string of small, rocky islands and, with their beautiful and alluring song, lured sailors to their death. There have only been two known escapes from this mythical peril. The first occurs when Orpheus saves the Argonauts by playing the beautiful music of his lyre to combat and layer over the noise, a metaphor for self- expression in the face of attempted destruction. And the second more famous escape happens when Odysseus wads wax in the ears of his crew and ties himself to the mast of his ship so that, as his crew slides past the rocky shores, he may hear the siren’s song and not be consumed by it. In The Dialectic 250 of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer read the sirens as representations of (the) Enlightenment and the processes of mechanization and modernity: "Even though the Sirens know all that has happened; they demand the future as the price of that knowledge, and the promise of the happy return is the deception with which the past ensnares the one who longs for it" (48). Petry’s story takes it one step further, though, considering the nostalgic longing for a “happy return” is signaled by advertising—a visual representation of an exclusive, raced and gendered constructed vision of domestic bliss that was always inaccessible to the protagonist: “The pictures were filled with the shine of metal, too. A silver punch bowl in a coca-cola ad and brass candlesticks that fairly jumped off the table. A family was sitting around the table, they were eating” (368). 33 “On Saturday” could also be read as a recasting of the myth of Echo and Narcissus, especially in light of Amy Lawrence’s comment that “Both Echo and Narcissus are ravished by perception, subjected to obstacles of expression of comprehension, and ultimately die from the missed connections” (2). 34 The term “lily” was also used to describe the folded feet of Chinese women after they have been bound, evocative of entrapment and circumscribed movement. Finally, to “gild the lily” means “to embellish excessively,” suggestive of the process by which layers of narrative meaning are applied to the figure of Lilly Belle. 35 It was re-recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1945. 36 He also discredits her as a mother by describing how the children’s visit to the hospital was the “first time they’d ever been clean” and immediately contrasting Lilly Belle with the “crisp starched nurse” (369). 37 Du Bois elaborates on this vision in his 1920 essay, “The Souls of White Folk”: “Of them [whites] I am singularly clairvoyant. I can see through them. . .I see these souls undressed and from the back and the side. I see the workings of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. . . And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped—ugly, human” (17). 38 Much of Petry’s aural imagery in The Street is also synaesthetic. Silences, for example, have shapes that can be tasted, touched, or felt like a pool of water around the feet. Sound is not ethereal or ephemeral, but a powerful material force that can have dire consequences. 39 At the climax of The Street, which also involves a murder, Petry describes Lutie Johnson as having “triple vision” (429). 40 For an excellent analysis of Petry’s critique of abstract citizenship in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography see Meg Wesling’s “The Opacity of Everyday Life: Segregation and the Iconicity of Uplift in The Street” (2006). 41 In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois writes, “Education, thrift, hard work and character undoubtedly are influential, but they are implemented with power only as they gain wealth; and as land, natural resources, credit and capital are increasingly monopolized, they gain wealth by permission of the dominating wealthy class” (190). 42 Petry repeats the adjective “shrill” throughout the text, using it to describe sounds that indicate the reach of white authority to black ears: The whistle of the cop car that pulls over Boots Smith for speeding through the white neighborhoods of the city (165), the bell that the white customers use to 251 summon Boots when he works as a Pullman Porter (273), the howling of the Super’s dog as Mrs. Hedges announces him as “Cellar Crazy” (301), and the contrasting soft chimes that Lutie hears when she expects a shrill doorbell at Boots’ place (399). I think this is a very important repetition, on par with the “clanging” in Wright’s text. 43 When Bub’s white teacher, Mrs. Rinner, feels herself to be losing control of her classroom, she tries to instill fear in the class by “fill[ing] her voice with authority, ma[king] it cross, waspish, in the hope that the sound would so overawe the class they wouldn’t realize that she had lost again” (335). 44 In some ways, Petry reverses the racial dynamics of Du Bois’s image of the veil, arguing that there a veil has also been placed over white power; the transparency of white economic practices can no longer be taken for granted. The conspicuous consumption of the overtly racist Chandlers is not nearly as threatening as the inconspicuous appropriation of the colorblind Junto; while he has no personal qualms about race, he works the racist system to his full economic advantage and has a vested interest in upholding it Although Junto allows his black business partners Mrs. Hedges and Boots Smith some autonomy, then never have any real control or long range opportunity. Mrs. Hedges operates a whorehouse in Junto’s building and Boots’s relationship with Junto eventually costs him his life, as he absorbs the brunt of the Lutie’s anger after she finally realizes the profundity of Junto’s stranglehold. 252 CHAPTER FOUR ‘New York, on the other side, that is’: Tony Schwartz and the “Noise” of Segregation in Postwar Nueva York “There is definite hostility between the Puerto Ricans and the Negroes who are in the great majority; and between the Puerto Ricans and the Italians living east of Third Avenue. And so Harlem is also a Puerto Rican child, afraid to use the swimming pools in the East River playgrounds because, ‘Those belong to the Italians.’ Sometimes these separate hostile groups rub shoulders, and for a moment, create the illusion that Harlem is a melting pot.” –Ann Petry, “Harlem” in Holiday Magazine (1949) “Spread wide were the ravaged brownstones, and she wandered there, remembering how, in the past, those houses would have been drawn within the darkness of themselves by this time, and the streets empty and echoing like the streets at dawn. Now the roomers’ tangled lives spilled out the open windows, and the staccato beat of Spanish voices, the frenzied, sensuous beat joined the warm canorous Negro sounds to glut the air. As she passed, a man—silhouetted against a room where everything seemed poised for flight—burst into a fiercely sad song in Spanish.” –Paule Marshall, Browngirl, Brownstones (1954) “I am very repentant of having left my country. Since I came here, the cold weather is trying to kill me. This is not my country. I am very disgusted. I have to be always wrapped in overcoats, and with the English language, I am always mixed up. Whenever I have to take an elevator, I start trembling from head to foot. I hate to think about the hour when I left my country. Somebody told me it was quite different from Puerto Rico and New York, on the other side, that is.” –Man translating song from Spanish to English at a Jukebox, Nueva York (1955) 1 Made during the period of “definite hostility” that Ann Petry described, Tony Schwartz’s recordings of New York City can sometimes “create the illusion that Harlem is a melting pot.” Black and Puerto Rican children improvise rhythms on trashcans and empty Pepsi bottles in a Harlem housing project while Pete Seeger of the Weavers belts out “Wimoweh.” 2 A Parker pitchman hawks to a crowd that his pens “write in Yiddish as well as English.” Schwartz’s heavily edited records—an estimated eleven hours of production for each minute of finished master, according 253 to Robert Angus’s profile in Better Listening—often make swift juxtapositions to present a vibrant, multiethnic urban environment where the sounds of a black cab driver singing spirituals peacefully co-exists with the blare of marching bands attending the procession of an Italian church’s patron saint. The fact that Schwartz’s soundscapes were frequently marketed as documentaries raises the stakes on these harmonious sounds. Documentaries during the early 1950s—the period of early cinema vérité—were predominately viewed as transparent vehicles of truth rather representational constructs that challenged the very notion of truth itself. “The naïve treatment of documentation” remarks Alexander Kluge, “therefore provides a unique opportunity to concoct fables” (qtd. in Trinh 16). While the danger of fanciful representation remains inherent in Schwartz’s undertaking, I argue that the urban “fables” he constructed in his aural montages were defiantly knowing ones. What might seem at best historically quaint to contemporary ears—and at worst a spectacular juxtaposition of cultures in the vein of the “melting pot”—becomes more radical when heard within the political and socio-historical context of a city becoming increasingly more racially segregated and stratified. Like the dissonance Paule Marshall’s passage creates between the sight of the “ravaged brownstones” and the vigorous sounds of the “tangled lives [that] spilled out the windows,” Schwartz pits his diverse sounds of the city against the dominant view of New York as a blighted wasteland, a vision circulated by contemporary 254 politicians, journalists, filmmakers, social scientists, and fleeing white suburbanites. Always acknowledging the role of his “imaginative frame of mind” in constructing his soundscapes (Angus 6), Schwartz reconfigures snippets of urban sound into believable narratives of cultural exchange that expose the prevailing representation of the postwar city as a festering slum as an even bigger fable—and a more insidious, powerful, and dangerous one at that. For example, when Robert Moses’s Urban Renewal Project—frequently called out as “Negro Removal”—slated 16.3 acres of Schwartz’s neighborhood for “slum clearance” in 1955 to provide space for the new Lincoln Center, Schwartz produced a radio program in protest. The show drew from all of the indoor and outdoor music he had recorded over the years within the looming footprint of the new entertainment complex. According to collaborator Michael Rowen, “politicians howled” when Schwartz’s broadcast brought the sounds of his neighbors’ thriving cultural production to the public, providing a venue for the music of people being forcibly “removed so that the formal orchestra and strings would have room” to entertain the powerful, prosperous, and privileged (2). During this transitional postwar era of urban conflict, increased segregation, and accelerating “white flight,” Schwartz’s LPs simultaneously affirmed and challenged the notion that music and audio culture function as forces of social cohesion in the United States. Through an auditory recreation of the postwar metropolis—complete with rumbling El Trains, honking horns, and throbbing jackhammers—Schwartz attempted to reclaim the noisy, ethnically diverse urban 255 streets as the preeminent crucible of American identity in the face of increasing white migration to the quiet, sterile, and secluded suburbs. However, Schwartz’s recordings make no simple recourse to a universally accessible American identity. He deftly intersperses moments of social cohesion with conflicting and conflicted counternarratives that depict American identity as multiple, complex, and contested. The legacy of colonialism can be heard through the grooves of Schwartz’s 1955 recording Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers, showing how the United States “is not [the] country” of millions of Puerto Ricans, despite having full citizenship rights. For example, on side one of Nueva York, Schwartz juxtaposes the words of a Riverside woman, who snarls that she wishes her Puerto Rican neighbors “hadn’t come here in the first place,” with a “fiercely sad song sung in Spanish” translated by a migrant to reveal a deep longing for Puerto Rico intermingled with profound disgust at the harsh, unwelcoming cruelty of New York. While a detailed examination of Schwartz’s entire oeuvre is certainly a worthwhile project—and one that has yet to be undertaken—I bound my analysis here to Nueva York as an audio case study of the multiple contours of the sonic color-line, a narrative of segregation that connects legal and public discourses around “noise” with Puerto Rican migration to New York City in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Schwartz’s self-described project “to capture sound that was part of everyday city life” (xiii) placed him at the epicenter of the profound demographic changes rocking the city. Rapid population growth, coupled with discriminatory housing 256 practices and large scale “white flight,” created an inner-city that was largely black, Puerto Rican, and poor, and commuter suburbs that were predominately white and middle to upper class. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, black migration to the urban North from the rural South continued in record numbers, forming a second Great Migration that rivaled that of the interwar years. After the end of World War II, the government eased travel restrictions between the United States and Puerto Rico, and the ensuing competition between American airline companies dramatically lowered the price of a one-way flight to Idlewild airport (now JFK International) and in 1947, approximately 30,000 Puerto Ricans moved to New York. The majority of migrants settled in established Puerto Rican communities or formed new neighborhoods within districts that had traditionally housed New York City’s European and African-American newcomers: East Harlem, the Lower East Side, the South Bronx, and the West-Side. In almost unbelievable ignorance of the complex colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S., the New York Times was quick to label this phenomenon “the Puerto Rican problem” and frequently represented Puerto Ricans as “noisy” foreign invaders of white American domestic “peace and quiet.” This chapter argues that Schwartz’s Nueva York made a critical audio intervention in the roiling public debate over race, (im)migration, urban space and American identity in the post-war era. In a critical maneuver reminiscent of Du Bois, Schwartz attempted to shift discourse surrounding “the Puerto Rican problem” to an 257 epistemological predicament of fundamental misrecognition. Although well versed in the emerging technologies of sound measurement by decibel level, Schwartz maintained the view that noise was almost entirely in the ear of the beholder: “Noise is an editorial word. When you talk about noise, you are talking about sound that is bothering you. There’s no party so noisy as the one you’re not invited to” (qtd. in Otten). Nueva York, in particular, counters aural stereotypes already circulating within the American cultural imaginary and posits listening as a practice that can potentially break down the socially constructed “sonic color-line” whites were drawing between their “sound” and the Other’s “noise.” By centralizing Puerto Rican voices in the story of their migration and juxtaposing them with white voices in a constructed civic dialogue, Schwartz’s work uses sound to resist the “city as pathology” perspective served up with