Mink Snopes

To create the character of Mink Snopes, Faulkner renames the man he had called Ernest Cotton in the earlier short story, "The Hound" (1931). The son of a Mississippi sharecropper, Mink, who has a "sombre violent face" (367), possesses the "same eyes" as his cousin Flem and is "slightly less than medium height also but thin, with a single line of heavy eyebrow" (81). He meets the woman he marries when he takes a job in a "south Mississippi convict camp" (244). Back in Frenchman's Bend they have two children while working as tenant farmers. His fate is decided when (in a re-telling of the events of "The Hound") he kills a local landowner and is arrested. While awaiting trial Mink devoutly believes that Flem will somehow save him from prison; the rage that follows his disillusionment will become a major element in The Mansion, the final volume of the Snopes trilogy.