"Red, Alabama Red" is the sexual partner whom Popeye provides Temple with during her confinement in the Memphis bordello. He works as "a houseman - the bouncer - at the nightclub" that Popeye owns (114). According to Temple, Red is "not a criminal," "just a thug" (114), but during their unconventional sexual encounters she "falls in love" with him (113), and writes him the letters that in the hands of his younger brother, Pete, create the occasion for the crime that Nancy commits eight years later.
Temple refers briefly to prostitutes in the Memphis bordello - whom she calls "the other girls in my own house" (113) - and compares them to the "young women" in her "dormitory at school" (213).