the Times’ morning headlines. In doing so, however, Nueva York also calls attention to the ways in which listening is always already shaped by racial ideologies. The liner notes to Nueva York imply a dual audience, both Spanish and English speaking. However, the narrative organization of the record and Schwartz’s expressed desire for the recording to “function as a bridge” between linguistic communities and “bring some understanding” of the difficulties faced by Puerto Rican Americans suggests he envisioned potential listeners as chiefly white and largely hostile. While Folkways Records was a small independent label with limited distribution, Nueva York received a favorable review in the New York Times and therefore potentially a much larger audience than the 258 majority of the record company’s catalogue (Shelton, “New York on Tape” X16). In order to better understand the intervention Schwartz made in Nueva York and the racial ideologies that framed it, I will first embed my “close listening” within several significant contexts: Schwartz’s personal history and recording methodology, the philosophy of Folkways records and its place within the larger musical marketplace of the 1950s, the role of “sonic color-line” in popular discourse about colonialism and Puerto Rico, and the conversation about noise, quiet, and “white flight” enacted by the New York Times’s “Our Changing City” series in 1955. “With Ears as Open as His Mind”: Tony Schwartz “I consider my recording work as a means of expression and communication. My programs and records express ideas and feelings I have about life around me. I feel they are complete when people understand and feel what I am tying to say and respond with some of the emotion I have about the subject.” —Tony Schwartz, liner notes, Sounds of My City (1956) “If you had two [television] sets, one with a broken picture tube and one with a broken speaker, you’d get much more out of the one with the broken picture tube.” —Tony Schwartz, qtd. in Berman Tony Schwartz, recording engineer, commercial designer, and audio artist, began making documentary recordings of New York 19, his midtown Manhattan postal code, in the mid 1940s. Bored with the limitations of ham radio, Schwartz bought his first wire recorder in 1944 for $139.95 at a record shop next door to his job at Graphics Institute in Manhattan. The purchase enabled an ambitious effort to get to know the world he would never be able to see through his ear. Schwartz has suffered 259 from agoraphobia since age 13, when a “sudden incomprehensible panic” descended on him while exiting a movie theater; it never left (“Lifeline”). Since returning from service in World War II, Schwartz has confined himself to the limits of his midtown postal code—then New York 19, now 10019. Schwartz describes himself as always having had an auditory orientation to the world, in part attributable to the episode at the movie theater but also linked to a six-month period of temporary emotional blindness at age 16 where “he depended on his ears to guide him” safely through the world (Rogers and Matsumoto 108). While the boundaries of New York 19 are narrow geographically (60th Street to the North, Times Square to the South, 5 th Avenue and the Hudson River on the East and West), Schwartz found that these streets formed a vast nexus of American “folk” culture fashioned from cultural, linguistic, religious, and racial diversity. 3 At first, Schwartz used his equipment to make recordings of radio performances of folk artists like the Weavers, who were too poor to afford studio time and had never heard themselves play. Committed to the free exchange of sound and aware of various degrees of censorship and/or demands imposed by advertisers, grants, and university research agendas, Schwartz’s recording remained a hobby paid for by his day job. Eventually he began making studio recordings at his home on West 57 th , tapes of singers like Paul Robeson, Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, and Yma Sumac and of African American intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; when Robeson and Du Bois 260 were barred from leaving the country during the Cold War, Schwartz recorded their speeches in order that their words might still travel. To fulfill his own desire to travel, Schwartz set up an ambitious tape exchange program with recording enthusiasts around the globe. To make contact, he wrote numerous letters, placed ads in various trade journals and newspapers, shipped over 600 recorded appeals in 19 languages to more than 40 countries, and produced radio spots for stations all over the world, including the Voice of America and U.N. Radio. He encouraged others to become grassroots collectors like himself by making his process as transparent as possible: copiously reprinting his correspondence, lists of equipment, and recording tips in the liner notes of his early Folkways releases like The World in My Mailbox: Friendship Around the World Thru Tape Exchange (1955). Importantly, the tape exchange brought him out of the studio and into the streets of New York 19. With a microphone strapped to his wrist and a 12-pound Magnemite battery-operated recorder dangling from his hip—he pioneered portable recording technology for this project—Schwartz set out to make recordings of New York City that would encourage his “tape pals” to share slices of their soundscapes with him. What Schwartz received through the tape exchange was nothing short of astonishing. By 1952 he had collected over 10,000 songs from all over the United States, and countries like Greece, South Africa, Switzerland, Haiti, Mexico, Ireland, India, Germany, Peru, and Korea. 4 Housed in this archive are multitudes of voices 261 largely ignored by the mainstream U.S. recording industry—for example, the female farmworker in New Mexico who shares a corrido protesting a patrón’s labor practices—as well as moments of striking transnational complexity, such as the haunting lament recorded by a U.S. soldier in Korea of a local woman testifying to the upheaval and human devastation wrought by the drawing of the 39 th parallel. In addition to its own richness, Schwartz’s complicated exchange and the relationships it forged produced what was for him an unanticipated effect: a deeper understanding and appreciation for the depth, range, and sheer multiplicity of sounds circulating within the porous boundaries of New York 19. When the trade first began, Schwartz imagined himself exchanging mundane American sounds for the unusual and the exotic. 5 Like many mainstream Americans of the “modern” age, he initially considered folk music and folklore something already ground under the steamrolling ideology of rapid industrialization: efficiency, progress, and commercialization. In his own neighborhood—the streets surrounding Tin Pan Alley, Radio City Music Hall, and other music industry hubs—Schwartz heard “folk” culture forming from the “bottom up” rather than the top down. “Folklore starts somewhere sometime,” wrote Schwartz in the liner notes of New York 19, “and I wanted to show this type of material starting today.” Although he continued to collect tapes from around the world, Schwartz shifted the emphasis of his recordings in 1952 to the sounds of transnational exchange and American cultural formation within his local postal code. Schwartz edited, spliced, and shared these sonic 262 documents in several venues: in a night club act, on his weekly WNYC radio show Around New York, which began in the mid-50s and ran for over 20 years, on Broadway as scene change music for the play “Two for the Seesaw” in 1958, and, most importantly, on 19 vinyl LPs for Folkways records, an unusual company already boasting the “World’s Largest Collection of Authentic Folk Music” by 1956. Schwartz, however, is more than an archivist of sound; through the process of recording, compiling, re-organizing, and publishing everyday sounds, he uses auditory soundscapes to communicate with people and influence their orientation to the world around them. “I have no interest in sound effects,” Schwartz later wrote in his 1973 monograph The Responsive Chord, “I am interested in the effect of sound on people” (xiv). Schwartz believes listening is the most important epistemology through which people know themselves and their environment, a process that is both conscious and unconscious. 6 His early recording work—especially the expressly political Nueva York— expanded the narrative potential of the Long Playing record, a format that had only been available since 1948. 7 It also represented a nascent experiment in using sound to mount persuasive arguments and evoke specific reactions in his audience; Schwartz would later parley this ability into a long, prominent career in advertising, political campaigning, and public interest work. 8 Schwartz’s main tenant has always involved knowing his audience; he is always “aware of what people are concerned with, what they’re interested in. With that knowledge,” Schwartz feels that he “can predict how they’ll react to the material” 263 (qtd. in Lander 40). Concern with his audience infuses his process from start to finish, influencing everything from microphone placement during recording—closer for a more intimate effect or farther away to create distance—all the way to the final splicing of sounds on the masters. 9 While certainly a grandiose claim about intentionality that largely denies the agency of his listeners, Schwartz’s comment points to a high level of control over his artistic output and enables a reading of his work as a compendium of his intended audience’s desires, fears, and perceptions. Because Schwartz’s work persuasively remixes the everyday sounds of the city for a primary audience of eavesdropping white “listening ears,” his oeuvre affirms the presence of the “sonic color-line,” specifically the sonic equivalent of the “white gaze.” The following three sections— on the imagined communities created by Folkways Records and the New York Times in the 1930s and 1950s, respectively—work together to contextualize Schwartz’s targeted intervention in Nueva York. “The Ring of Reality”: Folkways Records “FOLKWAYS RECORDS: The World’s Leading Producer of AUTHENTIC FOLK MUSIC on Records.” —Advertising slogan, circa 1955 “Folkways sought to document the entire world of sound.” — Smithsonian Folkways Advertising copy, 2007 It is paradoxically quite logical and rather surprising that Schwartz’s recordings would find a home on Folkways Records, Moe Asch’s independent New York record 264 label. On the one hand, Schwartz’s work was certainly eclectic enough for Folkways catalogue; like the majority of Folkways recordings, Schwartz’s output focused on the cultural expressions in people’s daily lives and was recorded directly on the streets. However, Schwartz’s streets were not located half a world away in Bali or Israel, but only several blocks from Folkways headquarters on 46 th Street. Schwartz heard folk culture in formation everywhere around him in the everyday street life of New York City, amongst children singing jump rope rhymes, salesmen hawking pens, preachers shouting to street corner parishioners, and im/migrants actively combining their cultures with American ways of life. Schwartz’s work challenged mainstream postwar American “listening ears”—eager to pursue and consume exotic aural adventures of “Otherness”—to listen to a novel version of themselves, a composite mix that made the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Schwartz’s work was integral in shifting Folkways’ vision away from the idea that folk culture was a thing of the past in the postwar United States, something to be found only in history books, the “old” countries of immigrant Americans, or in faraway, “primitive” cultures recorded by ethnographers. 10 Folkways provided a key auditory arena where these cultural constructs were forged and contested, especially when the company’s catalogue is contextualized within the larger postwar music market trends, such as Exotica. Although representing itself as merely an “invisible conduit to the world” (Asch, qtd. in Olmsted), Folkways was as actively engaged in the construction of the 265 concept of “the folk” as it was in recording sound. Moe Asch founded Folkways Records around the time Schwartz began recording, in 1948, after two previous attempts at forming a self-sustaining record company focused on non-commercial recordings. The first, Asch records, did not survive the shellac shortage of World War II; the second, Disc records, suffered from a poor business partnership that led to bankruptcy. However, Asch—a former radio technician and recording engineer turned entrepreneur—was a man determined to document and circulate all of the world’s sounds on tape and make this “encyclopedia of sound” available in perpetuity to the anyone who may want them (Olmstead 1). Positioned within the Leftist movements of the 1930s and privileged with a cosmopolitan, intellectual upbringing in Europe and the United States—his father, the Jewish novelist Sholem Asch, was notoriously restless—Asch was firmly committed to using the LP as a tool of knowledge and social change. Asch named his company Folkways, after the “Ethnic Folkways” series that audioethnologist Harold Courlander had curated for Disc records. Biographer Peter Goldsmith describes Asch as a cultural broker passionate about the “process of making the sounds of other people comprehensible and significant” to American ears (4). In other words, Asch wanted to facilitate the movement of sounds across the sonic color-line that marginalized them as incomprehensible and insignificant noise. The stakes of Folkways’ mission were great—misrepresentation, mistranslation, exoticization, appropriation, and exploitation—and, as contemporary reviews illustrate, their recordings ended up 266 reifying the sonic color-line more often than they succeeded in piercing or dissipating it. A June 1960 profile of Asch in High Fidelity magazine by jazz critic Robert Shelton, for example, smugly sums up Folkways’ output as “everything from cats on back fences to Japanese epics,” as if the two sounds were somehow equitable (42). While Asch’s unusual business philosophy attempted to democratize aural expression and contest the commercialization of music in the 1950s, it was partly responsible for the exoticization of Folkways recordings, as small sellers like “Sounds of the North African Bullfrog” (1959) were placed on equal footing with the latest Leadbelly, Woodie Guthrie, or Schwartz recording. Unlike the major record companies operating out of Times Square, Asch’s small West 46 th Street operation focused on earning just enough profit to keep making records; once a record was placed in the catalogue it remained available for the life of the company. 11 Rather than market a small amount of recordings to a mass audience, Folkways made as many recordings as they could sustain, hoping each would reach what came to be termed “niche markets.” This strategy was not without its drawbacks, as it placed the independent label perpetually at the edge of fiscal disaster and frequently left artists like Langston Hughes and Pete Seeger without satisfactory royalty payments. However, Folkways “held to its principles with the stubbornness of a mailman plodding through snow,” as Shelton remarked (42). 