Ab Snopes

The oldest named member of the Snopes clan, and the father of Flem. He features prominently in earlier stories, but only appears three times in this novel. Montgomery Snopes includes "old Ab" on his short list of Snopeses (97). Ratliff notes that Will Varner had to "evict Ab Snopes from a [tenant farmer's] house he hadn't paid no rent on in two years" (137). Ab's biography comes to an ambiguous conclusion 30 pages later, when Ratliff tells us that, unlike his son Flem and so many other members of the clan, "old man Ab" never moved to Jefferson: he "had come no closer than that hill two miles out where you could jest barely see the [town's] water tank, where he taken the studs that day back about 1910 and hadn't moved since" (169). This probably refers to the episode in The Town that describes an irascible old Snopes who lives just outside Jefferson; in that earlier novel the man is identified as either Ab or his brother. That episode involves a watermelon patch - what this reference means by "the studs" is not at all clear. In any case, Ratliff's "since" suggests Ab is still alive at least in the late 1920s.