Clarence Snopes

Clarence Snopes is identified the "son of a restaurant-owner" in Yoknapatawpha (175). In Flags in the Dust his father is identified as I.O. Snopes, and the restaurant is owned by Flem Snopes, the patriarch of (to quote Sanctuary again) the "family which had been moving into Jefferson for the past twenty years" (175). Venal and corrupt, Clarence has become Yoknapatawpha's State Senator on the strength of that family's influence, "without recourse to a public polling." He has a "vast, puffy face without any mark of age or thought whatever" (173); on one of his apparently frequent trips to the bordellos of Memphis, however, he accidentally discovers Temple's whereabouts, and is cunning enough to figure out how to sell that information three times: to Horace, to Temple's father and to Popeye's Memphis lawyer - thus becoming the link between the Memphis and Jefferson parts of the novel's plot. Horace does pay him, but tries to keep Senator Snopes from getting any closer to the Benbow house than the front gate.