Unnamed "Brassy-Haired" Woman

This woman in The Reivers one of Jefferson's more colorful residents, and not just because of her "brassy" (or orange-red) hair (25). Coming "from nowhere" and staying only "briefly," during the 1930s she transforms the "Snopes Hotel" into a place known to "the police" as "Little Chicago" (254). Presumably Lucius' reference to her as a "gentlewoman" is ironic (25): given Chicago's association in the popular mind at that time with the underworld, her boarding house must have been a fairly wild place.