The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

A secret fraternal order originating in medieval ritual, the Masons advocate charity and obedience. Eck was an active member among the Frenchman's Bend Masons, and Will Varner encouraged the Masons in Jefferson to find an appropriate job for Eck after his neck was broken. When Eck dies, they bury him, displaying their ritual "aprons" and "signs" at his funeral (117).

Cal Bookright is the father of Zack Houston's wife; at first, he opposed his daughter's marriage to Houston. (In the other texts where he appears, his name is spelled "Bookwright.")

This "strange Negro youth" (129) is sitting in the driver's seat of Wesley Pritchel's truck as the disguised Joel Flint prepares to sell the property and leave. "Strange" in this context almost certainly means 'not from Yoknapatawpa.' The youth has presumably been hired by Flint to drive the truck.

Mrs. Littlejohn owns a boarding house in Frenchman's Bend. Ratliff tells the story of her "coming onto the back gallery with an arm full of washing in one hand and the washboard in another" after the auction of the spotted horses and finding a horse on her porch: "she split the washboard down the center of its face and throwed the two pieces at it without even changing hands" (36). (This story is told at more length in the earlier story "Spotted Horses" and the first novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet.)

This entry represents the "half a dozen strangers not even kin to Snopeses by marriage" who are eating in the restaurant when Eck asks about what is really in the hamburgers he's cooking (34).

Wall Snopes (originally Wallstreet Panic) is a determined and ambitious son of his honest father, Eck: "Every morning Wall would get up before schooltime, as the days got shorter he would get up in the dark, to build a fire in the iron stove and sweep out the store and as soon as he got back after school in the afternoon he would be the delivery boy too, using a wheel barrow" (135). He believes in the value of an education, entering kindergarten as a pre-adolescent and making rapid progress through the grades.

In this novel Eck's wife is the mother of Wallstreet Panic and Admiral Dewey Snopes. When Eck dies, she receives a thousand dollars and invests the money in Wall's grocery store. (On the other hand, in the earlier novel The Hamlet, Eck marries a second wife after his first one dies, and Wallstreet and Ad have different mothers.)

This man, whom Gavin Stevens calls "one of the larger ones and of course the more imbecilic," joins Eck in attempting to set "a tremendous cypress log . . . onto the saw-carriage" (33). When the man slips and falls, Eck saves his life by holding up his own end of the log "until it occurred to someone" to get the Negro out from under it (33).

Neither of Eck's parents appear directly in The Town, but two of the novel's narrators - Ratliff and Gavin - do discuss his parentage. Based on their contempt for 'Snopeses,' they both feel strongly that since Eck is so good a person, genetically he is "not a Snopes" (32). Thus they invent this "titular father" for him: the imaginary man with whom Eck's mother had an affair (33).

The woman who gave birth to Eck is unnamed. When he introduces her into the story, Gavin Stevens asserts that she "must have, as the old bucolic poet said, cast a leglin girth herself before she married whatever Snopes was Eck's titular father" (33) - by which he is saying that Eck 'must' be illegitimate. The only basis for this, however, is Eck's honesty and decency combined with Gavin's own antipathy to all things Snopes: he and Ratliff see Eck as too good a human being to be genetically a Snopes.