The narrator of Sanctuary describes Popeye as someone with "that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin" (4). Although Temple once calls him "that black man" (49), and Horace refers to "Popeye's black presence" (121), Popeye is white. A modern psychologist would label him a sociopath. Horace calls him one of "those Memphis folks" (21), the gangsters who buy homemade whiskey from Lee to sell in the speakeasies of the city. He was born on Christmas, in Pensacola, Florida.
Miss Lorraine is one of the two women in Sanctuary who come back to the brothel with Miss Reba after Red's funeral. (The context suggests they might be madams at other Memphis brothels, but that is not made explicit in the text.) Lorraine is the "thin woman in sober, severe clothes and gold nose-glasses" (250). The narrator refers to her "flat spinster's breast" (256) and several times compares her appearance to that of "a school-teacher" (251, 258).
During the testimony that Temple Drake of Jackson, Mississippi, gives under oath in Sanctuary, she says her mother is dead (285). In Requiem for a Nun, however, Gowan takes Temple's son Bucky to spend a week "with [his] grandparents in New Orleans" (136) -
which resurrects Mrs. Drake and moves her to Louisiana. While in the first novel Temple often thinks of her father, and she refers to him again in the second, her mother is only mentioned in these two incompatible ways.
Never named, the woman in Sanctuary who gave birth to Popeye is "the daughter of a boarding house keeper" in Pensacola (302-03). She is already pregnant with him, and carrying the disease (probably syphilis) that will leave her an "invalid" (309), when she marries Popeye's father, a professional strike-breaker whom she has only known for 3 days when they decide to marry. They were married less than 3 weeks when he takes off, leaving her to raise the child who is born with the same disease.
In Sanctuary the man who fathered Popeye is a professional strike breaker who marries Popeye's mother when she gets pregnant and then, less than three weeks later, runs off - leaving her and the child with a disease that was probably syphilis.
In Sanctuary Ruby's father's last name may be "Lamar." Popeye calls Ruby by that name once (10). What we can say for sure about her father is that he "runs his family" very aggressively, cursing his son for wanting to be the one to kill Ruby's boyfriend Frank and then shooting Frank himself (58). He calls his daughter a "whore" for wanting to elope (58).
Ruby Lamar is a former Memphis prostitute who appears in Sanctuary as the devoted common-law wife of Lee Goodwin and conscientious mother of their very young child. Earlier she moved to San Francisco and New York to wait for Lee while he was serving overseas, and when he is sentenced to prison for killing fellow U.S. soldier in a fight over another woman, she not only moves to Leavenworth to be near him, but hires a lawyer for him, using her body as payment. When Lee is arrested for killing Tommy, she is prepared to pay Horace the same way.
In Sanctuary Jenny tells Horace that the last "young man" who tried courting Narcissa was "that Jones boy; Herschell" (24). From that it sounds as if Herschell belonged to a family the Benbows and Sartorises would have known socially, but beyond that we know nothing about him.
The narrator of Sanctuary tells us that Lee and Ruby's child is "not a year old" the first time he appears in the story - sleeping in a box behind the stove, where "the rats cant get to him" (18). Ruby is carrying him or caring for him throughout the rest of the novel. His appearance is another of the novel's unsettling elements. When Horace looks at him lying on a bed, for example, the child is "flushed and sweating, its curled hands above its head in the attitude of one crucified, breathing in short, whistling gasps" (135).
