Please Hold: Notes of an Audio Witness

I don’t recall the date, but I know it was before COVID-19 and before the world knew the name George Floyd. I know that I was undisturbed by my brother being out in the world, enjoying an unseasonably warm day. I don’t recall the exact time but there was daylight, here and there. He was in Minneapolis; I was in Los Angeles: two time zones, one sun. What I do recall is how my breath slowed, how I looked around the room in search of something that might assist — or a way to teleport, to arrive at the scene and speak plainly to the officer, to shield my brother from what I knew could easily become an end rather than a pause.

The call began like many others — shooting the shit while he was en route somewhere and I was in thought somewhere else. He was happy, joking about the other drivers and basking in the too-rare pleasure of having had a good day. I faintly heard his environment: late-day traffic and the squeak of his brakes. I assume my space was quiet save for, perhaps, my baby’s squeal or laughter. When he told me that he was being pulled over, all of the density fell from the air. There was no sound, no movement, no distraction, only perfect danger, “the weather” of anti-Blackness in the form of an officer’s approach.¹ Thousands of miles away, I offered what little I had: a calm and clear voice, and an ability to stay on the line in order to be his audio witness.

I focused all of my anxious energy into my ears, the tools that as a music scholar I rely on again and again, turning the volume up on the phone to assist in the concentrated, devastating listening that comes with the notice of bad news. The stress of the moment overwhelmed whatever wisdom could have led me to press record. Instead I tried to be in the car with him. “Put me on speaker,” I told him as he made his way to the shoulder. “It’s okay. It’ll be okay. Put your hands where they can see them.” I said all of this with full knowledge that my instructions were unlikely to save his life if someone was willing to take it. The words were a script that I could remember and recite if needed as evidence of his cooperation, his docility, his humanity.

I closed my eyes, hoping to both heighten my hearing and wish away the encroaching thought of harm that, if realized, would be lived over and over again, from the assault to the heartbreak to the lies to the devastation to the excuses to the rage of its repetition in cities and towns all over this country. I listened forensically, stripping away collateral noise to focus intensely on the voices that would tell the tale. How many are there? Where is the officer and how far apart are they? My listening became analytical in pursuit of the finest details. Are their pitches too high or too low? Is someone scared? Are the words aggressive or the silence between them too lengthy? Did a radio dispatch come in? A car door open? Please, no: a holster snap?

Some of this, I imagine, was on the mind of Katie Wright, Daunte Wright’s mother, as she listened on the phone during his last moments.² She received the call at 1:47pm on April 11, 2021 as he was being pulled over by police in Brooklyn Center, a suburban area just north of Minneapolis. She was prepared to speak to the officer, to offer insurance information, to offer assurance that her son was in good standing as a driver, but she never received that chance. Instead she heard an officer tell twenty-year-old Daunte to exit the car and hang up the phone. No more witnesses. And after the phone was dropped or put down she heard “scuffling,” a terrifying cacophony of sounds without source or clear choreography yet burdened with threat.³ In that indecipherable sound, between her son’s voice and that of an officer telling him not to run, are the details of his murder. Buried in that noise is the rationale for their contact, the logic of policing as pure force, the disregard for life.

The phone line was cut after the officer’s command. His mother tried to call back. Every few seconds a new effort to announce that she, like Daunte, knew that this was danger. To announce that she was there. To announce that someone loved him and would come looking for him. The absence of an answer might be the only minor grace of the whole event: that his mother was spared the sound of what Daunte’s companion witnessed from the passenger seat of the car. But maybe there’s no grace at all. The silence that she experienced is not peace. Heard or not heard, the brutality is world-shattering, just on a slightly different timeline. I cannot fathom that pain. The risk of it was and is enough to stop me cold, to render my chest and heart momentarily hollow.

In a world of common and unpredictable danger, there can never be enough tools at the disposal of those aggressively tasked with survival. In addition to fixing our sights on the bodycam footage that we cannot stop and will never forget, we must now train our ears in an effort to be in “presence time” with our beloveds. By presence time I mean an effort to not only be in that minute and hour with them but in that place — the kind of teleportation that I struggled to achieve on the phone with my brother but desperately wanted. Climbing into the car or arriving at the home or being on the block with our beloveds at the moment that they most need us. I’ve argued elsewhere that this transfer is available to and modeled by willful singers — that they can and do harness their vocal reserves in order to send themselves into a world beyond their physical grasp (in that case, the brilliant Paul Robeson).⁴ But the singer’s effort is only activated by an equally willful listener. Can we listen with enough intention that our beloveds who sing for life feel us next to them? 

