This short story provides the closest look at the nuclear family to which Flem Snopes belongs. It is narrated from the perspective of an adolescent who bears the oxymoronic name "Colonel Sartoris Snopes." He is deeply torn between his visceral hunger to belong to the family, and his instinctive knowledge that the behavior of his father Ab, a "barn burner" and domestic abuser, is horribly wrong. Through Sarty's eyes, Ab appears as both a villain and the victim of an economic system - tenant farming - that he can never overcome.
Faulkner revised some of the stories Bayard narrates a lot when he collected them into the book The Unvanquished, but he made no changes in the passages dealing with Ab or the woman who briefly appears at the door of his cabin, and who is presumably his wife.
The ultimate vendetta here is against a man named Grumby, but in their pursuit of him as Granny's killer, a Sartoris, a Strother and a McCaslin also train their sights on Ab Snopes. Grumby is an amoral monster, but even he despises Ab Snopes. In terms of Southern shibboleths, the scene where Ringo (a black slave) whips Ab (a white man) while two other respectable white males (and the reader) cheer him on is one of the most radical in Faulkner's fiction, but in context it is less a threat to the social order than a way to establish just how far beneath contempt Ab is.
From the first - the unfinished "Father Abraham" manuscript - Faulkner's imagination linked Snopeses with Sartorises as the yin and yang, the new and the old, the evil and the good of Southern culture. In the work of the 1920s the connection is through the bank that Bayard founds and that Flem covets. When in the mid-1930s his imagination turned back to the Sartorises in the series of Civil War stories Bayard narrates, it wasn't long before it also brought a Snopes into the picture.
I.O - the only member of the Snopes family in this story - appears almost as often as Flem in Faulkner's first ten Yokanatawpha fictions (Flem is in five, I.O. in four). Flem's character is well-defined from the start, but both I.O.'s character and his biography are full of inconsistencies. Flags in the Dust mentions that Flem brings him into Jefferson to run the restaurant; his face is described as "talkative" (235).
"It was those letters," Narcissa tells Virginia Du Pre to explain her trip to Memphis; "don't you remember?" (739). That is, the "anonymous love letters" that she received in Flags in the Dust. In this story she adds that after "that book-keeper in Colonel Sartoris' bank stole that money and ran away," she realized who wrote them.
Along with the contemporaneous "Centaur in Brass," this is one of the few stories which show Flem explicitly conning other people - though interestingly the question "how do I know it's Flem?" is asked three times by one of his victims, and for a manipulator of Flem's fabulous reputation, the con by which he hoodwinks those victims is surprisingly trite.
In this story Flem is in the middle of his journey from cabin to mansion, having become the superintendent of Jefferson's power plant by essentially pimping out his (unnamed) wife to the town mayor. The narrative allows readers to see firsthand what it calls "Flem Snopes's methods" as he schemes to manipulate the plant's two black employees into helping him embezzle city property (151). The "monument of brass" that results from his scheme can be contrasted, ironically, with the marble statues to the culture's genuine heroes (149).
If Faulkner had finished his first Yoknapatawpha fiction, "Father Abraham," the story of the spotted horses would have been his readers first introduction to the "tribe" of Snopeses. About three years after putting that manuscript aside, he revised part of it into this short story. Here he uses a first-person narrator whose vernacular voice identifies him as a countryman from the same rural world as the Snopeses to describe how Flem fleeces the men of Frenchmen's Bend - among whom are his cousins Eck and I.O. - by selling them horses that they will never be able to ride.
Snopesism here becomes a source of humor, a kind of counterpoint to the novel's grim main narrative. Temple's ordeal in the Memphis whorehouse is juxtaposed to the rural innocence of Virgil Snopes, who thinks the madam is the landlady of a boarding house and all the girls her daughters. The corrupt trial that ends in the lynching of an innocent man is Clarence Snopes' opportunity to try to make a few dollars.