267 One of the key principles was “authenticity.” By “authenticity,” I mean an explicit claim to truth and representational verisimilitude that becomes a commodity in the marketplace in excess of the music itself, especially when set against recordings deemed “inauthentic” due to cultural distance, overly polished or altered arrangements, and techniques of (over)production. Folkways achieved its trademark “authenticity” in several ways. First, authenticity was visually referenced by their stark and generic black record covers, upon which a customized, artistic sticker was then placed. Second, the recordings themselves were aurally distinguished by their emphasis on what one reviewer described as the “ ring of reality” (Mitgang 144). Asch engineered the majority of Folkways recordings himself, using methods that he felt were more true to the live music performance: a minimum of takes, monaural sound, and flat response. Flat response refers to using a microphone designed to be equally sensitive to all sound frequencies on the spectrum. Although no microphone can be completely flat, Asch felt that such equipment produced the “purest” live audio recordings because it did not artificially emphasize one particular range. In addition, while artists often balked at the cramped and cluttered studio at Folkways, Asch was beloved as an engineer because he gave the artists free reign over the recording process, encouraging them to improvise and experiment. Folkway’s signature sound was overwhelmingly at odds with the slick, stereophonic “high fidelity” productions that were in commercial demand during this period by audiophiles and increasingly, the general public. Asch’s conception of fidelity—an 268 attempt to be faithful to the “liveness” of the original moment of performance rather than trying to reproduce the (perceived) pristine clarity of the sound itself—earned him as many critics as it did fans, perhaps more. “The engineering is not the best one has come to expect in 1959,” as jazz critic Robert Shelton scolded in the New York Times, “and it is in this area that Folkways has often strained the patience of some of its staunchest friends” (X18). Schwartz’s recording techniques for his first Folkways release 1,2,3, and a Zing, Zing, Zing were described as “informal in the extreme” by a New York Times review in 1953, which remarked upon the preponderance of city noise present in the background—honking horns, a Boy Scout practicing his bugle— sounds that Schwartz believed to be integral to the subject of the record (Briggs X10). The novelty, originality, and history of the songs Folkways recorded, produced and/or marketed were often more important to Asch than vocal talent or listener expectations of musical professionalism. The majority of Folkways masters were live recordings made by anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, amateurs in the field, and spontaneous sound artists like Schwartz. The sound of these recordings— often of poor quality and filled with hiss and “background noise” repugnant to audiophiles and hi-fi enthusiasts—also helped construct the concept of “authenticity” for Folkways as the antithesis of slick, polished, studio recordings made primarily for commercial gain. Throughout the 1950s, according to biographer Goldsmith, it often seemed that the more obscure a recording appeared, the more pleased Asch 269 was to release it, as it solidified his noncommercial reputation (234). Rejecting some folk artists for sounding “‘overly urbanized’” and even buying “tapes from downright incompetent singers who know material no one else has come forward to record,” Asch was described as a relentless arbiter of the authentic by Shelton in a High Fidelity review (103). Shelton’s take on Asch brings up some of the limitations of Folkways’ authenticity, namely that it relied on well-worn distinctions between “primitive” and “civilized” rather than challenging them, characterizing “urbanized” space as modern and inauthentic, the domain of cultural consumers rather than producers, the recorders rather than the recorded. Schwartz’s work in Nueva York troubled such characterizations. Asch’s favored recording practices and selective inclusion of artists suggests that the “authenticity” of Folkways was not just aural, but ideological. Advertisements placed in the New York Times by Folkways throughout the 1950s highlight the company as the “World’s Largest Collection of Authentic Folk Music” and the home of the “world famous ETHNIC FOLKWAYS LIBRARY of primitive music on records, from many lands” which are faithfully “accompanied by extensive notes by famous collectors and recognized authorities.” Folkways promised its listeners—predominately elite, progressive whites according to Goldsmith (4, 124, 186)—an aural experience of the “primitive music” of the Other, safely vetted, translated, organized and explained by trusted and established (white) guides. Folkways’ listenership is also described in Tony Olmstead’s business history 270 Folkways Records: Moses Asch and his Encyclopedia of Sound (2003), in which he details the magazines that carried Folkways ads in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In addition to the New York Times, Folkways advertised in the New York Post, in a smattering of academic journals (American Sociological Review), several educational magazines (Catholic Educational Review, Childhood Education, Grade Teacher, Horn Book, Parents Magazine, Scholastic Teacher), trade magazines (Billboard, Film News, This Month’s Records, American Record Guide), and publications designed to reach record connoisseurs (High Fidelity, Downbeat, FM & Fine Arts). All of these publications suggest a primarily white audience of educated elites and insiders of various types (105-106). Interestingly, in a private correspondence cited by Olmsted, the director of the firm responsible for Folkways public relations campaigns, Lee-Myles, suggests to Asch that he begin advertising in Playboy magazine (105), a move suggestive of a an attempt at building a crossover audience of white male hipster consumers already attracted to the mainstream folk and exotica markets. The mainstream American “listening ear” of the 1950s was voracious for sounds perceived as novel, unusual, “raw,” and exotic. Reviewers both heard Folkways records through this “listening ear” and helped to construct it. Even as Asch sought to educate his American audience and increase understanding among the many cultures of the world, Folkways shaped and was shaped by the colonial legacy that structured the world along the hierarchical binary of civilized/primitive. 271 In a process detailed by Marta Savigliano in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (1995), the sights and sounds of non-white Others were framed and circulated within Western cultural production as exotic, “primitive” raw materials for the pleasurable consumption of members of the dominant culture in search of sacrificed passion and “authentic” ways of living lost to the “civilized.” The binary between “primitive” and “civilized” permeated American culture of the 1950s, precisely because of its rise to economic prosperity and global power post-World War II. As Savigliano notes, the “production of luxury and of ‘primitiveness’ went hand in hand with the manufacturing of exoticism: Variety was precious and denoted mastery over the world” (83). Even though Folkways records promised very different listening experiences from the smooth sound stylings of an Exotica LP— potentially “excruciating” according to music critics like Shelton—they can be considered flipsides of the same consumer demand for exotic sonic stimulation during this period. Now often dismissed as kitsch, exotica was an extremely popular musical genre in the late 1950s and early 1960s, enjoyed primarily by suburban whites who came of age during World War II. The genre—led by artists Les Baxter, Esquivel, Martin Denny, and Yma Sumac, a Peruvian artist first recorded by Schwartz at age 14—was famous for translating impressions of faraway tropical cultures into lush orchestral arrangements designed for easy listening. David Toop describes the music of Les Baxter as offering package tours in sound, running excursions for sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboo urges, view a pagan ceremony through gaps in 272 the bamboo, go wild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home stereo comforts in the whitebread suburbs (35). The staid “whitebread suburbs” then, are the civilized antithesis of the passion and desire of the Other, marked as taboo, demonic, and infinitely pleasurable, especially when viewed voyeuristically through “gaps in the bamboo.” Toop’s depiction of white suburban audio tourism is especially significant when considered alongside the acceleration of “white flight” during this period and the political and economic realities of urban segregation that I have examined in the literary representations of Richard Wright and Ann Petry. As I will later examine in greater detail, Schwartz’s recordings hold out the promise of voyeurism so prevalent in exotica, but also question the racialization of urban space and the social, political, and economic privilege that undergird the position of the voyeur. Exotica, a market fueled by soldiers returning from the Asia and the South Pacific after World War II, appealed to the aural equivalent of the colonial gaze. An example typical of exotica, Hugo Winterhalter’s 1959 recording for RCA Victor Wish You were Here, promised a Hi-Fi trip around the world, through sounds carefully produced in “Living Stereo” on a revolutionary “Miracle Surface” designed to remove dust from the LP’s dark grooves, eliminating “surface noise”: the notorious hisses, pops, and crackles that theoretically interfered with the purity of the playback. The Winterhalter serves up the exotic as obviously mediated, constructed aural seduction and fantasy; on the album’s cartoonish cover a blonde woman in a revealing pirate shirt sits expectantly on a pile of sand underneath a paper maché 273 palm tree, her hand softly splayed on a phallic telescope and her smoky eyes suggestively meeting the gaze of her implied male admirers. Her nearby “thought bubble” transforms the typical postcard slogan “Wish You Were Here” into heated sexual innuendo. The back cover describes the record as a “melodic junket” that provides its audience with a “fresh, exciting, and sometimes, startling musical experience” from the opening strains of “Slow Boat to China” through the orchestral sweep of “Romance in Majorca.” In contrast to the technicolor paradise of Wish You Were Here, Don Sibley’s stark, trademark black and white line drawings gracing the covers of most Folkways LPs, including several of Schwartz’s, suggest a window onto a completely different world, a sonic landscape of gritty realism and stripped-down authenticity. Despite Folkways’ politically progressive stance and explicitly educational purpose, their records were frequently characterized as no less exotic than exotica—perhaps even more so—because Folkways recordings were made “on the scene” rather than translated through orchestral maneuvers like Hugo Winterhalter’s. Contemporary reviewers like Howard Taubman declared that Folkways recordings were perfect for listeners seeking “material far removed from the gramophone routine” (X3). Similar to the liner notes of “Wish You Were Here,” Taubman’s symptomatic 1949 review of Ethnic Folkways releases Music of Indonesia, Music of the Middle East— Palestine, and Drums of Haiti, Volume II, describes the Folkways listening experience as an expedition away from the humdrum of everyday life, a special 274 “aural adventure” that required listeners to leave their everyday expectations and norms behind. “If you come to this music expecting it to conform to the conventions of familiar Western art,” warns Taubman, “you will be disappointed.” However, if listeners were bold enough to set aside their notions of what constitutes music—and, conversely, what qualifies as noise—they “will find much to hold and stimulate their attention” (X3). The listening pleasure then, stems not from the efforts and virtuosity of the individual artists recorded—Taubman, in fact, makes no distinction between records made in three different continents nor does he depict any individual song or singer—but rather from the expectation of titillation at crossing the border between music and noise, leaving one’s ideas of modernity, civilization, and the everyday temporarily behind. Reviews like Taubman’s represented the music recorded by Folkways as interesting but inaccessible, an exotic relic important mainly as a type of aural tonic for blasé ears dulled by the conformity of suburbia and American mass culture. “Despite the antiquity of much of the music and of the traditions from which it stems,” Taubman notes, the music from the Ethnic Folkways library is “wonderfully refreshing.” Even though the music—and by extension, the culture that produced it—are burdened by tradition and inexorably trapped in the past, the music somehow still manages to sound new to modern listeners. The perceived “antiquity” of the music is a commodity, a purchasable and pleasurable aural reminder of the listener’s position in the world and the perceived distance between modernity and antiquity, 275 developed and developing. In addition, placing this contemporary music in an imagined, primordial past, allows listeners a safe and sanctioned way to consume the “refreshing” passion of the “Other” that has theoretically been suppressed, conformed, and civilized out of the Modern world. Based on the flood of letters Taubman received from all over the country demanding information about Folkways, there was no shortage of consumers eager for this type of aural stimulation. In a June 10, 1951 review of “Folk Music on Disks” in the New York Times, new Folkways records are described as “fresh specimens,” highlighting their novelty and connoting their role as aural exhibits (C.W., X6). Furthermore, in the same High Fidelity review where he excoriated Asch’s recording techniques, Shelton referred to the Ethnic Folkways Collection as the pure musical expression of primitive or wholly unsophisticated peoples. Some of it is raw, often incomprehensible, such as Cult Music of Cuba and music of the Matta Grosso in Brazil. Other albums record simple folk, singing and making functional music in their play, dance, worship, hunting, farming (44). Just under the surface of this characterization of the cultural production of Latin America and the Caribbean as “incomprehensible” noise, lies an implied criticism of the contemporary American music scene as impure and corrupt. In addition to being patronizing, Shelton’s description of the collection reflects a nostalgic yearning; he valorizes Folkways’ catalogue for being precisely what he feels commercial popular music is no longer: the unvarnished “pure musical expression” of a people. In doing so, he depicts Folkways’ audience as contemporary, sophisticated, and complex—no 276 longer “simple folk.” The two recurrent strains in 1950s Folkways criticism can be heard again within Shelton’s review: the close proximity of the recordings to the border between the music and “raw, incomprehensible” noise and their role as a peephole into antiquity, when music was functional (rather than purely entertaining) and life was “simple.” I argue that this is precisely the contour of the sonic color- line that Schwartz exploits and contests in Nueva York, as he confronts dominant views of “noise” and aural stereotypes of Puerto Ricans as exotic, noisy, and “colorful.” Before focusing specifically on the public discourse about segregation and “white flight” in 1950s New York, I want to briefly examine the history of aural stereotypes of Puerto Ricans upon which later stereotypes were based. In the American cultural imaginary of the 1930s, aural stereotypes of Puerto Ricans as “foreign” mediated between an idealized Spanish colonial past and a disavowed U.S. colonial present. 