Flem Snopes

The horse that Jewel owns is referred to as "one of them Snopes horses" (112). Later in the novel this label is explained when Eustace Grimm mentions "them Texas horses" that Flem Snopes originally owned (192-93). The larger story of Flem occupied Faulkner's imagination for over three decades, but in this novel he is only mentioned in connection with those horses. That story is also one to which Faulkner kept returning: he first tells how Flem brought them back to Frenchman's Bend from Texas and had them sold at auction in the unfinished "Father Abraham" manuscript that was his very first Yoknapatawpha fiction, he tells it again in the short story "Spotted Horses," published the year after this novel, and yet again in The Hamlet (1940), the first volume of the Snopes trilogy. (The "Mr. Snopes" with whom Anse bargains a trade for mules is one of Flem's many nephews.)