The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

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.

He advises another fireman who wants to borrow money from Flem Snopes, though he doesn't seem to understand how much the interest Flem has been charging him for "two years" is costing him (78).

This is the fireman at Quick's mill who is told by another to "go to Mr Snopes at the store" to borrow money (78). (This is the kind of 'fireman' who stokes a fire rather than puts one out.)

The child of a poor family in "the next county" (114), Labove works his way through the University of Mississippi doing menial jobs and playing football. At 21, Labove is hired to be the schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend; Will Varner lends him a horse so that he can continue to earn his degree in law at the university, while tending to the school during the weekdays.

Bookwright mentions his wife on one occasion, telling Ratliff that she had not spoken of "anybody's new sewing machine in almost a year" (76).

The man from "Massachusetts or Boston or Ohio" who buys land in Yoknapatawpha in order to start a goat ranch (87). As Ratliff says when explaining this to his friends: "You got to keep in mind he is a northerner. They does things different from us" (88).

Flem Snopes sells the machinery from the old blacksmith shop to "a junk man" (74). The text does not give a clear indication if this man is black or white.

I.O. calls himself "a single man, unfortunately" (225), but to the surprise of Frenchman's Bend, three years after he arrived in the hamlet he turns out to have a wife, a "big gray-colored woman" (292). When she appears with "a baby six months old" in a carriage, I.O. "takes one look at that buggy" and vanishes (293). Her character is not developed further in this novel. (In the next novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Town, it turns out that this is only one of I.O.'s wives - he is a bigamist.)

Eck marries a second wife six months after arriving in Frenchman's Bend. A "big, strong, tranquil-faced young woman" (220), she is from the family whom he meets while he and Flem are boarding at a farm outside of the village. Together Eck and his wife have three children, but they are only briefly alluded to in this novel.