277 The Colonial Legacy of the Sonic Color-Line: “Colorful Puerto Rico” “The spirit of Old Spain lingers in the ancient houses and churches, and native drums beat wild rhythms in the near-by jungles.” –“Colorful Puerto Rico,” New York Times (May 12, 1935) “Despite the standard semimilitary units and drum majorettes, there was something of the fiesta in the air yesterday, just a trace of dancing in the street and a faint echo of maracas shaken to a compelling Latin-American rhythm.” –“Hispanic Parade Livens Fifth Avenue,” New York Times (May 4 th , 1959) Before the mass migration of Puerto Ricans to New York after World War II, Puerto Ricans were described in highly exotic terms by the mainstream press, in spite of— or perhaps because of—their status as American citizens. A travel article, entitled “Colorful Puerto Rico,” from the May 12, 1935 issue of the New York Times is symptomatic of the sonic stereotypes held about Puerto Ricans before the mass migration after World War II. The piece details Rose Henderson’s travels to the island, where she claims that “Old Spain and the New Age Mingle in a Gay Land of Poverty and Beauty” (X24). Her article is filled with dreamy visual tableaus aestheticizing the poverty of the island while romanticizing the Spanish colonial past, which Henderson depicts as exerting a powerful, almost mesmerizing force over the island even as its physical architecture crumbles and fades. It is through sound, however, that the writer makes her strongest assertions about the “primitive strangeness” of the Puerto Rican people. In other words, even when their “colorful” qualities are not easily seen, they are quite powerfully heard. 278 Underlying Henderson’s xenophobic representation of the “colorful” foreignness of Puerto Rico is the perceived domestic threat to (white) America enacted by potential Puerto Rican statehood. Henderson’s article opens with the aural stereotype of the Latin American leader dictating via the loudspeaker. Puerto Rico is a “colorful little island whose leaders are busy telling the people by radio how to obtain admission to the Union” (X24, unless specified, all further quotes in this section from this page). The lead paragraph calls up the underlying fear that snakes its way through the article: that Puerto Ricans just may heed the call of the wireless and move to the U.S. en masse. Henderson claims that Puerto Ricans feel that the geographical separation between Puerto Rico and the United States has “been all but annihilated” by air travel and the radio and that “racial difference should mean little to a nation that has assimilated millions of immigrants.” Racial difference, however, means quite a bit to Henderson—and obviously to 1930s America—whether it “should” or not. Having established this threat of invasion, the rest of “Colorful Puerto Rico” works to establish and solidify racial difference by depicting Puerto Ricans as trapped in both a colonial and a primordial past, inextricably linked to the “lush wildness” and “barbaric splendor” of nature. For example, an image that is repeated twice in the article combines “soft-trade winds, blowing constantly” with “native drums [that] beat wild rhythms in the near-by jungles,” as if the two were one and the same sound. The beating of drums in the jungle, already a well-worn stereotype 279 denoting savagery within Western culture by this time, calls up associative imagery of Africa as the “heart of darkness,” home of a transhistorical blackness, untouched by time and the “civilizing” influences of European culture. 12 Through this combined image, the writer conflates indigenous Puerto Rican musical culture with the natural, effortless blowing of the breeze. Furthermore, her description of the beating of drums brings a subconscious attention to the African heritage of many Puerto Ricans, whose “dark skin and hair” caused much consternation and debate amongst white Americans in segregated, Jim Crow America. Henderson’s portrait of Puerto Ricans as “primitive” or “natural” is achieved through repeated aural imagery that intermingles the sounds of nature with those made by Puerto Rican people. Henderson again uses sound to link the culture of the Puerto Rican marketplace with the perceived wildness of the island’s landscape: “amid a medley of scents, a riot of color and much chattering and running about. The music of native gourd instruments mingles with the cries of chickens and parrots and of the marketers.” The conversation amongst Puerto Ricans at the marketplace is described as “chattering,” a derisive term most often used to describe the incessant sound of excited animals. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines chattering as “making short, indistinct sounds in rapid succession, as birds, apes, etc.” (242). The depiction of the marketers as animal-like is solidified in the next sentence, when their voices combine with the “music of native gourd instruments” (noticeably not of native peoples—the music seems to come from the instrument itself) and the excited 280 cries of birds. Henderson’s article twice depicts the speech of Puerto Ricans—or “chattering villagers”—as the unintelligible noise of animals. Only the echoes of European colonialism have the ability to transform the raw and dangerous passion of Puerto Rico into a safe, “romantic enchantment” to Henderson’s “listening ear.” Halfway through “Colorful Puerto Rico,” Henderson’s attention shifts from describing the daily activities of Puerto Ricans to the Spanish colonial legacy on the island. There is drastic difference in her depiction of the island’s soundscape, such as her poetic musings while visiting the Governor’s Palace: “Here, with orchestra playing, the moon whitening the terrace and the palms whispering in the wind, one feels the romantic enchantment of Puerto Rico” (X24). In this segment, the sound of the European orchestra has the power to civilize and humanize even the wild natural environment; the winds do not merely blow here, they “whisper.” Henderson also associated the orchestral sound—hallmark of Europe’s image of itself as rational and ordered (Attali 66)— with the literal “whitening” of the landscape by the moon. 13 However, the noise of the Puerto Rican Other remains a sonic marker of unassimilable difference to Henderson, a threatening sound that, like the “tropical wilderness,” has emerged “eerily unsubdued” by Colonial Spanish rule, American citizenship, or Western industrialism (and the disease and poverty left in its wake). Even “in the most modernly furnished rooms, dancing or talking with friends from ‘the States,’” Henderson describes how “one is still acutely conscious of the palm- 281 thatched huts, the chattering villagers and the gaudy marketplace.” Her aural imagery ultimately casts “chattering” Puerto Ricans against “talking” Americans, defining them as perpetual Others destined to haunt modern citizens from ‘the States’ with reminders of a primitive, “palm-thatched” past and the “gaudy marketplaces” of pre-Industrial capitalism. After her trip through the mythology of Spanish colonial rule, Henderson intensifies her conflation of Puerto Rican people with the landscape: “Along with the flavor of old Spain,” she notes, the island keeps its own primitive strangeness, its lush wildness, its barbaric splendor. Hunger and disease walk the streets and fields, but cannot subdue the native color and gayety. Death haunts the unsanitary huts, but the streets are full of laughter, music, and dancing. Henderson uses sound to racialize Puerto Ricans and reduce the complexities of their culture to “native color,” a particular tone struck by their reaction— inappropriate to Henderson’s listening ear—to sorrow and devastation; the “laughter, music, and dancing” that appears to emanate naturally from “the streets.” She uses the term subdue, as if Puerto Ricans were wild animals in need of taming; the proximity of the terms “native color” and “gayety” essentialize Puerto Ricans as perpetually laughing. Henderson employs these vibrant sounds to solidify the essentialist linkage between the “color” of someone’s skin and their “colorful” culture. The construction of “sonic color-lines” in the dominant American cultural imaginary facilitated the perception that Puerto Rico was a distant, “colorful” and “foreign” country despite its status as commonwealth. The process of “Othering” only intensified after Puerto Ricans began moving to the United States in larger 282 numbers—taking advantage of the mobility afforded by US Citizenship as part of the Dawes Act of 1917—and the border between foreign and domestic, exotic and familiar was crossed and recrossed. Long after Puerto Ricans were no longer “foreigners” to the United States, they continued to be represented by the press as hopelessly and threateningly so, and in far less wistful language than Henderson’s. After all, “‘exoticism’” as Marta Savigliano describes, is always there to remind us of the difference between the old, really ‘civilized’ peoples and the ones only recently, incompletely brought into civilization—the colonized who can never fully overcome the fact of carrying ‘primitiveness’ in their blood (9). The explicit exoticization of Puerto Ricans symbolically contested and attempted to nullify the fact of their citizenship and keep them both contained and segregated from full political participation the United States. During the late 1940s and early 1950’s stereotypical descriptions of Puerto Ricans deemed them out of place in dominant (white) American society; the social construction of “noise” was a key arena where their alterity was built and maintained. R. Murray Schafer (1977) theorizes noise as a sonic form of political and cultural “Othering” that is socially and historically defined. There are no strict, universal aesthetic divisions between “music,” “sound,” and “noise” because these markers are constantly evolving and shifting. Part of what binds a society are mutually agreed-upon definitions of “noise,” and the notion of noise as “sound out of place” (Bailey 195) is easily displaced upon racial, social, and economic “Others,” especially in a city as segregated as New York in the 1940s and 1950s. 14 As Alberto 283 Sandoval-Sanchez has argued, the Puerto Rican diaspora had thoroughly broken into the Anglo-American imaginary by 1957—two years after Schwartz’s Nueva York and the same year that West Side Story was produced on Broadway—yet the images of the Puerto Rican migrant hovered on the tense border between “Latino Foreign other” and “Latin domestic ethnic and racial other” (63). Sonic images of Puerto Ricans as “noisy” simultaneously reflect this tension between exoticized and domestic forms of Othering. For example, a 1949 piece from the New York Times entitled “Bias Here Charged by Puerto Ricans” discusses “‘general notions’ in the continental American mind” that particularly trouble Puerto Ricans, the most insidious of which were sonic in nature. According to anthropologist Warren Brown, mainland Americans consider “all Puerto Ricans [to be] ignorant, unintelligent and stupid because they do not speak English.” Prior to and irregardless of any words being said, the very sound of Spanish—or a Spanish accent, for that matter—to a “listening ear” accustomed to a particular type of English as standard, provokes an instantaneous assumption of intellectual superiority and “Americanness.” Brown argues that Puerto Ricans are further marginalized by being represented wholesale as “rough, rowdy, loud, and hilarious,” terms that echo Henderson’s travelogue and evoke the antithetical image of disciplined decorum of body and voice demanded by (white) American norms of the era (6). 15 Such descriptions racialize aural expression and amplify the sonic-color-line, a form of discrimination related to but not dependent on sight. 284 Through the sonic color-line, Puerto Ricans can thus be discriminated against not because of their skin color—already unconstitutional and becoming increasingly illegal—but because they refuse to quiet down to “universal” American standards. In 1958, the Times declared “discrimination appears to have assumed more subtle forms under the city’s new law against bias in private housing.” While explicitly referring to new forms of landlord discrimination after the passage of the Sharkey- Brown-Isaacs Law in April of 1958, this phrase could just as easily refer to the sonic and linguistic euphemisms whites used to justify their exodus to the suburbs. Overt racism was already becoming less tolerable in many public forums of the urban North, so much so that one Times reader felt silenced enough to demand in a vicious 1959 letter, “What is so sacred about the Puerto Rican?” (SM4). However, it remained socially acceptable for white New Yorkers to explain their mass flight to the suburbs by expressing their desire to escape the urban noise of the “constantly boiling melting pot” of Manhattan, Harlem and the South Bronx (Currivan 131). 285 Summer, 1955: the New York Times documents “Our Changing City” “The West Side says it assimilated the Dutch and the English and the Irish and the Germans and the Italians and the Jews and all the others, and it can assimilate the Negroes and the Puerto Ricans too. Aren’t we Americans all?” –“Our Changing City: Along Manhattan’s West Side” (July 4, 1955) “We may have to live together. . .whether we can in harmony is another question. Right now, most of us don’t like it.” –anonymous white resident, “OCC: New Faces in the Lower Bronx” (July 11, 1955) “New Yorkers who a few years or a generation ago had been in the same situation were dealing with the Puerto Rican New Yorkers with the same misunderstanding they had been dealt.” –Tony Schwartz, liner notes, Nueva York, 1955 “Poverty and overcrowding.” “Creeping urbanization.” “Bronxification.” “Tense problems in housing.” “Hostility and suspicion.” “Gang fights, muggings.” “West- Siders fleeing a Puerto Rican influx.” While echoing the gloom and doom of science fiction film trailers, this mix of headlines and statements are all gleaned from a twenty-part special series entitled “Our Changing City” (OCC) run by the New York Times over the Summer of 1955. The opening banner: “Our Changing City: Social and Economic Shifts Reshape New York’s Face” (Berger 1) metaphorically links the central concerns of the series: the building boom that is literally reshaping the city’s “face” from quaint five story brownstones and Art Deco skyscrapers into a dramatic vertical, glass and steel metropolis and the population shift that is transforming the metaphoric “face” of the city’s collective population from white to brown. The series diagnoses New York City as a sick social body and paints a fearful portrait of a 286 fallen, treacherous concrete jungle where mass migrations of poverty-stricken people of color threaten to destroy the mighty metropolis. “OCC” both reflected and shaped the dominant perspective. It tells the story of white residents struggling to comprehend the rapid transformations of “their” city precisely at the moment when they are leaving it in large numbers for Westchester tract homes, racially exclusive Levittowns, and posh Connecticut suburbs, ensuring the proliferation of the very inner-city ghettos that they so feared. Throughout the “OCC” pieces devoted to the epicenter of Manhattan—Tony Schwartz’s Postal Code 19— apprehension about the business boom and the changing demographics is represented through sonic descriptions of the city as overwhelmingly noisy and locked in a struggle between demolition and construction. Reporter Harrison Salisbury makes numerous references to the “cannonade of riveter’s guns” and the “landmarks [that] totter and tremble under the impact of the wrecker’s crowbars” (23). Salisbury’s sonic imagery depicts Manhattan as a peacetime city at war, as older, storied parts of the city fall—protesting with squeaks and groans—under the invading force of the construction crews that leave waves of nostalgia in their wake for sights and sounds “lost in the antiquity of the mid-forties” (23). Aging, historic ethnic neighborhoods all over Manhattan were labeled “slums” and fiercely demonized in the series as a “vicious cancer” of “labrynthian hells filled with vice, filth and disease as sordid as any in the world” (Phillips 25). Blocks of old law housing were razed wholesale to make way for highways—such as the notorious 287 Cross-Bronx Expressway—high rise housing projects, and sparkling new office buildings that proclaimed New York City’s increasing global power as a financial center, leaving thousands without homes and accounting for a large amount of the intra-city migration during the early fifties. 