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Retold Stories, Untold Histories
 TheatreUntold
Retold Stories, Noise:Histories:
TheKingston
Maxine Hong Sound ofandPerformance
Leslie Marmon Silko
on the Politics of Imagining the Past

Edited by
By
Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner
Joanna Ziarkowska
 Retold Stories, Untold Histories:
Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko on the Politics of Imagining the Past,
by Joanna Ziarkowska

This book first published 2013

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2012 by Joanna Ziarkowska

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-4957-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4957-9

 Table of Contents v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter One
Interrupting Historical Silences: In Search
of a Language of Historical Articulations.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Chapter Two
History in Photographic Images: Between Passive Poses
and Creative Resistance.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Chapter Three
Mapping the Past: Maps, Citizenship and National
Boundaries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Chapter Four
History as ReMembered: Memory, Imagination and
Writing Histories.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

Chapter Five
History’s Genres: “How Do We Seize the Past?”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

Works Cited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
 Introduction 1

INTroductiON

“What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me?”
asks Jamaica Kincaid, an Antiguan-born writer. “Should I call it history?
If so, what should history mean to someone like me? . . . Is it a collection
of facts, all true and precise details, and if so, what should I do, how
should I feel, where should I place myself?” (620). Kincaid’s question,
relevant for all colonized and marginalized groups, addresses the issue of
the hegemony of historical representation, written from the perspective
of the dominant culture, which efficaciously erases and silences people
like Kincaid. Such history belongs to, reflects on and represents solely
its writers, thus rendering the Other(s) either invisible or insignificant in
the historical narrative.
Retold Stories, Untold Histories concentrates on demonstrating how
Kincaid’s question is addressed by Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie
Marmon Silko and why it is identified as one of the most critical themes
in their writings. The rationale behind juxtaposing two writers from
diverse cultural contexts originates in the fact that both Kingston and
Silko share the experience of historical and cultural marginalization
and, more importantly, devise similar methods of rendering it in creative
writing. Maxine Hong Kingston, second-generation Chinese American,
entered the literary scene in 1976 with the publication of the now
canonical The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts,
followed shortly by the thematically connected sequel China Men.
In 1989 Kingston published Tripmaster Monkey, which introduces the
lively character of Wittman Ah Sing, who reappears in her autobiographical
The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) and the recent I Love a Broad Margin
to My Life (2011). Leslie Marmon Silko, of the Laguna Pueblo, debuted
in 1978 with Ceremony, one of the most influential texts in the ethnic
canon. In her later works, Storyteller (1981), Almanac of the Dead
(1991), Gardens in the Dunes (2000) and most recently The Turquoise
Ledge (2010), she consistently focuses on Native American cultures and
their reformulations in the contemporary context. Writing from the per-
spective of two distinct marginalized groups, Kingston and Silko share
the view that the official version of national history may be seen as
a narrative of misrepresentation and the exclusion of people who either
greatly contributed to the building of the country or occupied the territory
of the present United States long before its creation. In their texts, both
2 Introduction

writers engage in a polemic against a history that, using its legitimizing

power as a scientific discipline, produces and perpetuates stereotypical
images of Chinese and Native Americans and, more importantly, eliminates
the two groups from the process of constructing the national narratives of
origins that monitor and control the borders of what constitutes American
identity. Despite apparent differences in cultural and historical contexts,
Kingston and Silko share an enthusiasm for employing unconventional
tools and sources for offering creative reconstructions of a past which
had been silenced or repressed. Therefore, it is possible to trace the nar-
rative strategies and discursive methodologies that the two writers employ
to introduce literary discourse as a possible site for reconstructing and
creating alternative versions of history, and through this creative act,
assert the presence of their cultures in the American past. This approach
to rewriting history, developed by Kingston and Silko, is present in the
literary texts of ethnic writers representing culturally diverse marginalized
groups, a fact which reflects its applicability emphasizing the connec-
tions and fluidity between the public discourse of official history and the
private stories distributed at a micro level within ethnic communities.

