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).
Ab Snopes’ two daughters are indistinguishable in The Hamlet, where they are simply described as "two hulking gals" who take no part in the intensive labor their mother and aunt engage in once they arrive at the de Spain sharecropper's cabin (15-16). In "Barn Burning," they are described as twins; one is named Net, the other, this one, is not named at all.
The one Snopes in this tale is the clerk in Varner's store in Frenchman's Bend, who tries to turn Cotton's murder of Houston into a source of profit for himself. Both the job and the behavior could point to Flem as the Snopes Faulkner has in mind, though the larger context of the Yoknapatawpha canon makes it more likely that this time the unscrupulous clerk is a cousin of Flem's named Launcelot by his mother but called Lump by the people of the Bend.
The "Mr Snopes" in Frenchman's Bend with whom Anse bargains for a new team of mules in As I Lay Dying is not given a first name (192). According to Armstid, he owns "three-four span[s]" of mules (184), which suggests he is a fairly prosperous farmer, perhaps even a landlord. According to Eustace Grimm, who "works Snopes' place," this farmer is the nephew of Flem Snopes (192) - if so, he is Flem's only nephew or niece in the fictions.
After referring to the "incoming Snopeses" as a group, the narrator of Flags in the Dust singles out one to individualize: "there was one, an invalid of some sort, who operated a second-hand peanut parcher" (167). A "parcher" is a pushcart for roasting and selling peanuts on the street. (This may be the fictions' first mention of Eck Snopes. In The Town; Eck works as a watchman who wears a neck brace and is liked by "all the boys" in Jefferson because "he kept a meal sack full of raw peanuts" that he would share with them by the "handful" (116).
Flem continues to climb the social ladder in this second volume of the Snopes trilogy. At the beginning he is already in Jefferson as the co-owner of a side-street restaurant; at the end he is the President of the Colonel Sartoris' bank and the owner of Major de Spain's ante-bellum mansion. He leaves the life of tenant farmer far behind: as in The Hamlet, however, he continues to "farm Snopeses" (32) - that's Ratliff's term for the way other members of the family follow Flem as he rises.
The title of this political fable of course is a borrowing from Abraham Lincoln's most famous speech. It is used here a bit ironically: it isn't "the people" who preserve democracy, but one inspired individual, V.K. Ratliff, who has battled Snopesism so often before. Snopesism here is represented by Clarence Snopes, who in true Snopes fashion "uses and betrays and makes capital of everything he ever touched" (138). Clarence had already appeared in Sanctuary.
Narrated by a child of Frenchman's Bend, this tale depicts the rural community's small farmers in both ironically mock-heroic and sincerely respectful terms. One enigmatic "Snopes" appears among them, as one of the narrator's 'us': "we was all there now, all that belonged to that church and used it to be born and marry and die from - us [the Griers] and the Armstids and Tulls, and Bookwright and Quick and Snopes" (41).
The central narrative arc of the first volume in the Snopes trilogy is organized around Flem Snopes' rise, from sharecropper's son in Frenchman's Bend toward business owner in Jefferson. Following in his wake are five more Snopeses: in order of their arrival in the Bend, I.O., Eck, Mink, Ike and Lump. They refer to each other as cousins, all children of different fathers who may have been brothers of Ab Snopes.