16 Although purportedly focused on the state of the metropolis, “OCC” is ultimately a story of suburban growth and segregation during the 1950s. The articles began in lower Manhattan and methodically spiraled all the way out to the central New Jersey suburbs, mimicking the trajectory of white out-migration and reflecting the paranoia of a city trying desperately to maintain a consistent narrative in the midst of flux and upheaval. That white flight was driven by race rather than class is evidenced in part by the South Bronx, which experienced heavy white out-migration even though the “lower Bronx has always been a low-income area, whether its people were white or nonwhite, native-born or immigrant” (Gruson 25). In his study Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila contends that “white flight” was both a structural and cultural resegregation. While “postwar suburbanization sanctioned the formation of a new racial geography that spatialized a starker contrast between white and black” (4), it also functioned as a “cultural process in which an expanding middle class of myriad ethnic backgrounds came to discover itself as white” (14). Heterogeneous ethnic identities linked with immigrant pasts and “old” inner city neighborhoods—now declared “slums” vulnerable to the wrecking ball of Urban Renewal—were traded for a “deeply racialized fantasy of suburban 288 whiteness” (15) that epitomized sameness, containment, and, I argue, a new American Dream of “peace and quiet.” Sound historian Emily Thompson notes that the mass white flight to the suburbs during this period was increasingly justified by white characterizations of the city as a “noisy” place, where the victims of industrial noise (largely poor people of color and/or immigrants) were represented as the natural and essential causes of it. When zoning laws failed to keep the noises of the city sufficiently at bay, wealthier whites sought a private solution to their distress with the rapidly changing urban demography: “by turning inward and creating acoustically efficient refuge from the noises of public life” in the suburbs (168). Redlining, blockbusting, and racially restrictive covenants ensured that these spaces would remain “quiet.” What Thompson calls the “war against noise” was to some extent a euphemistic battle against the influx of immigrants and people of color to American cities during the war, and legally enforced zones of quiet became politicized spaces that sounded volumes about who was valued, privileged, and powerful in the United States. Part of the subtext of “white flight” from the inner city to the suburbs was the desire that many white people had to insulate themselves from what they perceived as the noise of the Other and surround themselves with familiar, known, and controlled sounds. As Frank S. Horne, executive director of New York’s Commission on Intergroup Relations declared in the Times in 1957, the “hardening” effect of racism” spurred whites into “regarding their neighborhoods as sacrosanct 289 and worshipping the ‘deism of a static community’” (qtd. in Asbury 31). Even in neighborhoods that remained overwhelmingly white like Western Brooklyn— although “OCC” reported that the white population “dwindled” to 727,000 from 743,900—Puerto Rican migration transformed the soundscape into something unrecognizable and menacing to white ears. “Some family mansions have been subdivided into warrens,” reporter Charles Grutzner remarked, “some older apartment houses became hives of buzzing Spanish” (23). Aural imagery—filtered through the dominant white audio-racial imaginary—was used to dehumanize the Puerto Rican migrants in the New York Times. Echoing the animal imagery of “Colorful Puerto Rico,” the mansions in Brooklyn Heights no longer house families but contain rapidly breeding rabbits; the unintelligible “buzzing” of Spanish, flattened from a complex, language into a single monotone noise, threatens to turn white “houses” into insectoid Puerto Rican “hives.” So, what was the idealized contrast to the buzzing “slums, dirt, and noise” (“Essayist” 21) of the increasingly black and brown inner-city? In a 1949 Times article entitled “City is Among Tops For ‘Noisiest Title,” Dr. Vern Knudsen of Stanford University suggested that the predominately white suburbs of Queens, Long Island, Westchester, Fairfield, and New Jersey—“quiet surroundings where people can live, work, or seek refuge from the din of homo mechanicus”—were the antidote to the “sound and fury of the city” (27). Interestingly, Knudson notes that part of the reason New York’s noise ordinances are ineffective is that they are not “objective” 290 enough, remaining tied to subjective and “vague references to the sensitivities of people” rather than the decibel (27). Such heightened aural sensitivities, honed by racism and pricked by fear and stereotypical depictions, helped fuel the mass white move to “quiet surroundings.” 17 The increasing concern with noise in the mid to late 1950s had its precedent in the immediate postwar period. While Tony Schwartz was becoming interested in the sounds of city life in mid-town Manhattan, lifestyle pieces in the New York Times Home section like Mary Roche’s 1944 article “A Quiet House” constructed “quiet” as the dominant, default standard of American middle-class life. While Roche includes a brief addendum to help those unfortunate enough to still live in the city to “subdue incoming street noises” as if they were invading thugs climbing through one’s window, the article’s title, along with the accompanying L-shaped floor plan with fireplace, readily limits Roche’s audience to those privileged enough to afford to purchase a spacious home outside of the city. Although she opens with the disclaimer that “most of us can get used to noise,” the entire article focuses on how to use the most recent advances of acoustical engineering to control the sound levels in one’s home environment. Furthermore, her opening description of “noise” is already quite far removed from the diverse aural mélange that Manhattanites would encounter in their daily lives during this period. While “most of us can get used to noise,” Roche remarks that it is much easier to tolerate the “noise of our own kith and kin having a good time or going about the day’s work” (SM 32). Simply by 291 moving to the suburbs, whites were able to control “noise,” restricting it to the similar, the familiar and the familial. Roche’s article redefines “noise” in the suburbs as the purposeful sonic byproducts of the dichotomous rhythms of white middle class work and leisure. Restricting the level of noise is only the beginning for the post-war New York suburbanite. After all, the concept of noise is not only determined by the “sound decibels” measured by acoustical engineers, but should also be understood “in terms of personal comfort—toward which a comparatively slight amount of noise reduction might make a big psychological contribution” (SM32). Roche’s comments here suggest a layperson’s understanding of noise in this era as essentially in the ear of the listener and part and parcel of individual psychology and conditioning; a person’s mental attitudes and auditory attention can amplify a relatively quiet sound into a grating, discomforting noise simply because it signifies something distasteful to the listener. In the suburbs, the comfort and control of the individual listener reigns supreme and the rest of the article focuses on tips and tricks to eradicate any noises that are out of synch with the patriarch’s design of the soundscape. After all, family life would certainly be pleasanter in a house where youngsters could wage mock battles in the nursery without deafening everyone else in the building, where conversations could still go on while the man of the house listened to baseball broadcasts, and where the rattling of kitchen pots and pans wouldn’t remind guests that entertaining at dinner makes extra work” (SM32). The noises described here are both raced—suburbs of NYC were over 90% white in 1944 and the percentage stayed level throughout the “white flight” patterns of the 292 1950s—and gendered. The radio has become the central, privileged sound in the house; all sounds that interfere with the “baseball broadcasts” dialed in by the “man of the house” are deemed noises slated for muffling. The everyday sounds of suburban female domestic labor such as the “deafening” sounds of childrearing, vital “conversations” with others, and the telltale “rattling of kitchen pots and pans” involved in food preparation are to be made inaudible in the “quiet house.” By laying thick carpet, hanging fabric or acoustic tile on the walls, and directing sound waves with strategically placed screens, the interior space of the suburban home is transformed into a giant earlid for the white “man of the house.” Both children and women are to be seen and not heard. The “quiet house” makes the sounds of labor inaudible; the privilege of male leisure is broadcast through quiet. Overall, this article depicts the suburban home owner as an engineer of silence, a domestic acoustician who must “control,” “subdue,” and “tone down” the sounds of labor and everyday living. The effort to control and subdue sound in the home was related to another type of domestic campaign: the Cold War. In the early 1950s, “Noise Abatement Weeks”—popular during World War II—were once again held in New York City. These community efforts tied the notion of “peace and quiet” to patriotism and the effort to defeat the spread of Communism. A brief note on the 1952 “Noise Abatement Week” in the April 14 th Times takes on both the noise of the city and the “disbelieving amusement” of those who said that the city cannot possibly quash its 293 notorious din. Silence is again posited as the desired and default state of human life and the piece urges citizens to do what they can toward this end. While the article proclaims, “it is undoubtedly too much to expect that New York will ever be a silent city,” citizens should “do all [they] can to muffle the sound of activity on the streets, in offices, in factories, and in our homes.” After all, “loud and unnecessary noise contributes to fatigue and mental strain and reduces efficiency,” which is especially dangerous while “so many workers in the city are putting in so much effort to help advance the defense program” both for the Korean Conflict and for Cold War armaments at home. Quietness thus becomes increasingly associated with responsibility, citizenship, and doing one’s duty for the nation. Noise is described as needless, unnecessary, wasted sound; expended effort without accompanying productivity. Noise is the “Other” of the good, silent worker and American: undisciplined, inefficient, chaotic and ultimately dangerous to the nation. 18 The logic of Cold War quiet resonated with —and added an ominous contour to—perceptions of the sound of black and Puerto Rican life as idle and “noisy” already present in the dominant American cultural imaginary, further fueling “white flight” and (re)segregation. Throughout the 1950s, Times articles about changing urban demographics represented predominately Latino neighborhoods as cacophonous on one side of the sonic color-line, and racialized quiet as “white” on the other. One of the particularly egregious debates concerned the “unseemly” sounds of the “noisy hymn-singing camaraderie and handclapping” of Puerto Rican 294 Pentecostal storefront churches (Dugan 68), which Schwartz confronts directly on side two of Nueva York. Furthermore, an article whose headline exclaims “Rising Hispanic Migration Heightens City Tensions” ticks off a litany of noises, indicating to readers that the true “otherness” of the Puerto Rican is not in fact detected through the eye, but rather the ear. In fact, the inherent difference of “typical” Puerto Rican neighborhood can hide itself at first glance because it “looks peaceful enough, though it is teeming with life all of the time and often noisy.” To the listening ears of fleeing white residents, the newly Puerto Rican soundscape is filled with “loud” and “voluble Spanish,” “Caribbean rhythms and guitar twangs [that] waft from windows, “wild shouts” of children in the streets, “boisterous” arguments over the “political feuds of their countries,” fierce murmurs of “characteristic Latin dissension” mixed with “Caribbean gaiety and garishness,” not to mention the fact that “most Hispanic families keep television and radio blaring simultaneously,” (which most likely can barely be heard over the women “shedding tears” at the novelas) (Hofmann 1). Stereotypical sonic representations like these contributed to the feeling amongst white emigrants that New York City was becoming an “audio slum,” as Erica Landis declared in a 1958 letter to the Times entitled “Invasion of Privacy by Noise” (24). Whites drew sonic color-lines around their own neighborhoods and buildings, which they perceived as being invaded by the noise of Others. In the letter, Landis goes on to express her angry perception that “both peace and privacy are violated by TV and Hi-fi” (Landis 24). Her discussion of sound hints toward a 295 displacement of feelings about miscegenation with “anonymous” neighbors; she expresses her consternation that her neighbors’ noise forces her into to become their “decibel intimates” despite “civilized appeals” to preserve the quiet peace of her social distance. This sense of violation and forced intimacy is echoed in a 1959 letter by Domenick Roamer in which he also represents the clash between whites and Puerto Ricans as one of differing attitudes about sound. He depicts white residents as the “peaceful people in the nice, quiet, clean neighborhoods, upon whom the hordes of Puerto Ricans descended” (SM4). In the midst of perceived encroachment by the “Other,” these letters racialize quiet as “white” and associate the sound with civilization, restraint of the body, enhancement of the mind, and an appreciation of ‘proper’ arrangement and boundaries. To be “noisy” is to be primitive, disorderly, trashy and excessive, driven by the body and its demands for raucous, sensuous pleasure that spills uncontrollably out-of-bounds. This racialized aural imagery—of the pristine quiet of (white) people juxtaposed with (and annihilated by) the invasive noise of animal-like “hordes” of migrants—worked to essentialize Puerto Ricans as “noisy” and “quiet” as the proper default state of affairs. Letters like these claim “quiet” as an invisible but tangible possession of white privilege. 