The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

A small time farmer in "the next county" to Yoknapatawpha (114) who sees no point in his son going to a university to become a teacher. He is "annoyed, concerned, even a little outraged that he should have deserted them with the remaining work on the crop - the picking and ginning of the cotton, the gathering and cribbing of the corn - to be done" (117).

Labove's sister, one of his five younger siblings, is "about ten" years old; like everyone in the family, she likes to wear the football cleats he brings home (114).

Labove's "incredibly old" great-grandmother smokes "a foul little clay pipe" and likes wearing the football cleats he sends home because of the sound they make (114).

The "old man" who runs the Frenchman's Bend school before Labove is referred to only as "the Professor" (113). "Bibulous by nature," as an educator he has no control over the classroom and gets no respect from the students (113).

Although the narrator calls the Varner's cook the "only" servant of any sort in the whole district" (11), the Varner's also have at least one manservant named Sam. Among his jobs is carrying Eula "until she was five or six": "the negro man staggering slightly beneath his long, dangling, already indisputably female burden" (106). (At least one manservant, because the novel also refers to the Varner "family's negro retainers"; they are not otherwise described, but they are presumably also male because they can be seen walking on the local roads wearing Jody Varner's old clothes, 8.)

One of Ben Quick's grandchildren is mentioned, although not identified as a boy or a girl. Ben has a son named Isham, but whether he is the father of this child is also not said.

Isaac "Ike" Snopes is the cognitively limited cousin of Flem and Mink. At 14, he is a "hulking figure" in "bursting overalls" (94) who works around Mrs. Littlejohn's hotel as a kind of janitor. With Flem as his official guardian, Ike is referred to as an "idiot" and "creature" with a "mowing and bobbing head" and a "Gorgon-face" that "had been blasted empty and clean forever of any thought, the slobbering mouth in its mist of soft gold hair" (95).

Mink and his wife have two children, which are initially described as "towheaded" (81) and hide behind their mother's "skirts as if they were deaf or as if they lived in another world" (82). They were conceived two years apart, in the first five years of their parents' marriage (264).

"Miz" Mink Snopes has "pale hard eyes" and is a "big-boned hard-faced woman with incredible yellow hair" (81). She moves with a "speed and co-ordination which her size belied" (81). In The Hamlet, Faulkner eventually provides greater context for these qualities. She is the daughter of the owner of a logging camp and lost her mother at birth, growing up with her father and his quadroon mistress among laboring convicts.

To create the character of Mink Snopes, Faulkner renames the man he had called Ernest Cotton in the earlier short story, "The Hound" (1931). The son of a Mississippi sharecropper, Mink, who has a "sombre violent face" (367), possesses the "same eyes" as his cousin Flem and is "slightly less than medium height also but thin, with a single line of heavy eyebrow" (81). He meets the woman he marries when he takes a job in a "south Mississippi convict camp" (244). Back in Frenchman's Bend they have two children while working as tenant farmers.