As stewards for so many vulnerable people and as those whose witness often tells the tale, this practice of audio witnessing is disproportionately assigned to and uniquely accomplished by women. The Minnesota Three — Daunte Wright, Philando Castile, and George Floyd — each had or summoned women (all of them mothers) to their side as they faced the possibility of a deadly police force that became certain: Wright’s phone call to his mother, Castile’s partner who witnessed his murder from the passenger seat of their car, and Floyd who, notably, called out for his deceased mother as the life was being choked out of him on a Minneapolis street. Two of the three of these requested that their loved ones be where they were without presence, and in the case of Floyd, that his mother return. Seeking more than comfort, more than protection (but these as well), these men begged for witnesses — those who could, in that moment and beyond, testify to their humanity. Surely, they likely believed, logic could prevail if only they/Black people could better articulate their right to life, if only there were more voices added to the chorus of character witnesses and others of conscience who screamed at alternating intervals and pitches, “What did he do,” “Stop,” “Leave him alone,” and, finally, “What have you done?”

To witness and testify are foundational requests of the state, even as the state itself has worked vigilantly to evade the scrutiny produced by that labor. While demands for police accountability date at least to the middle twentieth century, mostly prominently with the Black Panther Party’s genesis and commitment to “police the police,” the movements of the twenty-first century have amplified and escalated notice of police menace.⁵ Calls for everything from reform to abolition have set into motion renewed energy for community oversight of police and more information about and accountability for their work in real time.⁶ Intended to serve as a form of irrefutable witness, body cameras took center stage as a unifying request across ideological difference. These videos, however, are not foolproof in the eyes of the law, as recent non-indictments and acquittals have demonstrated.⁷ Open, like everything else, to the terms of interested interpretation, actions seen clear as day on tape can easily be bent and malformed in order to preserve the systems that reproduce radical vulnerability and harm. No better are the belt (audio) recorders developed for similar purposes. An unsound archive of the ongoing ravages of policing in deindustrialized and extracted Black and brown neighborhoods, these recordings continue to be used and abused by departments in places like Riverside, California where, due to community outrage and organizing, police are required to use small digital voice recorders on patrol.

In her reading of the belt audio recovered after the murder of Lee Deante Brown by Riverside police in 2006, ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong troubles the common sense of ocularity as the “key intervention into police brutality.”⁸ Using sound instead, she details the horror, confusion, and ineptitude that attended to Brown’s final moments:

The audio recordings of the encounter reveal that the two officers and Lee Brown talked continuously during their brief encounter — talk that overlapped, talk that was supposed to make things happen, talk that was scripted and impelled by official policies, talk that came from two different realities, talk that created a wall of impossibility, talk that kept going even after Brown stopped because he was shot and dying — and the officer’s belt recorders captured it all. The resulting audio artifacts are dense with sound.⁹

Brown’s expiry within minutes of police encounter gives life (or death?) to the phrase, “talk is cheap.” Without articulate assessment of the situation or de-escalation, the police talk recorded on that date was not sufficient enough evidence to bring relief to the Brown family. In addition to the failures of its interpretation by select city officials, the technology itself was flawed — poor quality, “low fidelity, hard to understand, and full of the snap and crackle of bodies in movement” — becoming a shield behind which the state could cower when put under pressure.¹⁰

Neither video nor audio recording, of any quantity or quality, has made imperiled communities safer. Each has failed to deter state violence, instead becoming contested remnants of repetitive suffering and death. What the audio recordings, in particular, refuse are signs of Black life. With so much investment in deploying the audio as evidence, listeners miss that the scene did not unfold in the past tense. It was active with desire and language that insists on presence, not reflection. In addition to moments of profound distress and unintelligibility, Brown is heard in the recording calling for “Mariah.”¹¹ Only after his death did those involved beg the question of who that person was. He wanted to see his daughter. Had the recording’s listeners labored against the state, something radically different could have been heard. We’ve been listening to the wrong voices and, in that, listening exclusively to prosecute rather than to protect.

Listening for life, rather than death, requires a different manner of investigation with stakes that surpass the unlikely event of a verdict against the state. It is a search for the noise of emotion and the detail of bonds to those who may only appear by/as signal or sign. In distinction to the state that demands that we grieve over and bury our loved ones’ stricken bodies quickly and quietly, might we use our ears to witness as Mamie (Till-)Bradley did with her eyes? 

When she insisted on seeing his body she bore witness to the crime they had committed and to the final brutal minutes of Emmett’s life. By looking at his body, and telling and retelling the story of that heartbreaking examination, she took the first step toward ensuring that her son would live on in collective memory long after his body had been buried. Furthermore, she figuratively reconstituted the brutalized corpse and crafted a perpetual epilogue, by imaginatively suturing its parts to her memories of each limb and feature, plane and surface.¹²

Her defiance of the state’s order that she and her son Emmett disappear included a demand of her design: that, with her son’s open casket, the world see as she saw. Of course no one can see as she did. We are not Mamie (Till-)Bradley or Samaria Rice or Delmer Miller, Minneola or Gwendalena Butler — but we, knowing that it is “dangerous and cowardly not to look,” can train to witness in the ways tasked to them, and this without the expectation that our lives reproduce or be defined by this unrelenting violence.¹³ The audio witness leans into the scene in order to labor at the frequency of need, to hear what the vulnerable say between and beyond text, and to interpret at the level of Black being.

