He works for the madam of the Memphis bordello where Popeye puts Temple, and occasionally drives her and the "madam" around the city "in a closed car the size of an undertaker's wagon" (113).
In her account of her six weeks in Memphis bordello, Temple refers to this woman as "the madam of [a] cat house" (111). She is not named or described in the novel, and defined mainly as the "eagle-eyed" person who serves Popeye by making sure Temple stays in her custody (111). In the earlier Sanctuary (1931) and the later The Reivers she is called Reba Rivers, and described very vividly.
According to Temple's account of her six weeks in the Memphis "sporting house," the establishment's "Negro maid" is both her guard and the one person with whom she could "talk" (111-12). When Temple introduces her into her account, she falters briefly in the middle of a sentence that begins "Yes, that's why - " (112); the sentence is not completed, but seems to suggest that Temple's relationship with this maid explains her decision to hire Nancy later.
In its brief summation of the experience of Jackson, Mississippi, during Reconstruction the narrative evokes the stereotypical bogeyman of the Yankee carpetbagger. According to this account, during the Civil War these men made profits from selling the Union military "spoiled grain and tainted meat and spavined mules"; after the surrender they came South carrying "carpet bags stuffed with ballot-forms" to exploit the freedmen (87). During Reconstruction they "cover the South like a migration of locusts" (187).
