Jackson           1-2       Mr.Summers          

• round-faced, jovial man 
• Has no children and wife is a scold
• Mr. Summers runs the lottery because he has a lot of time to do things for the village.
• He arrives in the square with the black box, followed by Mr. Graves, the postmaster.
• This black box isn’t the original box used for the lottery because the original was lost many years ago, even before the town elder, Old Man Warner, was born.
• Mr. Summers always suggests that they make a new box because the current one is shabby, but no one wants to fool around with tradition.
• Mr. Summers did, however, convince the villagers to replace the traditional wood chips with slips of paper.

Jackson    1-2        The lottery

• The villagers of a small town gather together in the square on June 27, a beautiful day, for the town lottery. 
• In other towns, the lottery takes longer, but there are only 300 people in this village, so the lottery takes only two hours.
• Village children, who have just finished school for the summer, run around collecting stones. They put the stones in their pockets and make a pile in the square.
• Men gather next, followed by the women. Parents call their children over, and families stand together.

Jackson       1-2         The Lottery

• Mr. Summers mixes up the slips of paper in the box.
• He and Mr. Graves made the papers the night before and then locked up the box at Mr. Summers’s coal company.
• Before the lottery can begin, they make a list of all the families and households in the village.
• Mr. Summers is sworn in. Some people remember that in the past there used to be a song and salute, but these have been lost.
• Tessie Hutchinson joins the crowd, flustered because she had forgotten that today was the day of the lottery.
• She joins her husband and children at the front of the crowd, and people joke about her late arrival.
• Mr. Summers asks whether anyone is absent, and the crowd responds that Dunbar isn’t there.
• Mr. Summers asks who will draw for Dunbar, and Mrs. Dunbar says she will because she doesn’t have a son who’s old enough to do it for her.
• Mr. Summers asks whether the Watson boy will draw, and he answers that he will. Mr. Summers then asks to make sure that Old Man Warner is there too.

Jackson    1-3        The Lottery

• Mr. Summers reminds everyone about the lottery’s rules: he’ll read names, and the family heads come up and draw a slip of paper.
• No one should look at the paper until everyone has drawn. He calls all the names, greeting each person as they come up to draw a paper.
• Mr. Adams tells Old Man Warner that people in the north village might stop the lottery, and Old Man Warner ridicules young people.
• He says that giving up the lottery could lead to a return to living in caves.
• Mrs. Adams says the lottery has already been given up in other villages, and Old Man Warner says that’s “nothing but trouble.”

Jackson    2-3       The Lottery

• Mr. Summers finishes calling names, and everyone opens his or her papers.
• Word quickly gets around that Bill Hutchinson has “got it.” Tessie argues that it wasn’t fair because Bill didn’t have enough time to select a paper.
• Mr. Summers asks whether there are any other households in the Hutchinson family, and Bill says no, because his married daughter draws with her husband’s family.
• Mr. Summers asks how many kids Bill has, and he answers that he has three.
• Tessie protests again that the lottery wasn’t fair.