Yoknapatawpha County: the Snopes family tree

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You can visit Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi at John B. Padgett's "William Faulkner on the Web" site, hosted by "Ole Miss," the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Faulkner never went to college, but wrote his first breakthrough novel, Sanctuary, while he worked at a night job in a campus boiler room. He was also fired from his postmaster job for not assisting patrons; he spent the day reading their magazines in a back room.

The graves of most of these people can be found in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi USA. Their remarkable adventures and relationships are chronicled in William Faulkner's The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion.

One Snopes man acquired a reputation for scrupulous honesty, which convinced two lifelong observers of the Snopeses that he could not possibly be of genuine Snopes lineage.

The fascinated Snopes watchers were the town lawyer Gavin Stevens, and his friend, the traveling sewing machine salesman V.K. Ratliff, both bachelors, both lifelong hopelessly in love with Eula Varner (Snopes), and then, after her suicide, with her daughter Linda Snopes. The Yoknapatawpha chronicles describe so much time that eventually Ratliff also sells televisions.

The daughter of the richest man in the county, Eulah did not walk until she was about 14; a family servant carried her on his shoulders everywhere. It reminded Stevens, who had been educated at Harvard, of a "Living Theater" tableau of "The Rape of the Sabine Women."

After half a century, Linda told Stevens what "V.K." stood for; it had been a Ratliff family secret since 1777, passed down to every new generation's firstborn son, but he had revealed it to Eula, who had told her daughter.

Eula's daughter Linda fought on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War with her husband Barton Kohl, who died in Spain. She was deafened by an artillery explosion, and thereafter spoke with a duck-like voice.

Flem was the first Snopes to appear in Yoknapatawpha County, around 1900, no one knows from where. A rumor that he burned the barns of neighbors who annoyed him accompanied him. Throughout the 20th century, the "innumerable" Snopes cousins and children appeared out of nowhere, reproduced prodigiously, and displaced and extincted the original aristocrats of Yoknapatawpha County (who had displaced and extincted the original Indians). Note the Snopes family pattern of bigamy.

Flem was a remarkablly skilled horse seller, fooling and defrauding the same neighbors with new trick after new trick year after year. One meaty, healthy-looking stallion proved to be a skinny and sick nag only after the buyer discovered Flem had inflated the horse with air from a bicycle pump.

On his return from World War I Army service in France, Montgomery Ward Snopes, now wearing a beret and thin moustache, opened a photography studio, "Atelier Monty," in the county seat, Jefferson. Customers, all men, visited it by a side door up an alley at all hours of the night, until the sheriff raided it and Monty was forced to leave Yoknapatawpha.