Mink Snopes' Step-Mother

Mink says that "the lady that raised me" was "jest" the wife of his father, and "no kin a-tall" to Mink himself (110). "Because she was a Christian" - a phrase that is meant to convey her self-righteousness - she regularly took him to church services and prayer meetings (117). She "always failed" Mink as a surrogate mother, but the novel has some sympathy for her as a battered wife: "a gaunt harried slattern of a woman . . . always either with a black eye or holding a dirty rag to her bleeding" (117).