Mink Snopes' Father

The brief description of Mink's father in The Hamlet could make him seem sympathetic: he's a lifelong sharecropper who "moved from farm to farm, without himself having been more than fifteen or twenty miles away from any one of them" (261). The account of him that his son provides in The Mansion, however, leaves little room for sympathy: he's a "son of a bitch" (111) who constantly beat his second-wife, Mink's step-mother - and with whom Mink had to use violence to get even a "pittance" of the money he earned working with his family on "the implacable rented ground by months behind a plow" (318).