Invalid Snopes

After referring to the "incoming Snopeses" as a group, the narrator of Flags in the Dust singles out one to individualize: "there was one, an invalid of some sort, who operated a second-hand peanut parcher" (167). A "parcher" is a pushcart for roasting and selling peanuts on the street. (This may be the fictions' first mention of Eck Snopes. In The Town; Eck works as a watchman who wears a neck brace and is liked by "all the boys" in Jefferson because "he kept a meal sack full of raw peanuts" that he would share with them by the "handful" (116). Almost three decades separate these novels and the peanuts in the parcher from the raw peanuts in Eck's sack, but this might be an example of how Faulkner's imagination kept his cast of characters alive over the course of his career.)