Mink Snopes's Wife

"Miz" Mink Snopes has "pale hard eyes" and is a "big-boned hard-faced woman with incredible yellow hair" (81). She moves with a "speed and co-ordination which her size belied" (81). In The Hamlet, Faulkner eventually provides greater context for these qualities. She is the daughter of the owner of a logging camp and lost her mother at birth, growing up with her father and his quadroon mistress among laboring convicts. In her youth, she had "a splendid heavy mane" of "black hair" before cutting it "man-short with razors" in order to avoid getting lice from the laborers with whom she has sex promiscuously. Mink attributes 'masculine' self-reliant qualities to her, moreover. When he first arrives at the logging camp, she looks at him "not speculatively, but intently and boldly, as a bold and successful man would." According to Mink, she was "not a nympholept but the confident lord of a harem" (262), her room being the "fierce simple cave of a lioness" (263). With the collapse of her father's business five months after Mink arrives, the two marry and return to Mink's native country to share crop and produce two children within the first five years of marriage. She grows her hair out again and dyes it (265). Mink is never sure if the children are his - and with his arrest, it is speculated that she returns to selling herself to the men at the Savoy Hotel (289).