10.19 - The Lottery Story

To begin, the story described the people gathering, staring with all the children waiting for their parents. The boys gathered smooth stones and played while the girls stood and talked. Then the men came, and shortly after, the women. When the families were all there, the parents called to their children, and they stood together, and waited for Mr. Summers to arrive with the lottery box. The story goes into great detail about the town's value of tradition, and the importance of the old black lottery box. When it is established that everyone is there, or at least someone representing each family, Mr. Summers began to say the last names of each family, and the person representing each family went up when called to select a piece of paper from the black box. While all this was going on, some of the people were talking about other towns that had given up the lottery, which the people thought was ridiculous. Once each family had a piece of paper, they unfolded them and found out who had one with a marking. A man named Bill Hutchinson was the one that ended up having the marked piece, but his wife wasn't happy, and argued that it wasn't fair, and that they should go again and take more time. Mr. Summers dismisses her protests and proceeds to ask Bill Hutchinson how many people are in his family. Then each member of the Hutchinson family draws a piece of paper, the two children, the baby, Mrs. Hutchinson and Bill. When they unfold their papers, we find that Mrs. Hutchinson has the marked piece. When the village learned she had it, they all went and collected the stones the boys had collected earlier, and stoned her, as she protested. One might assume this is a tradition to either keep down the population of the town, or as a human sacrifice of sorts for the towns prosperity.