Misrepresented Histories and Histories

of Misrepresentation
The histories that Kingston and Silko question, challenge and rewrite
are often referred to as histories of absence due to their tendency of
focusing on the cultural mainstream and its perspective, systematically
silencing and erasing those occupying the cultural margins. The be-
ginnings of the Chinese presence in the U.S., a theme often taken up
by Kingston, is saturated by the image of an unwanted and unskilled
Chinese laborer, unable and unwilling to embrace American values. As
Huping Ling observes, the first historical analyses, exemplified by L. T.
Townsend’s The Chinese Problem (1876; the title best illustrates the author’s
approach to the topic) and S. L. Baldwin’s Must the Chinese Go? (1890),
lacked methodological sophistication; their content was often brief and
descriptive, and inevitably ideologically biased (460). The first more
insightful scholarly work, Mary Coolidge’s Chinese Immigration (1906),
was based on the analysis of local newspapers and public records, and
demonstrated how the author approached her subjects as participants in,
and creators of, culture rather than “coolie” workers devoid of cultural
and historical backgrounds. Coolidge’s work, however, was not represen-
tative of scholarship on Chinese immigrants of the time which, with its
overemphasis on the immigration experience, immigration policy and the
 Introduction 3

anti-Chinese sentiments of the general public, offered a one-dimensional

picture of the group.
The 1960s and the development of the Civil Rights movement
brought an important change in the approach adopted in the writings
about the Chinese. Works from that time tend to look at the Chinese in
a wider context and combine history with sociology, include the voices
of the “common people,” and for the first time, introduce a feminist
perspective to the study: Some examples include S. W. Kung’s Chinese
in American Life, Some Aspects of Their History, Status, Problems and
Contributions (1962), Gunther Barth’s Bitter Strength: A History of the
Chinese in the United States 1850–1870 (1964), and Stanford Lyman’s
Chinese Americans (1974).
On the other hand, the 1960s witnessed the emergence of another ste-
reotypical term to describe Asian Americans, namely “model minority.” In
January 1966, William Peterson published an article on Japanese Americans’
successful struggle to enter the American mainstream in the New York Times
(20–21). The same year, a December issue of U.S. News & World Report
featured Chinese Americans as another example of a “Success Story.”
According to Keith Osajima, the year 1966 marked the birth of the image
of Asian Americans as a “model minority” (449–58) which, apart from
being another stereotypical label, served an important ideological goal.
In 1966, at the peak of the Civil Rights movement, the protests of Afro-
American communities were becoming not only more and more conspicu-
ous but also openly militant. The characterization of Asian Americans as a
model minority served the goal of contrasting them with Afro-Americans,
who were described as everything but industrious, docile, well-mannered,
hard-working and self-disciplined. Asian Americans were praised for “not
complaining about or protesting against difficulties”; moreover, they dealt
with their problems themselves instead of “burdening Americans with their
needs by seeking government aid and welfare assistance” (Kim 177).
The 1980s continued the changes initiated during the Civil Rights era
and further explored the themes of the Chinese American population and
its history, which had been either marginalized or completely ignored.
Scholars began to see the Chinese American past in connection with
social, economic and political conditions and to recognize its intercon-
nectedness and influence on the shape of history. Similarly, some scholars
began to concentrate specifically on countering Asian women’s exclusion
from historical analysis. Notable examples include Chinese in America,
Stereotyped Past, Changing Present, edited by Loren W. Fessler (1983),
Judy Yung’s Chinese Women of America, A Pictorial History (1986); and
Stacey Guat-Hong Yap’s Gather Your Strength Sisters: The Emerging
Role of Chinese Women Community Workers (1989).
4 Introduction

