Christine Hume

 

Hum

When I turned twelve, my family moved to the edge of state game land. I walked its paths or made my own while listening to the wind hushing treetops, my stride shushing ferns. As I walked, my throat emptied, and a buried sound forced its way out of my face. I walked into being something alone and overripe as a silver-veined diva voice emerged in soft spectacle, barely audible and tuneless. Mostly I did not know I was sounding until someone called my attention to it. My high hum asked for no answer, yet my mother and brother noted the leakage in annoyance; sometimes worried strangers cocked their heads at me; some acted trapped inside the sound. The hum’s ambient sonority—mimicry of a local wasp, fly, or bee—led me further into the woods.

Hum

Streaming through me, this sound owned me; its occupying power may have earmarked my voice for something more than speech. An inrush of language filled my mouth: half-heard phrases slipping into conflicting ideas, gardens of tones gagged with broken slogans, soundbites embedded in flack and facts, muttered accusations thickened with the irrepressible detritus of lyrics. Without moving my lips, in a nonvolitional ventriloquy, I choked up. My mouth became a mine for all sounds, all words at once, flattened and trembling. My mouth clogged with its own recalls. It rang out like an emergency alert. 

Hum

When my family relocated, I was moving into adolescence, giving me both means and reason to hide. At the root of the word “hum” is “to cover embarrassment.” Did my shame have a voice? Was humming a kind of aural blush? Was my hum drawing out or drowning out another voice? Was I becoming a witch or a weird sister? I feared being possessed by spirits. I read about pre-teen girls suddenly talking in tongues, slamming furniture around with their minds, or being held temporarily in the grips of a man’s voice. I identified with these isolated girls. Abandoning my ordinariness, I left myself susceptible to ghosts. Waiting and sick of waiting, I called to them, a high voltage signal. From my radiobody, in search of belonging, I tried, actually, to conduct invisible anima. Wherever I went, an aimless, shaming hum accompanied me. I want to dig out the primal scene of my hum, but the word only leads me back to my name, the sound of my captivity, the only intimacy I had available to me.