296 Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers “It is my hope that this record will bring some understanding a people have in moving to a new location, leaving their old homes and ways of life.” –Tony Schwartz, liner notes to Nueva York (1955) “I am leaning over talking to this kid and behind me there’s something of a racket and the kid is doing a little dance and they were singing a little song. And they started to laugh and I didn’t know what they were saying, until I you know, let them know I was curious about the song they were singing. And the kid told me that the song was ‘I Wouldn’t Take 65 United States for One Little Puerto Rico.’ And that was my first realization, my first exposure to the feeling they had about Puerto Rico, about their homeland and about being here in New York.” —Anonymous public school teacher, Nueva York (1955) Within the pages of the New York Times, Puerto Rican New Yorkers were represented as an undifferentiated mass—a hive, a swarm, a wave, a teem, a spill. Nueva York, in contrast, presents an aural mosaic of individual Puerto Rican voices, speaking to this significant lack in the public debate about Puerto Rican migration and challenging the mechanisms that silence these voices. While the Times’ “Our Changing City” series speaks of unparallelled “social and economic shifts [reshaping] New York’s face” and a dangerous dissonance between “rightful” residents and noisy newcomers, Schwartz heard something more familiar amidst New York 19’s transformation. In Nueva York’s liner notes he explains, In the 1940’s and 1950’s I saw Puerto Rican families moving into the same areas [where my father’s immigrant family had first lived]. I heard and saw situations that reminded me of the stories that my father told me. New Yorkers who a few years or a generation ago had been in the same situation were dealing with the Puerto Rican New Yorkers with the same misunderstanding that they had been dealt. 297 Schwartz’s statement works to interpolate Puerto Rican migrants into the familiar “We are immigrants, all” narrative of American identity, a move that is both reactionary and resistant in Nueva York. Certainly his all-encompassing nationalism is problematic, potentially contributing to the “enforced melting-down of genuine cultural diversity” (Flores: 1993, 14) and embodying what theorist Trinh T. Minh-Ha describes as a totalizing “license to name” that is the authoritative privilege of the dominant/dominating class (104). Schwartz’s liner notes go so far as retroactively proffer citizenship to what he describes as the “several hundred non-English speaking Americans” living in Manhattan in 1626. On the other hand, Schwartz disentangles English from an automatic relationship with national citizenship—there can, in fact be “non-English speaking Americans”—and frames the sounds on the record as simultaneously Puerto Rican and American. Such a move strategically resisted both the cultural erasure of the traditional “melting pot”—what Josh Kun terms the “refusal of de-ethnicized Americanness” in Audiotopia (56)—and the dominant American representation of Puerto Ricans, which deemed them so culturally different as to be dangerously unassimilable. While Schwartz does not discuss his own Jewish ethnic identity at length, his brief reference to his father’s immigrant experience suggests ways in which his own positionality shaped his “listening ear” in mid-twentieth century America as simultaneously an insider and an outsider. 19 As Kun describes in “The Yiddish are Coming,” after World War Two 298 equated racialization with mass death, Jews walked a tense and sensitive tightrope between early-twentieth century views of the Jew as a racial group and post-Holocaust attempts to reconfigure the Jew as meltably ethnic, white Americans no different from anyone else on the suburban block” (50). For Jews during the 1950s, joining “white flight” away from urban space often meant leaving certain markers of Jewishness behind; for example, in 1952, 160,000 American Jews either shortened or replaced their last names (Kugelmass cited in Kun 62). The subtext of Nueva York explores the fraught conflict between cultural preservation and cultural assimilation, examining the material effects of American racism alongside the stakes of assimilation. In locating the sounds of contemporary Puerto Rican migration within his father’s stories of former im/migration to the city, Schwartz creates the potential for the sounds of Nueva York to be heard as simultaneously new and nostalgic, enabling “meltably ethnic” listeners to hear the (lost/erased) stories of their own families within the Boricua grooves of Nueva York. While taking on racial segregation as an appalling problem, Schwartz’s Nueva York argues that assimilation to white Americanness is not a ready-made solution. His liner notes to the record claim that former European immigrants had not only forgotten the urban streets that shaped them—and erased their own ethnic identities—but they had become the newest gatekeepers of the white America that had once excluded them. By thus framing the voices of assimilated New Yorkers in Nueva York, Schwartz calls attention to the racist assumptions underpinning the American immigrant story and amplifies the deliberate exclusions that shaped what Avila describes as the “more expansive white identity” of the 1950s (6). For the 299 privilege of being unmarked “New Yorkers,” former immigrants to the city had absorbed America’s racist “misunderstanding” instead of resisting and altering it. Schwartz points out that cultural amnesia and xenophobia appear to be as endemic to American identity as the many threads of its immigrant story. While Nueva York does include tape of “newly arrived” Puerto Rican children “Pledging Allegiance to the Flag,” the many voices that have preceded the children’s recitation—voices that speak of racism and discrimination in the U.S. and construct narratives of Puerto Rican cultural nationalism—resist an easy reading of this sound as an aural display of the “melting pot” in action. While Nueva York opens with an airport loudspeaker announcing the arrival of “Flight 848, Tourist Flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico,” it closes with “La Borinquena,” the Puerto Rican National Anthem—untranslated from its original Spanish. Recording was Schwartz’s chosen medium to combat American racism and to close the chasm of segregation, building a bilingual “bridge between the Puerto Rican New Yorker and the other New Yorkers” (liner notes, Nueva York). However, there are limits to Schwartz’s project of mediation and they are important to keep in mind. While actively involved in the Puerto Rican life of his neighborhood, Schwartz himself is neither Puerto Rican nor Spanish speaking; Nueva York is therefore fraught with the intertwined dangers of appropriation, (in)authenticity, and (mis)translation. 20 It is not my intention here to convict or exonerate Schwartz from potential charges of appropriation; rather I want to explore the complexities of his 300 position as an inter-cultural practitioner, where he succeeds in listening across the sonic color-line and where he cannot. Importantly, Schwartz does not claim totalizing representation of “the” Puerto Rican story in Nueva York; rather he makes modest claims toward revealing “some aspects” and “some understandings” of the “problems of a people” (liner notes Nueva York). Furthermore, he does not hide his own presence throughout the record—as an interviewer but especially as an editor— and he maintains his core methodology, as stated in 1956, that “identification with and understanding of people” is more important to him than concealing his technology or remaining distanced from his subjects (liner notes, Sounds of My City). However, although Schwartz claims narrative authority through his own immigration history and continued residence in the neighborhood he records, he explains that his lack of Spanish language skills constrains his understanding and compels the project to take on “various forms of translation.” However, while he does decentralize the voices of white New Yorkers within the edited dialogue of Nueva York, the various levels of aural translation that Schwartz undertakes—of Spanish to English, of urban noise to city sound, of white stereotype to Puerto Rican realities—privileges the listening ear of white consumers and calls attention to his own privileged access to recording and radio media, unavailable to Puerto Ricans themselves. By using sound to counter the dominant white discourse about Puerto Rican migration, Schwartz’s editing process calls attention to the ways in which listening is always already 301 shaped by racial ideologies and exposes the ways in which race, urban space, and national identity are powerfully constructed and understood through the ear. After eight years of recording at a rate of about 15 hours a month, Schwartz edited his archive to a complex 45-minute composition that mixed strains of new cultural formations alongside the simultaneous echoes of older socio-political narratives. Schwartz’s documentary uses sound to privilege the voices of Puerto Rican New Yorkers in the story of their migration and to counter aural stereotypes already circulating within the American cultural imaginary. His juxtapositions represent Puerto Rican American identity as a state of becoming—not a set of fixed practices—in a city that is much more a process than a space with definable (and therefore defendable) boundaries. If, as Mikhail Bakhtin declares, the “ideological becoming of a human being. . .is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others,” then Tony Schwartz collects and reorganizes the everyday words of New Yorkers to represent the ideological becoming of New York itself (341). The title, Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers, performs this synthesis: as Puerto Ricans become “New Yorkers,” the city is itself remade anew—nueva—by their cultural influences and standpoints. The record is loosely but clearly organized along the familiar “immigrant experience,” beginning with the sounds of arrival and then navigating through the various challenges that newcomers faced in postwar New York City: finding housing in a racially segregated market, adjusting to colder climates, seeking employment, dealing with social 302 services, building new communities of worship, sending children to American schools, and feeling the loss of Puerto Rico. To tell this story, Schwartz combines a diverse array of musical and vocal recordings: from a nervous woman facing down a gruff government worker—“Do you speak English? Poquito? Do ya need an intrerpreta? Be betta?”—to evangelicals shaking their tambourines to the sky. Throughout Nueva York, Schwartz disrupts aural stereotypes and counters dominant views of “noise” through particular editorial choices mixing content with tone and accent. For example, early on in the recording, Schwartz records a man standing at a jukebox translating a Spanish song. Listeners who do not know Spanish might have marked the song as “foreign”; the translation reveals it to be from the U.S., a canción de musica jíbara written and recorded in New York. 21 The theme of the song—a jibaro migrant’s travails in the city—reverses the representation of Spanish as “noise” by representing how English sounds “on the other side”: The other day, I saw one of my good friends, Mateo. And he started speaking to me with a sing song that I couldn’t know what he wanted to say. I didn’t know a damn thing of what he wanted to say because he wanted to try to imitate how to speak in English, when he didn’t know English at all. Not only does the song imply that American listeners frequently mishear and dismiss Puerto Rican Americans in the process of learning English, it relativizes English by representing it as a strange “sing-song” of loss to Puerto Rican ears. 303 Tone is particularly key in representations of vocal “noise,” especially in concert with Schwartz’s philosophy that the “sound of speech is the body language of the ear” (qtd. in Rowen 7). In communication, the sound of a word often carries as much meaning as the word itself. For instance, while the tone of the government worker mentioned above is booming and harsh when first addressing the Spanish- speaking woman, he is dramatically quieter and more at ease when speaking with the interpreter. In this way, Schwartz represents the tone of English as “noise” to the ear of Puerto Rican migrants, the sound of being condescendingly talked at rather than being conspiratorially spoken to. Furthermore, Schwartz sonically illustrates the man’s authority over the woman—she is at the office applying for unemployment insurance—by placing the mic nearer to him. Her voice is represented as smaller and distanced from the listener. Schwartz also juxtaposes tone with accent to create new meanings in Nueva York, especially in the sequence on housing segregation. The liner notes do not distinguish the speakers in terms of ethnicity, and Schwartz utilizes this sense of surprise to full effect. The segment opens with a “comment about being rejected,” from a man with a slight Spanish accent describing how he “knocked on the door of a family” only to be told—and here his voice takes on a crisp, rude tone imitating the sound of the speakers huddled behind the door—“They ‘do not open the door to foreigners!’” Although Puerto Ricans were not “foreigners,” they were frequently represented as such in the dominant discourse, as I have shown. Then, Schwartz 304 splices in an audibly angry “West Side woman’s comment,” representing those on the other side of the door of rejection. In an extremely thick New York accent, this woman voices the most virulent cultural judgments about Puerto Rican New Yorkers on the record, statements which echo the discourse of “Our Changing City” and the Times reader letters. While her tone is agitated and her speech rapid, the woman’s pacing is odd and she hardly breathes throughout her litany, giving it a memorized— almost bored—effect. She states: I live on Riverside drive. On West End Avenue and on Riverside Drive, the houses are very beautiful and very well kept. Between the streets of West End Avenue and Riverside, the houses are filled with Puerto Ricans. They dirty the steps they sit all day in front of the house, they make lewd remarks when I pass by. I can look in the window and see them, living in filth and misery. . .I wish they hadn’t come here in the first place. They aren’t welcome. They don’t want to learn how to speak the language and it’s a shame they don’t stay in their own country. Her rote tone heightens her expressed blend of authoritative ignorance and voyeurism; the woman is certain she knows Puerto Rican life and feels entitled to surveille her Puerto Rican neighbors through their windows. Her tone also suggests an automatic, learned quality to her anger. Schwartz then juxtaposes the woman’s heavy