Unquestionably, the 1980s and 1990s brought an increase in perspectives

in the study of Chinese Americans, and issues such as the anti-Chinese
movement, Exclusion Acts and immigration experience ceased to be the sole
focus of scholarly exploration of the subject of Chinese American history.
As Reed Ueda points out, there are numerous aspects of Asian American
history—historical demography, social structures of the Asian American
population, the role and structure of the family, social psychology as well
as political culture—that, for many years, remained terra incognita and
are being explored only now (119–22). The rise in scholarly studies on
Asian American history and diversity is by all means a positive change
yet, as scholars and historians observe, it is not sufficient to erase the
pervading image of a “coolie” worker from the general consciousness. Gary
Okihiro notes that in 1992, still, the books that “fill[ed] most of the shelf
space of Asian American collections” were those devoted to anti-Chinese
and anti-Japanese movements, as if only this subject was the essence
of the Asian presence in America. Sucheng Chan, in the introduction
to her Asian Americans: An Interpretative History, acknowledges that a
“good work of synthesis can be produced only when there is a sufficient
number of sound monographs to serve as its foundation” (xiii). Due to
the strong anti-Asian bias in the older works and the uneven quality of
current scholarship, Chan admits that perhaps it is too early to attempt
such an endeavor. However, as college and university students across the
country express their interest in “a more ethnically diverse curriculum”
(xiii), there is a compelling need for such a succinct history.
The process of constructing more culturally sensitive Chinese American
histories also exposed the problem of the selection and availability of
sources. In his criticism of Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different
Shore (1989), L. Ling-chi Wang draws attention to the fact that Takaki
insufficiently “acknowledged tribute to researchers who have labored
in the trenches in the past two decades of Asian American studies” (89,
emphasis in the original). The choice of words is not coincidental here and
illustrates the difficulty and laboriousness of the work done by scholars
in looking for the presence of Asian immigrants in documents, archives
and personal collections, often neglected and deemed unimportant. The
recovery of the Angel Island poems illustrates the tedious character of
examining such a record and “the near possibility of [its] disappearance
without further trace” (C. Wong 10). In 1970 on Angel Island, park ranger
Alexander Weiss noticed characters inscribed on the walls inside the wood
barracks where Chinese immigrants used to be held. Concluding that the
characters must have been left by the immigrants awaiting entry to the
U.S. or deportation, he informed his superiors who, however, were not
interested in his discovery. Believing in the importance of the discovery,
 Introduction 5

Weiss contacted Dr. George Araki from San Francisco State University,
who, together with photographer Mark Takahashi, examined and pho-
tographed the barrack walls. The writing discovered by Weiss turned
out to be poetry written by the Chinese; poetry whose content greatly
illuminates the picture of the Chinese immigrants (Lai and Yung 9–10).
Another example demonstrates the need to redefine historical methodolo-
gies and the obvious benefits. Judy Yung, author of two books on Chinese
American oral history, admits that in the process of looking for answers
to questions concerning her identity, history textbooks failed completely
(4). Yung was looking for the history of her ancestors in America and her
special interest in Chinese women only made the task more difficult and
arduous. Under such circumstances, while the voice of Chinese immigrants
seems to have faltered when clashing with the mainstream construction
of the past, oral history offers countless possibilities. “Oral histories,”
writes Yung, “despite the drawbacks of faulty or selective memory and
retrospective interpretations, added life and credence” to the study of
Chinese Americans, allowing them to tell their own story from the bottom
up (4). Yung’s 1999 book, Unbound Voice, which attempts to integrate
Chinese American women’s history into the mainstream, uses oral history
as its primary source of information. One of the main benefits of oral
history is that it “allows ordinary folks . . . [to] speak for themselves, fill
in historiographical gaps, and challenge stereotypes, as well as validate
their lives” (511). Yung believes that conventional sources alone, “devoid
of human voices and stories, would be equally incomplete, a skeleton
without any flesh,” and thus the best approach to reconstructing history
is one that combines the study of historical documents and oral
history (512). Yung’s book demonstrates how much can be gained from
a combination of conventional and alternative sources, especially in the
reconstruction of the past from the point of view of a particular group.
In early historiography on Native Americans, invisibility and misrep-
resentation emerged as the two major patterns of historical representation.
The defining historical narrative was usually constructed as “the mythic
tale of progress” (D. Morrison 11) in which the demise of the Indian
population was a dire yet inevitable consequence of the forces of his-
tory at work. Native Americans, if mentioned at all, were presented as
primitive, often appealing in their exoticity, and yet doomed to extinction
due to their moral, social, religious and political inferiority. Thus, their
gradual elimination was not only justified but also natural. When, in 1893,
Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous lecture, “The Significance
of the Frontier in American History,” the Native population was cast in
the role of the “vanishing race,” an image used and reproduced countless
times in years to follow.
6 Introduction

