Musicians play at the Grotto club at two different points in Sanctuary. A second "orchestra," "from a downtown hotel," is hired to provide music at Red's funeral. A dispute arises about what kind of music they should play. "The leader" proposes "the Blue Danube" by "Strauss" (a detail which suggests these musicians are white, 244), another man proposes "jazz." But at the suggestion of the proprietor of the Grotto they first play "Nearer My God, To Thee," and then the "cornetist" plays a solo version of "In That Haven of Rest" (245).
When Temple arrives at the Grotto, she sees four men "sitting at a table near the door" (234). Two soon leave, but the other two are described with a few details. One is chewing gum with "teeth of an unbelievable whiteness and size" (234). The other has "his coat buttoned across his chest" (235). The two who remain forcibly carry Temple away from the club. All four seem to be cronies of Popeye, working with him to arrange Red's murder.
Musicians play at the Grotto club at two different points in Sanctuary. The first time, this regular club "orchestra" provides the soundtrack to the scene in which Popeye and Red compete fatally for Temple. The dance music they play "swirls slowly about her in a bright myriad wave" (238). But the narrative never describes either the musicians or the music more particularly; given the history of music in Memphis, they may be black.
Waiters appear in both scenes set in the Grotto club. In Chapter 25, describing the funeral for Red, they are clearly identified as "negro waiters, in black shirts beneath starched jackets." In the previous chapter, however, the narrative describes the two waiters who place drinks in front of Temple and Popeye in more racially ambiguous terms: seen from Temple's perspective they appear as "a brown [hand] in a white sleeve, a soiled white one beneath a dirty cuff" (235). Also in Chapter 24, "a waiter" shows Temple to a private room, where Red joins her (238).
This icon represents the various dancers and gamblers "at the crap table" (237) who are at the Grotto club the night Popeye takes Temple there. The dancers are summed up in the phrase about the "movement of feet, the voluptuous hysteria of muscles warming the scent of flesh, of the blood" (233).
While Temple is in the "washroom" of the Grotto club she and another woman "examine one another's clothes with brief, covert, cold, embracing glances" (233).
The second husband of Popeye's maternal grandmother appears in and disappears from the narrative in half a paragraph. We see "an undersized, snuffy man with a mild, rich moustache" who is very handy maintaining the boarding house his wife owns, until the day he walks out with a check to pay the butcher and instead vanishes with all the money she has saved (304).
The mother of Popeye's mother seems normal enough when first introduced, as someone who likes the strike-breaker who is Popeye's father. After being widowed, she has remarried a man who takes good care of her boarding house - until one day he disappears with all the money she had in the bank. Perhaps this event is what triggers her madness, a mixture of pyromania and paranoia.
The man who fathered Popeye was a professional strike breaker who married Popeye's mother when she got pregnant and then, less than three weeks later, ran off - leaving her and the child with a disease that was probably syphilis.
