Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2017-09-14 13:21
Father of Eula Varner Snopes, but never really present as a character, Will Varner is nonetheless a major figure in the background of The Town. "Mr Will Varner . . . just about owned the whole settlement and district called Frenchman's Bend about twenty miles from Jefferson" (5). He lets his son Jody rent "a farm so poor and small and already wornout that only the most trifling farmer would undertake it" (5) to Ab Snopes - without realizing that he is also mortgaging a part of his life to Ab's son Flem.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2017-09-14 13:16
The first "Colonel Sartoris" to be mentioned in this novel is John, a leading figure in Yoknapatawpha County, and one of the major figures in the Yoknapatawpha fictions (5) - although with one exception (148) everywhere else in the novel "Colonel Sartoris" refers to John's son, Bayard II on the larger Sartoris family tree - though in the novel the name Bayard refers exclusively to Bayard III.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2017-09-14 13:13
Ab Snopes, Flem's father in a number of Yoknapatawpha fictions, is an elusive figure in The Town. In Chapter 1 Charles reports him as having been hanged during the Civil War as a horse thief - right before Ratliff tells Gavin Stevens that "about ten years ago Flem and an old man who seemed to be his father appeared suddenly from nowhere one day and rented a little farm from Mr Will Varner" (5).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2017-09-14 13:10
Part-owner of the backstreet restaurant Flem Snopes co-owns when he first comes to Jefferson, Grover Winbush eventually becomes the night watchman in Jefferson. His other nighttime activity is revealed when the Atelier Monty is raided. (In The Hamlet, as Ratliff's partner, he is named Aaron Rideout.)
The crowd at the "bleak" railroad station where Labove sees a white man shoot a black man "scatters" as the shooting occurs, then forms a "crowd" around the Negro so dense that Labove has to "use his football tactics" to move through it; some of them also "overpower and disarm" the white man (138).
The descendants of the slaves who once worked on the Old Frenchman's plantation are identified as "saxophone players in Harlem" (375). With this reference the narrative looks ahead both to the Great Migration in which thousands of southern blacks moved to northern cities (which was just beginning at the time the novel takes place) and to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.
When describing the graveyard at the Old Frenchman's place, the narrator refers to the slaves buried there as "the progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem honkytonks" (375). This reference re-frames the narrative in both time and space, relocating it briefly from Yoknapatawpha in the present (the 1890s) and the past (the antebellum era of slavery) to the New York City of the 1920s, by which time large numbers of southern blacks had moved to the urban North and when jazz was in vogue among both white and black audiences.
This icon represents the group whom Lump Snopes refers to as "a few of the boys" (258). They don't appear directly in the narrative, but Lump tells Mink his plan to take these young white men one night to the home of the Negro who found Mink's shotgun, and terrify him "with a couple of trace chains or maybe a little fire under his feet" in order to force him to admit, falsely, that he stole the gun (258).
