Speech, Listening, and Female Sexuality in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

DEBORAH M. GARFIELD Speech, Listening, and Female Sexuality in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl "You have let your tongue run too far" I. THE RAVISHING OF THE EAR: ORAL AGENCY, SEDUCTION, AND THE FEMALE ABOLITIONIST t the first convention ofthe American Anti-Slavery Society .in 1833, members called for the mobilization of free blacks and ex-slaves as professional "agents" who would bear oral witness to the wrongs ofcaptivity. Writing to Theodore Weld in 1838, the abolitionist Angelina Grimké champions these roving lecturers by exalting the dynamic between the ear and the voice igniting it: the slave's "narratives " must "come burning from his own lips. . . . Many and many a tale of romantic horror can the slaves tell" (Weid-Grimke' Letters 2: January 21, 1838, 523-24).' In her controversial Pennsylvania Hall speech, Grimké endorses hearing as an almost mystical transportation into the space of political reform—the "here" of the Pennsylvania Hall itself: "Here it—hear it. . . . Every man and woman present may do something ... by opening our mouths for the dumb and pleading the cause" (Pennsylvania Hall 123-25.) The rhetorical outrage of abolitionists like Grimké consistently, of course, took the form of meticulous ratiocination. But she and other cohorts understood that speech might not only convert the intellect and soul, but ravish the senses as well. Arizona Quarterly Volume 50 Number 2, Summer 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1 610 20Deborah M. Garfield An evangelical performance which stirred or arrested the body could ready the psyche for moral suasion. If Grimké often relied on what might seem a conventionally "feminine " response to the Radcliffean allure of such oral testimonies, John Collins, too, intuited the talismanic aura an audience, warming to slavery's "romantic horror," might find in an agent's lectures. "The public ," he notes in a letter to William Lloyd Garrison, "have itching ears to hear a colored man speak, and particularly a slave. Multitudes will flock to hear one ofhis class speak" (Liberator January 21, 1842).2 Burning lips; itching ears: the relation between the two systematically appeared , in one form or the other, in the typical caption on the advertisements of ex-slaves' speaking tours: 'All who wish to hear the workings of Slavery from one of its own recipients are invited to attend."3 As instrumental as the written slave autobiography became, it remained the austere, but privative, form of the oratory that was often its lively original. Jhe editor of Josiah Henson's 1849 autobiography lamented that the published work "loses the attraction derived from . . . the natural eloquence of a man who tells a story in which he is deeply interested" (Eliot, ed. The life ofJosiah Henson). A similar insight into charismatic telling prompted a reporter for the Salem Register to respond that Douglass' cogent arguments, charged by his voice, "created the most indescribable of sensations in the minds of those unaccustomed to hear freemen of color speak in public." He provided "living, speaking, and startling proof of the folly . . . of slavery" (Foner 1: 55). Again the compact between ear and speech involves a "startling" mental ineffability which ripens into revelation. While the published narrative was given the status of abolitionist scripture and its readers' "perusal" became a necessary stage in the conversion to slavery's "folly," there was a préexistent rapport between the agent's utterance and the "sensations" it fomented in the listener. Numerous former slaves, among them, Douglass, Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, Henry "Box" Brown, the Clarkes, Josiah Henson, and Moses Grandy, who initiated their writing careers as circuit-speakers, were proof of the magnetic pull of oratory. And many resumed their lecturing after their narratives were published. Speech enabled narrative; narrative, in turn, facilitated a retreat to the "living, speaking" Logos parenting it. Although , as John Sekora adeptly argues, the black orators' spontaneity was cramped by white mentors' questionnaires and interviews, and by Speech, Listening, and Female Sexuality21 the pragmatics of audience response, that speech still retained its etiological pedigree.4 While the male agent's speech was frequently cherished as the word made flesh, it was in that momentous embodiment oí language—its "romance," "horror," and misty...