On the other hand, if Native Americans were included in the histori-

cal discourse of the nation, their representations were products of white
fantasies rather than the findings of historical studies. As Michael Dorris,
a Medoc writer, puts it, “for five hundred years Indian people have been
measured and have competed against a fantasy over which they have had
no control. They are compared with beings who never really were, yet
the stereotype is taken for truth” (Dorris 100, emphasis in the original).
Dane Morrison adds that “our histories have painted a picture of the first
Americans that reflects a distorted impression of our own culture, tracing
our own ambivalences and anxieties about carving ‘civilization’ out of
the wilderness” (7).
As in the case of Chinese American history, a noticeable shift in the
approach to history writing took place in the 1960s with the emergence of
the Civil Rights movement, which directed public attention to social and
political issues raised by minority groups. According to Ellen Fitzpatrick,
however, the change in perspective dates back to even earlier times, namely
the 1920s and 1930s. Fitzpatrick links this shift with the effects of World
War I and the overpowering sense of pessimism and insecurity that ensued.
In consequence, “[m]any scholars,” Fitzpatrick claims, “challenged the
fundamental leitmotif advanced by students of the American past who
equated historical change with progress and advance of liberal democracy.
They pointed instead to a darker, more sobering view of the trajectory
of American history” (101). This shift was most noticeable in historical
writing on Native Americans during the interwar years. The works that
appeared at that time nurtured the ambition to reveal the “Indian side”
of the frontier story. Some of the examples mentioned by Fitzpatrick
include William MacLeod’s The American Indian Frontier (1928), Verner
Crane’s The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (1929), Chapman Milling’s
Red Carolinians (1940), Loring Priest’s Uncle Sam’s Stepchildren: The
Reformation of United States Indian Policy, 1865–1887 (1942) and the
groundbreaking work of Angie Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw
Republic (1934). The insistence on depicting Native Americans as victims
of history, however, while demonstrating a significant shift in the adopted
historical perspective, did not develop a historical analysis that would
escape the trap of producing another stereotypical and one-dimensional
representation.
The Civil Rights movement and the changes that it introduced into
the way of perceiving American society prompted another generation of
historians to include the experience of people who had previously been
excluded, “incorporate the insights of other disciplines” and examine
“fresh types of sources” (D. Morrison 15). In Native American studies,
this new idea of pluralism in historical studies, christened the New Indian
 Introduction 7

History by Robert F. Berkhofer, aimed “to see beyond traditional white

prejudices and scholarly specialties so as to portray native peoples in their
own right, acting for their own reasons in light of their own cultural norms
and values” (“Cultural” 36). Some of the historians who have written in
the spirit of the New Indian History are Francis Jennings, James Axtell,
R. David Edmunds, Frederick E. Hoxie and Richard White, to mention
just a few.
Parallel to the emergence of the New History School was the intro-
duction of ethnohistory into the domain of academic disciplines. James
Axtell, one of the leading practitioners of ethnohistory, recalls that in the
1960s, when he was entering the academic profession, very few people
dealt with the history of Native Americans. Those who did write about the
indigenous people were mostly anthropologists, who relied on methodol-
ogy known as ethnohistory, a combination of anthropology and history.
The applicability of ethnohistory in the study of Native Americans soon
proved fruitful and efficient, and publishing opportunities offered by
journals such as Ethnohistory, the journal of the American Society for
Ethnohistory, and William and Mary Quarterly, have contributed to the
field’s development (Porter, “Imagining” 350).
One of the reasons why ethnohistory became an attractive model
for approaching Native American histories is that it takes as “its most
proper subject culture as opposed to society,” and tries to perceive cul-
tures as a “whole” with “all of their social parts and sub-codes” which
“interact functionally and symbiotically to produce a single cultural
organism” (Axtell 13). Such an approach to historical research allows
us to seek answers not only in traditionally used “reliable written docu-
ments” but also in anthropology, archeology, sociology, religion, art and
other academic fields. Furthermore, the presentation of tribes as agents
of historical change rather than as passive subjects swept away by the
“winds” of history helps avoid casting Indians in the subordinate role of
victims, like for example in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Century of Dishonor
(1881) or more recently in Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded
Knee (1970).
However attractive, the ethnohistoric approach did not solve all the
problems stemming from unanswered questions about the methodology
of historical writing. A case in point is the much-valued The Middle
Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region,
1650–1815 (1991) by Richard White. His widely acclaimed book, which
examines Winnebagos, Wyandots, Seneca-Cayugas, Shawnees, Delawares
and other tribes inhabiting the region, is seen as illustrating a shift in the
study of Native American history (D. Morrison 10). However, while for
some the book is a groundbreaking work, for others it is an offending
8 Introduction