How do we account for violence when evasion for responsibility is not only the goal but the point? The repetitive enactment of vulnerability is built into the very conditions of existence for those whose claims to the category of “citizen” have always pressed the state beyond its natural designs, meaning that culpability, when on the rare occasion it is pursued, is understood and experienced as exceptional. Isolated judgements against law enforcement are trumpeted as victories, months, years later even as other atrocities continue to mount, overwhelming our senses. We can’t feel fast enough, yell loud enough, witness elementally enough to feel whole, let alone safe. Yet we listen every day for all that the atmosphere and its recordings entail. 

To listen with the expectation of assigning and detailing life, rather than death, is a polyphonic effort with expansive possibilities for our ability to know and survive, now and in the future. Knowledge, emotion, and the (public) archive are reworked in this effort because “the forms of witness themselves can configure the narratives that women and other witnesses are able to offer.”¹⁴ Like the Oliverosian “deep listening,” listening in presence time requires a “heightened awareness of the sonic environment,”¹⁵ yet not simply one’s own but the “total climate,” and exists for the preservation and integrity of someone else and, by extension, the radical whole. The audio witness is both a listening to and with those imperiled.¹⁶ In their critical attention to women and witnessing, Abrams and Kacandes argue that

the power of any forms of witness lies in that texture, those details: they help us to relate the jarring injury of our own lives, help us to see the way that we too could move in an instance from the familiar details of our lives to an unimagined horror, or to be confronted with the kind of searing choice that we would like to deny.¹⁷

Cries, names, breath, pleas, songs, brakes, knocks compose some of the textured soundscape to which the audio witness is attuned. That substance is then given meaning through the study of its repetition and refusal, the notes of the song played in the background, the search for the person who belongs to the name called. Though studied, the auralities of presence time give rise to “witnessing that attests to ordinariness, both in the constraints, injuries, and possibilities that witnesses relate and in the manner of reporting them.”¹⁸ Any and everything could matter in saving a life and crafting the story that will shelter and carry that life through the inevitable horrors to come.

My brother was physically unharmed on the date that I cannot recall but anticipate will be repeated. This event did not become what we as Black people brace ourselves for when we hear the sounds of the police. I’m grateful. And angry. Angry that I’m grateful that my brother survived a traffic stop. I’m angry that we are forced to live and listen this way; that the terror of policing translates across thousands of miles; angry that, in spite of all evidence, some still believe that policing can be rehabilitated. It cannot. No amount of policy or training is enough to disguise the fact that policing is fundamentally inhumane and universally, though unevenly, disastrous. Even if Black folks drive or walk away, even if we return to our beds for sleep or run another mile, we have lost something, some precious part of ourselves to the designs of the white supremacist state.

Until such time as we’ve collectively established our abolition democracy, we hold the line and our loved ones in order to signal that they are cared for — that we will listen in order to come looking for them and those who seek to harm them. That is a promise.

Endnotes

1. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016).[↑]
2. Holly Yan, “Daunte Wright called his mother right before he was shot. This is what he said.” CNN, April 15, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/13/us/daunte-wright-family-reaction/index.html.[↑]
3. Katie Wright, “Daunte Wright’s mom emotionally recounts her son’s death,” Interview, CNN, April 13, 2021, Video, 2 min., 2 sec. https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/13/us/daunte-wright-family-reaction/index.html.[↑]
4. Shana L. Redmond, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke University Press, 2020).[↑]
5. See, for example, Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (University of California Press, 2016); and Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (Abrams Books, 2016).[↑]
6. See, for example, Los Angeles County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission. “Annual Report 2017,” https://assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/0234f496-d2b7-00b6-17a4-b43e949b70a2/e4ce9d6a-867b-4229-a97a-acf1dbcc6fa2/Final%202017%20Annual%20Report.pdf; and The CR10 Publications Collective, Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2008).[↑]
7. Evidence abounds but see, for example, the 2022 acquittal of the officer who murdered Jonathan Price in Texas or the 2025 acquittal of the officer who murdered pregnant Ta’Kiya Young in Ohio.[↑]
8. Deborah Wong, “Deadly Soundscapes: Scripts of Lethal Force and Lo-Fi Death,” in Theorizing Sound Writing, ed. Deborah Kapchan (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 257-8.[↑]
9. Wong, “Deadly Soundscapes,” 260.[↑]
10. Wong, “Deadly Soundscapes,” 260.[↑]
11. Wong, “Deadly Soundscapes,” 255.[↑]
12. Valerie Smith, “Emmett Till’s Ring,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1/2 (Spring–Summer 2008): 154.[↑]
13. John Edgar Wideman, “Looking at Emmett Till,” Creative Nonfiction 19, (2002): 25.[↑]
14. Kathryn Abrams and Irene Kacandes, “Introduction: Witness,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1/2 (Spring-Summer, 2008): 21.[↑]
15. “About Deep Listening,” The Center for Deep Listening, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/deep-listening/.[↑]
16. Sharpe, In the Wake.[↑]
17. Abrams and Kacandes, “Introduction,” 23.[↑]
18. Abrams and Kacandes, “Introduction,” 22.[↑]