Ratliff reports to Gavin in The Town that Will Varner had three biracial concubines, "the first Negroes in that section of the county and for a time the only ones he would permit there, by whom he now had grandchildren" (289).
When he becomes vice president of the bank in The Town, Flem employs this salesman in a Memphis furniture store to provide him with appropriate home furnishings.
Gavin counts on these friends who live in New York to help Linda during her move to Greenwich Village. Ratliff says, "Lawyer had it all arranged, friends he knowed in Harvard to meet the train at the depot and take care of her, get her settled and ever thing" (367).
The minister who leads Eula's memorial service in Jefferson in The Town is "the old Methodist minister who had christened her thirty-eight years ago" in Frenchman's Bend; he is described as "an old man who had been a preacher all his adult life but would have for the rest of it the warped back and the wrenched bitter hands of a dirt farmer" (360). He is mentioned again in The Mansion, where Ratliff calls him "the old Methodist preacher that had baptised Eula" (163).
Uncle Billy's Frenchman's Bend Masons are in charge of Eck Snopes' funeral in The Town. (The first American chapters of the social order known as Freemasonry were organized in Pennsylvania in the early 18th century. Many of the Founders of the Revolutionary era were Freemasons, which is why the U.S. dollar includes masonic symbolism. Not long after the Revolution ended there were 'lodges' in all the states, but I confess it's surprising to think that such a small and impoverished place as Frenchman's Bend had its own chapter.)
As Ratliff explains to Charles in The Town, during World War I Montgomery Ward Snopes ran brothels in France. He began in a little town with "a young French lady he happened to know" (120; since Charles is only five at the time, Ratliff resorts to evasive terms), then set up a bigger brothel in Paris, "adding more and more entertaining ladies to that-ere new canteen he set up in Paris" (121). The ladies themselves are not described in any more detail. (Prostitution was legal in France at this time, though it was illegal to run a brothel.)
In The Town this girl is discovered in an "empty cotton house" having sex with "schoolmaster" Snopes (43). (See also the Unnamed Eleven-Year-Old Girl who appears in The Mansion, and may be the same character.)
In The Town these poor people, who are housed by the county, know about Mr. Hait's death and have "heard that Mrs. Hait had got eight thousand dollars for him" (242).