accent and angry tone with an “accentless” voice providing a “comment on housing discrimination.” This woman’s tone is calm, even, and pleasant, in sharp contrast to the story she tells: And we were discussing, you know, the apartment and everything and he started telling us, ‘oh the people around here you don’t have to worry about them, they’re terrific and so on and so forth. And one thing you don’t have to worry about ever, [long pause, a tone of irony when her voice returns] ‘Puerto Ricans’ he says. So, both Andy and I just looked. We got very quiet 305 and I sorta pinched him, you know? So after a little while Andy says to him, ‘you know something, we’re Latins,’ and I think his face got white and he says, ‘Oh no!’ because he’d already talked to us and he liked us and we were going to take the place. And I figured why let him know that I am a Puerto Rican, lose the chance on getting a terrific setup like we would have, you know, so we just let it ride, and we figured at some time to come we will let him know, so that he’ll realize that not everybody is the same. Not only does the West side’s woman’s venomous tone seem that much more cruel when placed next to the even sound of the second woman’s voice, Schwartz shows that racism has direct material consequences. “By manipulating the effects of context,” as Bakhtin argues, “it is very easy to emphasize the brute materiality of another’s words, and to stimulate dialogic reactions associated with such ‘brute materiality’ (340). The juxtaposition of the two women’s voices dramatically ironizes the landlord’s depiction of the people in the neighborhood as “terrific” and produces dialogue about the racialized power dynamics of the housing market. Moreover, Schwartz uses voice and accent in this segment to raise the issue of “passing”—both visually and sonically—to unsettle perceived assumptions Puerto Rican racial identity. By not revealing the ethnicity of the various speakers, Schwartz places potentially hostile white listeners in the point-of-audition of the surprised landlord, who had already listened to and liked the woman before realizing she is “Latin.” Not only does the second speaker know “how to speak the language,” her English is flawless—as is her husband’s whose story immediately follows hers. 22 Even though they are visibly and sonically “white,” the young couple’s disclosure jeopardizes their “chance on getting a terrific setup” because of perceived white 306 supremacy, one drop rules, and stereotypes that “everybody is the same.” The fact that the couple continues to pass unbeknownst to the landlord questions visual and sonic color-lines that supposedly divide foreign/domestic, white “self” from Puerto Rican “Other.” As even these few snippets show, Schwartz’s montage technique unsettles the notion that all Puerto Ricans—indeed all Latinos—have a particular sound, as the limited and forcibly exaggerated vocal representations of contemporary celebrities Carmen Miranda and Desi Arnaz came to signify in the dominant media. 23 While unsettling racial boundaries, the ability to “pass” is visually connected to the privileges afforded by “looking white” and sonically linked to the linguistic privileges of “sounding white.” While restrictive covenants force the young couple to hide their “Puertoricanness” to land the “terrific set up” reserved for whites, Schwartz contrasts their story with the discrimination faced by a woman who cannot linguistically pass for white/American. In thick Spanish-accented English, she describes her substandard housing and the continued landlord neglect and exploitation that keeps it that way: You know the hall is dark, and I report that about four or five times. And then later and tomorrow and then later and never come. . .and then a lot of trouble with so dirty the walls. So that they still about three months, then water from the upstairs, and then still the water is from the toilet, that’s no good for health, I’m waiting you know. I am waiting until summer because no se I’ll come back to Puerto Rico because this is terrible. It is a place terrible. You can’t sleep because many troubles para eso is still. . .[voice is slowly faded out while the woman is still talking]. This woman’s story provides a counternarrative contesting the authority of the “West Side” woman’s narrative of “dirty” Puerto Ricans—a story from within rather than a 307 narrative imposed from outside—and places the onus for substandard housing on the shoulders of the landlords who profit from unsanitary slum housing conditions. The housing conditions she describes are strikingly similar to Wright’s Native Son and Petry’s Harlem kitchenettes in “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” and The Street. This woman, too, contests the narrative of the urban North as the Promised Land. For her, “it’s a place terrible”; its troubles far worse than those she left in Puerto Rico. The fact that Schwartz fades her voice out while she is still talking suggests both that her story never ends—she could keep on talking about the horrors of her building—and that her voice is marginalized within the system. Schwartz tunes her out just like her landlord, who ignores her reports even after “four or five times.” As her story fades out, the even tones of a man speaking Standard English fade in. “Well, I think it’s good business to give good housing,” he says. Placed directly next to the woman’s story, the housing developer’s speech is jarring. Schwartz’s juxtaposition creates what Bahktin describes as a “contact zone” between the woman’s “internally persuasive word”— “discourse that is denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society” (342)—and the man’s “authoritative discourse”—words that “embody authority as such, or the authoritativeness of tradition, of generally accepted truths, of the official line and other similar authorities” (344). Though the man goes on to describe renovations he is making to a building that will cut the number of units down from 16 to 9 and give the remaining tenants “twice the space for the same money as they 308 are paying for much smaller areas in the neighborhood,” his authority has been dramatically undercut by the voices that came before. Maybe he, too, is just “looking through the windows” and making assumptions, rather than listening to his tenants’ complaints. In addition to voice, Schwartz confronts the issue of Puerto Rican street music as threatening “noise”—a frequent complaint of police interviewed in Times stories about Puerto Rican neighborhoods—especially the percussion groups that were quite popular with New York youth. Schwartz features this group in the segment entitled “Music,” that follows a sequence on the sound of storefront church services. 24 Although there is the briefest silence between the tracks, the exuberant “hallelujahs” and metallic tambourine rainfall of the evangelical church service seems to fade into the rhythmic snapping of palms onto tightened drumheads. The shared pleasure experienced by congregants gathered in praise is placed side-by-side with the community circled within the drum’s beat. The clunk of the cowbell answers the drum to form a polyphonic rhythm; the voices of young men layer mambo lyrics over the top of this beat, now encompassing fingertips on car fenders. Sometimes the boys match pitch and rhythm, and sometimes they diverge, but their voices remain ardent. An abrupt cut directs attention to a young man’s voice, whose simmering Standard English punctuates his critique of a group he identifies only as “they.” To ears tuned by and attuned to the dominant standards of American whiteness, there might be just the briefest recognition, an expectation that this young 309 man is about to critique “they” who make noise in the New York City streets. However, the young man is a Puerto Rican New Yorker—on the inside of the drum circle—and he candidly criticizes the voyeurism of outsiders to his neighborhood, those who “come by and they watch us dancing out in the streets. . . they think its terrible and disgusting, but you know they do the same thing too, only they do it in the nightclubs.” The speaker makes a potent critique of the voyeurism inherent in the act of “watching”—whether through windshields, apartment windows, or newsprint—calling attention to its power dynamics and its limitations as a way of knowing others. As the young man indicates, those who watch are outsiders who do not become involved; those who watch are harsh in their judgment and blind to their own hypocrisy. The interlocking forces of poverty and racial segregation—which limited migrants’ access to private space—in combination with Puerto Rican cultural conceptions of the street as an active public sphere of interchange, compel Puerto Rican young people to make a space for themselves on the city streets. The youth make themselves (hyper) visible and audible in defiant violation of white cultural norms concerning privacy, propriety, and “peace and quiet.” In recognizing the judgment of the gaze, in which dancing in public spaces is immediately equated with a brown (hyper)sexuality deemed “terrible and disgusting,” the speaker calls attention to the displacement of white sexuality onto this same construction. After all, those who watch like to shake it to the mambo beat as well, but only inside the 310 cordoned-off space of the exclusive nightclub, which the young man describes as a privilege of both class and race. A honk of horn punctuates his statement, an aural reminder that this exchange is taking place on the streets of the New York, and the Puerto Rican musicians are engaged in a tense cultural conflict over the “proper” sound and movement of bodies through urban space. Mambo music was being generated on the segregated streets of New York City—not just imported from Caribbean and Latin American countries—and was being consumed in clubs equally segregated. By exploiting the properties of sound— especially its ability to bleed into and other sounds—Nueva York exemplifies Juan Flores’ conception of the popular in From Bomba to Hip Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (2000). “Rather than marking off boundaries and defining separate spheres of cultural practice,” Flores writes, “perhaps popular culture is about the traversing and transgressing of them” (20). Schwartz arranges the sounds in this section to privilege the streets of New York over the nightclub as a space of communal pleasure grassroots cultural formation. After the young man finishes speaking, there is a lengthy silence and then a cut to an older man’s voice with the strains of a Mambo orchestra behind him. The intimacy of the close-up microphone Schwartz used to record the teenagers—and the inclusion of the honking horns in the background—gives the young people’s musical expression an exuberant and organic immediacy, whereas the more centralized mic he uses for the big band makes their music sound closed-off and distant, as if they were playing in a cavernous and empty 311 room. Furthermore, the older man reveals himself to be the “owner of the Palladium, the Home of the Mambo,” precisely the type of place where the young man argues that “they” go to dance. The Palladium, which adopted an all-mambo policy in 1952, is particularly symptomatic of the appropriation of mambo within mainstream American culture and the Anglicization of its sound in the mid 1950s (Kun 79); Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney had both released mambo songs by the time Nueva York was released. As the club owner advertises, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we have nothing but Spanish speaking people here. . .We have 95% Puerto Rican people come in on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. On Wednesday Nights, we have nothing but Americans come and see us. We play nothing but Mambo music and we have a terrific show. The advertisement is literally drowned out by the sound of a large, professional band playing a mambo typical of Xavier Cugat or Perez Prado, with screaming horns charging over a quirky staccato beat. The music climbs to a fever pitch and then silence. Suddenly, the more intimate sound of two young girl’s voices singing acapella in Spanish fills the speaker. Listeners have left the nightclub and are back on the street, now re-positioned as the wellspring of musical expression, the source of its energy, pulse and life rather than its “terrible, disgusting” debasement. The familiar sound of popular mambo music has been reframed by the arrangement of sounds preceding it and following it; the orchestra sounds distant and slightly canned when compared with the teenagers jamming on the street, even as their beat is echoed faintly within the smooth, polished stylings of the nightclub musicians. 312 By privileging Puerto Rican voices like those of the young musicians, the grooves of Nueva York attempt to break open the unitary language of official media sources. Schwartz’s editing creates what Bakhtin calls a “play of boundaries” within the sonic color-line, using juxtaposition, accent, and tone of voice to unsettle dominant discourse and open up “entirely different possibilities” (345). While the New York Times printed hundreds of articles about “Puerto Rican problem” in the same period, there are no articles written by Puerto Rican migrants to the city; few, if any, invoke a Puerto Rican perspective or include even a single quotation. On the whole, Puerto Ricans are spoken about—by city officials, by angry white New Yorkers, by politicians seeking re-election, by police—and they are spoken for—by academics, investigative journalists, teachers, church and settlement workers—but the power structure of the mainstream media rarely, if ever, allows Puerto Ricans to speak directly about their lives and the issues that affect them. Although clearly and somewhat problematically mediated by Schwartz, Nueva York succeeds in presenting an aural mosaic of different Puerto Rican voices, speaking to this profound lack in the contemporary public debate and challenging the mechanisms that silence these voices. Schwartz’s montage juxtaposes slices of “reality”—of the grain of the voice sounding on tape in real time—to embed a believable virtual image of a divergent, multiracial American city emergent within segregation. Nueva York re-images 1950’s New York as a space of heteroglossia, full of competing, coexisting, and conflicting languages that cannot be contained and neatly cordoned 313 off. While these voices conflict as much, if not more, than they converge and are not yet speaking to each other, Nueva York shows them to be already deeply engaged in dialogue. 1 I performed all transcriptions of Nueva York myself. 2 Schwartz’s recording adds another diasporic layer to the already complex recording history of the song “Wimoweh,” originally “Mbube” in Zulu. The song was written and originally recorded by South African Zulu artist Solomon Linda and his group the Evening Birds. Because blacks were barred from earning royalties under apartheid, the group was paid only petty cash despite the fact that the record sold over 100,000 copies for Gallo Records, the first recording studio in sub-Saharan Africa. While Linda became famous, he remained penniless. Pete Seeger heard the song in 1948, when Alan Lomax “rescued” a promotional copy from Folkways’ trash bin. He became fascinated with the song, transcribing it (the Zulu chant “Uyimbe” became “Wimoweh”) and recording it for Folkways in 1952, to modest success. The Weevers sent some money to Linda, but he did not receive songwriter’s credit from the music publisher (or the royalties that go along with it). Many more covers followed, most famously the Token’s “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which was a top ten hit in the U.S. the same year that Linda died of kidney failure in South Africa. The 2005 PBS documentary A Lion’s Trail traces the history of the song (“A Lion’s Trail”). 