The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Cliff Odum helps Mrs. Snopes get the milk separator in Jefferson.

Doctor Peabody is the local doctor, a recurring figure in the Yoknapatawpha novels and stories. In this novel, Ab sends Ratliff to him to purchase "a bottle of whiskey" (44). (Because Mississippi was a 'dry' state until 1966, doctors - who were allowed to prescribe alcohol for medicinal purporses and so often kept a supply on hand - were sometimes used as a source for it.)

A small business owner from whom Ab buys a milk separator for his wife. (In the original version of this event, "Fool about a Horse" [1936], the man who owns the store is Ike McCaslin.)

These people watch Ab struggle with his mules behind McCaslin's hardware store (42-43).

Short is mentioned in the tale Ratliff tells about Ab Snopes' misadventures in horse-trading; he was an earlier owner of the horse that Ab is a fool for.

These men are sitting on the store porch when Ab and Ratliff drive by; they may have been the ones who told Ab that "Pat Stamper was in Jefferson that day" (38).

One of the men hanging out on the gallery in front of the Whiteleaf store.

Beasley Kemp gave Herman Short eight dollars for a horse that had earlier belonged to Pat Stamper. Ab then traded farm implements, some of them not his, to acquire the horse from Beasley. The introduction of cash into the swap, according to Ratliff, violates the principles of Yoknapatawpha horse-trading: "for a stranger to come in and start that cash money to changing and jumping from one fellow to another, it's like when a burglar breaks into your house and flings your things ever which way even if he dont take nothing. It makes you twice as mad" (39).

The father of Vynie Snopes has never approved of her marriage to Ab Snopes. According to Ratliff, one day he "druv up in a wagon and loaded her and the furniture into it and told Ab" if he ever came back into Vynie's life, "he would shoot him" (33-34).

Ab's first wife, named Vynie, was originally the wife - also named Vynie - of a poor white farmer called "Pap" in the short story "Fool about a Horse." The Vynie in The Hamlet is originally from Jefferson. After suffering Ab's foolishness as long as she can, she returns to her father, who threatens to kill Ab if he ever comes back for her. There were no children in this marriage.