example of how Indian history should not be written.1 For instance, Susan
A. Miller (Tiger Clan/Seminole) claims that White, writing about tribes
whose descendants are alive today, “ignores the people whose history
he is examining.” This approach to the writing of history resembles the
familiar pattern of extraction of Native resources such as timber and
minerals by outside interests that give back nothing to the Native com-
munity and move on when the easy profits play out” (101). The example
shows that even ethnohistorical works written by scholars dedicated to
a more truthful presentation of Indian history do not solve the problem
of devising a formula for writing about the Native American past that
would be satisfactory for Indian and non-Indian historians as well as
descendants of the examined tribes.
Indeed, the debate over the shape of Native American history remains
a fierce and heated one. Apart from a recurring postulation that American
Indian history should “include Indians’ versions of events” (Mihesuah,
Introduction 1) questions that have to be addressed are “Who is doing
the writing? Why? And what do the subjects have to say about this?”
(Wilson, “American” 23). Angela Cavender Wilson (Wahpatonwan Dakota)
asserts that the field of Indian history is dominated by white, male histo-
rians who rarely care what the Indians have to say about their work. The
most common product of such an approach is a non-Native perception
of American Indian history rather than a true grasp of the Indian past.
To achieve this, Wilson claims, it is not enough to put the Indians at the
center of history; it is also necessary and ethically required to consult tribal
and family historians (24). Writing Indian history inevitably engages the
difficult issue of ethics. Non-Native historians are repeatedly criticized
for instrumentality in their approach to tribal people and their culture,
as well as an evident failure to consult Native Americans on their interpre-
tations of history, not to mention the permission to use cultural materials.
The project of producing Native American history written from and
sensitive to Indian cultures also calls for a redefinition of historical meth-
odology, which has traditionally privileged the immersion in empirical
data whose findings are expressed in a progressive narration. However,
concepts such as chronology, linear progress and written documentation are
alien and irrelevant to many Native cultures. As Vine Deloria explains in

1 For The Middle Ground, White was awarded the following awards: the Francis
Parkman Prize for best book on American history (1992); the Albert J. Bev-
eridge Award for the best English-language book on American history (1992);
the Albert B. Corey Prize for the best book on U.S.-Canadian history (1992);
the James A. Rawley Prize for a book on the history of race relations in the
United States (1992).
 Introduction 9