3 Schwartz was often considered a folklorist in contemporary views of his work because of his interest in collecting music and sound as experienced and exchanged in everyday city life. “Upstate, Downstate: Folklore News and Notes,” a review essay in the Autumn 1953 edition of The New York Folklore Quarterly describes Schwartz as exemplary of the emerging “Downstate” school of New York folklore, which was interested in examining cultural change and intersection, rather than preserving rural folkways as “authentic,” as the “Upstate” school was accused of doing. According to authors B.A. Botkin and William G. Tyrell, the Downstate school embraced the culture of New York City considered inauthentic and “foreign, wet, Democratic, Catholic” (231) by the Upstaters and examined the “‘sounds of our times’ as a mingling of sounds and voices from all parts of the country and the world” (233). 4 Schwartz’s archive—now housing 40,000 songs—is considered by many to be the finest recorded archive of folk music in the world. The Library of Congress estimates its value at 2.5 million dollars and is currently working on acquiring it from him. 5 I realize that “exotic” is a critically loaded term, and I use it here precisely to replicate the white American imaginary of the Cold War years, in which a flurry of visual, aural, and cinematic representations of the “exotic” circulated throughout American culture. This imagery—a decontextualized pastiche of tikis, leopard prints, “shrunken heads,” grass skirts, Hawaiian shirts and 314 tropical drinks—were eagerly consumed by mainstream audiences during the 1950s, as they were used to both establish American cultural norms and contest conformity to them by allowing whites a culturally acceptable form of imaginary escape from the perceived blandness of suburbia. This process is discussed at length in Francesco Adinolfi’s Mondo Exotica (2000). 6 Like Richard Wright, Schwartz theorized about aural literacy and connected listening to the natal experience. In testimony to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee in 1973, Schwartz played the following recording: “Long before you as a child, long before you could tell the difference between a smile and a frown, you could tell the difference in the sound of a word—in the sound of love, in the sound of anger, in the sound of impatience. Pleasure and pain were evidenced by you as sounds, and you didn’t know what a face looked like when it felt these things. So even now, when you hear a sound, its meaning to you is more profound because you have a greater history of hearing sounds than of making sense out of sight” (qtd. in Rowan 6). 7 The move to long-playing vinyl came directly out of World War II shellac shortages. Vinyl enabled the size of the groove to be dramatically reduced—allowing for more music to be recorded on the same disk size that now rotated at 33 1/3 rpm rather than 78—while at the same time reducing surface noise and producing a considerable clearer sound. The LP was launched in 1948 by Columbia in the U.S.; the 7-inch 45 rpm “single” by RCA Victor in 1949 (Chanan 93). 8 Since his recording career in the 1950s, Schwartz has produced over 3,000 commercials, most famously for Coca-Cola, Johnson and Johnson, and Bufferin. He has also worked on several high profile political campaigns including Jimmy Carter’s bid for president in 1976 (not 1980) and Andy Young’s successful run for congress in Atlanta, GA, in 1974. He is most famous for producing the highly controversial Lyndon Johnson “Daisy” ad for his campaign against Barry Goldwater in 1964, which many analysts feel sealed the deal for Johnson. He blended the sound of a little girl counting to ten with a countdown to a nuclear explosion, evoking fear in viewers that Goldwater was eager to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. During this period he struck up a lifelong friendship with famous communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, who reviewed Schwartz’s first book for Rolling Stone in 1974. 9 Schwartz discusses his early theories concerning microphone placement in a 1956 interview for Tape Recording Magazine reprinted in the liner notes for Sounds of My City: “The secret, Tony says, is not an engineering trick, but a point of view. ‘I am interested in content, rather than total sound.’ By placement of the microphone, you can indicate your attitude towards the song and develop a perspective in sound. ‘If you want to stress the words, put the mike closer to the mouth of the performer; if it’s the music you are more interested in, place the mike closer to the instrument.’ By bearing in mind the position of the person who will listen to the playback, Tony gives you the feeling that the performer is singing directly to you when he makes the recording” (Lowe). 10 See Sterne’s Audible Past (2003) for a discussion of the rise of recording technology in connection with the professionalization of anthropology and its drive to record “dying cultures.” 11 This was such an important part of the Folkways philosophy that it was a condition of the sale of Folkways to the Smithsonian, which Asch was in the midst of settling upon his death in 1987. Renamed Smithsonian Folkways in 1989, the non-profit agency has made every Asch recording available online; listeners may purchase either a customized tape or CD that comes with a photocopy of the original liner notes. Their mission statement remains: “Supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among peoples through the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of sound” (www.folkways.si.edu). 315 12 For an excellent discussion of the imagery of the drum, see Barbara Browning’s Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (1998). For a conversation about the notion of African “rhythm” in the 1920s and 1930’s, see Ronald Radano’s “Hot Fantasies: American Modernism and the Idea of Black Rhythm” (2001). 13 Richard Dyer has extensive readings of the connections between representations of “lightness” and “whitening” in chapter three of White, “The Light of the World” (1997). 14 Schafer also argues that a key site to examine cultural definitions of who/what is considered noise is through noise abatement legislation. For example, John Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes (2002) examines the extensive noise laws developed during the Victorian era to outlaw the “organ grinder”— usually manned by recent immigrants from Southern Europe and England’s colonies—from London’s streets. In The Soundscape of Modernity, Emily Anderson describes the efforts in New York City to ban megaphones at Coney Island in 1908, a practice that disproportionately affected poor—often immigrant—carnival barkers (124). Or more recently, the drive by wealthy white Angelenos to ban the leaf blower—coincidentally the primary tool of their largely Latino gardeners—from their placid suburban avenues. In essence, the ability to define “noise” is a sign of political power and, as Schafer argues, having the capacity to make noise without censure is a potent symbol of authority. 15 The connection between the sound of “proper” English and American patriotism is something that I plan to explore further. In Do You Speak American? (2005), Robert MacNeil and William Cran describe a “Good English Makes Good Americans” campaign that swept America’s schools after World War I (95-96). Documents cited such as the “Pledge for Children,” a loyalty oath created by the Chicago Woman’s Club American Speech Committee in 1918, provide compelling evidence for the link between sound and citizenship. It states: “I love the United States of America. I love my country’s flag. I love my country’s language. I promise: 1. That I will not leave dishonor my country’s speech by leaving off the last syllables of words. 2. That I will say a good American ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the place of an Indian grunt ‘un-hum’ and ‘nup-um’ or a foreign ‘ya’ or ‘yeh’ and ‘nope.’ 3. That I will do my best to improve American speech by avoiding loud, rough tones, by enunciating distinctly, and by speaking pleasantly, clearly and sincerely. 4. That I will learn to articulate as correctly as possible during the year.” Notice especially the repetition of the terms “loud, and rough” to describe Anti-American speech sounds, the same words used by the New York Times to describe white-held stereotypes about Puerto Ricans. School as a tool of socialization and standardization also factors heavily into the second side of Schwartz’s Nueva York. 16 See chapter two of Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994) and “Necropolis: The Bronx and the Politics of Abandonment” in Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation (2005) for a discussion of the lasting repercussions of Robert Moses’s Urban Renewal—and the Cross-Bronx Expressway in particular— on the black and Latino working class residents of NYC, especially for burgeoning hip-hop and the war on sound in the 1970s. 17 The large scale white flight—frequently described as an “exodus” suggestive of a mass escape from horror or strife—was heavily chronicled in the New York Times. Not surprisingly, the large numbers of new white residents straining the services of suburban counties is never characterized as “tense problems in housing” as is the case for Puerto Ricans in Manhattan and the Bronx (Gruson 25); the shift is described in positive terms as “phenomenal growth” (Wright 21) and any difficulties are dismissed heartily as mere “growing pains” (Conklin 23). 18 The notion of noise as American “Other” surfaces in surprising ways throughout this period. A short piece from January 28, 1951 called “When the Sirens Sound” describes the testing of the air raid sirens as adding a few important decibels to “this always noisy city’s noises.” The city somehow 316 managed to go about its business, despite the way that the “eerie sound” of the sirens proclaimed the new wave of barbarism [that] threatens the earth”: Communism. In this cosmology, the siren’s sound links the Cold War to the events of World War II, representing the “breath of perilous winds whistling for many thousands of miles around the world.” In effect, the siren becomes an aural symbol evoking fear and performing a kind of aural surveillance of those within its reach. Listening, of course, is classed and raced. For a very different take on the meaning of the siren’s sound, see my earlier chapter on Ann Petry. 19 His father, Samuel Schwartz, was a civil engineer who helped design Manhattan’s subway tunnels. His mother, Esther, was an author. 20 See Josh Kun’s Audiotopia for a discussion of Jewish and Latino interactions in New York City during the 1950s, especially in the context of Mambo (79). 21 Música Jíbara—roughly translating into “country music”—is a rural Puerto Rican musical tradition originating from the people living in the inland mountains. It was brought to the U.S., along with working-class forms bomba and plena as early as the 1920s. For a comprehensive discussion of Puerto Rican musical forms, see Juan Flores’s Divided Borders (1993) and From Bomba to Hip Hop (2000). 22 I have been able to identify the two speakers as Norma and Amador “Andy” Chaidez, whom Schwartz thanks in the liner notes. I have written a letter to Chaidezes—still alive as of 2004 and living in Scarsdale—inquiring about their participation in the project as well as their thoughts about Nueva York and its personal and political impact. In personal correspondence, Schwartz’s assistant Forrest Gray described Norma Chaidez as a close friend of Schwartz. His archive includes recordings of the waiting room during the birth of her child and of her singing to her newborn baby in English and Spanish made during the mid-1950s. 23 Here I can’t help but to think of these lines from Rosario Morales’s poem “I Am What I Am”: “I am Boricua as Boricuas come from the Isle of Manhattan and I croon Carlos Gardel tangoes in my sleep and Afro-Cuban beats in my blood and Xavier Cugat’s lukewarm latin is so familiar and dear sneer dear but he’s familiar and dear but not Carmen Miranda who’s a joke because I never was a joke” (14). 24 Schwartz used recordings of the music of Puerto Rican youth on almost every recording he put out on Folkways, including 1,2,3, and a Zing, Zing, Zing (1953), Millions of Musicians (1954), New York 19 (1954), and Sounds of My City (1956). 317 List of Works Cited Adams, Frank S. “Migrant Aid Asked for Puerto Ricans.” New York Times 13 February 1948: 23. 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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
"The Contours of the Sonic Color-line: Slavery, Segregation, and the Cultural Politics of Listening" is a literary, historical, and theoretical examination of the ways in which sound and listening functioned to produce social and racial difference during two significant, interconnected moments in American racial formation: late antebellum slavery in the mid-nineteenth century and the late Jim Crow era in the mid-twentieth. The literary and aural texts I examine -- slave narratives and social realist works -- explicitly responded to and intervened in racial discourse during these periods, representing the uneven power dynamics of U.S. white supremacy in order to dismantle them. In Contours, I argue that two of the most powerful dimensions of these counternarratives of race have heretofore been overlooked: the way in which they represent racism as operating in multiple sensory modalities -- especially sound -- as well as their use of aural imagery to challenge the dominance of visual discourses of race stemming from the Enlightenment. The notion of the visible color-line, made famous by W.E.B. Du Bois, is imbricated with its aural echo, what I term the "sonic color-line."
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn
(author)
Core Title
The contours of the sonic color-line: slavery, segregation, and the cultural politics of listening
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
American Studies and Ethnicity
Degree Conferral Date
2007-08
Publication Date
07/02/2009
Defense Date
05/09/2007
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
African Americans,listening ear,OAI-PMH Harvest,race,sonic color-line,sound,the novel
Language
English
Advisor
Kaplan, Carla (
committee chair
), Demers, Joanna (
committee member
), Jackson-Fossett, Judith (
committee member
), Moten, Fred (
committee member
)
Creator Email
stoever@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m577
Unique identifier
UC1321411
Identifier
etd-Stoever-20070702 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-511784 (legacy record id),usctheses-m577 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-Stoever-20070702.pdf
Dmrecord
511784
Document Type
Dissertation
Rights
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Repository Name
Libraries, University of Southern California
Repository Location
Los Angeles, California
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
African Americans
listening ear
race
sonic color-line
sound
the novel