God Is Red, “the idea of keeping a careful chronological record of events

never seemed to impress the greater number of tribes of the continent”
(98). Some of the tribes devised a method of winter counts or calendar
sticks which indicated important events in a community’s life. However,
the ultimate goal of such practices was by no means an attempt at an
accurate record of past events (99). The preoccupation or, some might
say, obsession with chronology and progress is an exclusively Western
idea, the origin of which Deloria links with Christianity and its emphasis
on a need to record the experiences of humankind. In tribal religions, on
the other hand, important events such as the appearance of various folk
heroes who brought sacred ceremonies “did not depend on history for
their verification” (103). What was of great importance was the appear-
ance of the hero and its consequences for the community rather than its
location in time. If there is a point of reference in tribal stories, it is a
geographical location rather than a date (Howe 164).
A source most appropriate for reconstructing Native histories, oral
tradition, also used in Chinese American historiography, is at the same
time one of the most distrusted methodological tools. An often cited argu-
ment against the incorporation of oral history into the study of “history
proper,” as many would call it, is its unreliability and temporal nature.
This view remains valid only if one refuses to reject Western privileging
of the written word over the spoken one. As Peter Nabokov explains,
“memorized history . . . can preserve intimacy and locality over astonish-
ing time depths. . . . It is called into being during and for interpersonal
situations. It nurtures the family and community and cosmic continuities
of which it speaks” (144). Although oral history is radically different
from Western history and difficult to incorporate into a historical mode
of writing, it must be included in American Indian history in order to
“truly gain a grasp of the field” (Wilson, “Power” 101) and be considered
reliable and representative by the Native population that is an integral
part of it. Contrary to popular opinions, tribal stories which build up
Native American oral history are not merely entertaining tales, or amus-
ing pieces of fiction, but central components of tribal history, culture and
identity. Moreover, even if they include details of past events which are
necessary for a traditional reconstruction of history, dates are the least
important, as the essence of the stories is that they are “transmissions of
culture upon which our [Indian] survival as a people depends” (Wilson,
“Power” 111). Angela Caveneder Wilson explains that

the historical and mythical stories provide moral guidelines by which

one should live. They reach the young and remind the old what behavior
is appropriate and inappropriate in our cultures; they provide a sense of
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
cesseront de causer des catastrophes, mais elles deviendront un
bienfait pour la terre.
Tout mon plan est tracé dans ma tête. Avec lui j’acquerrai la
possession totale des taches solaires. J’ai aussi en mon pouvoir la
méthode qui me permettra de les employer au point de vue
commercial ; mais je ne veux pas dévoiler mon secret avant d’avoir
pris tous les brevets. J’espère pouvoir vendre mes droits à
relativement bon compte aux pays de médiocre importance : je
réserverai pour les États de premier ordre les climats les mieux
organisés et facilement adaptables aux grandes circonstances de la
vie, telles que les couronnements, batailles, et autres événements
importants.
Il y a des milliards à gagner dans cette entreprise, aucune mise
de fonds n’étant nécessaire. Je commencerai à réaliser mes
bénéfices au bout de quelques jours ou quelques semaines au plus.
Et ainsi je serai en mesure de payer comptant l’achat de la Sibérie et
de relever mon honneur et mon crédit. Je suis parfaitement sûr du
succès de mon œuvre. Aussi désirerais-je vous voir bien et
chaudement équipé pour une expédition vers le Nord, prêt à partir
au reçu de la dépêche que je vous adresserai à n’importe quelle
heure du jour ou de la nuit. Vous prendrez alors possession de tout
le pays environnant le Pôle Nord et vous achèterez, tandis qu’ils
sont encore à bon marché, le Groenland et l’Islande. Mon intention
est d’y transporter les Tropiques et de convertir la zone équatoriale
en forme de glaces. Il faut que toute la région arctique soit à vendre
sur le marché l’été prochain, et que nous utilisions les anciens
climats pour tempérer les nouveaux. Mais je vous en ai dit assez
pour vous donner un aperçu de mon plan grandiose et de son
caractère pratique. Je vous rejoindrai en Angleterre, vous autres
heureuses gens, dès que j’aurai vendu quelques-uns de mes climats
et que j’aurai conclu avec le Czar l’achat de la Sibérie.
En attendant, soyez sur le qui-vive.
Dans huit jours nous serons séparés par de grands espaces. Moi
sur la côte du Pacifique, tandis que vous devinerez à l’horizon les
côtes d’Angleterre. Ce jour-là, si je suis encore en vie et si ma
découverte sublime a porté ses fruits, je vous en ferai part en pleine
mer au moyen d’une tache solaire qui vous couvrira de son ombre ;
lorsque vous verrez ce léger nuage, vous reconnaîtrez en lui un
messager de mon affection et vous direz en chœur : « Voilà Mulberry
Sellers qui nous envoie un baiser à travers les espaces. »

FIN
 ACHEVÉ D’IMPRIMER
le vingt mars mil neuf cent six
PAR
Ch. COLIN
A MAYENNE
pour le
MERCVRE
DE
FRANCE
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LE
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