Mrs. Tucker is one of Rodney's earlier Jefferson conquests, the married woman with whom he had an affair while visiting town "last summer" (266). One one occasion, Mrs. Tucker is "sick," so Georgie doesn't get a quarter for his part in the "business" (285).
George, husband of Grandpa's daughter, Sarah, and father of Georgie, owns a livery stable; he is a hardworking man with a skeptical outlook and a clear understanding of his wife's family dynamics. He also has a contemptuous understanding of his brother-in-law, Rodney: "Yes," he said, "it certainly wasn't Uncle Rodney's fault, he never knew a man to try harder to get money than Uncle Rodney did, that Uncle Rodney had tried every known plan to get it except work" (267). When Aunt Louisa mentions Rodney's lack of opportunities "to meet a nice girl and marry her," George says: "Marry?
The youngest of three children and the narrator's uncle, Rodney commits theft, fraud, and embezzlement. He is also a persistent philanderer. Rodney manages the latter "business" by manipulating his nephew, Georgie, with promises of future monetary rewards. "By God," he tells Georgie, "some day you will be as good a businessman as I am" (280). Rodney's instructions to the seven-year-old regarding his most recent "business" are quite explicit: "Start at the corner of the house and count three windows. Then throw the handful of gravel against the window.
The "grandpa" of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" is married to grandma, and the father of Louisa, Sarah, and Rodney. He knows his son is a criminal but covers for him as long as possible, apparently taking refuge or solace in anger and his "tonic," which he keeps in a bottle in his desk - a desk which Rodney knows how to "prize open" in order to sneak his own (alcoholic) "dose" (266).
Sarah - Uncle Rodney's older sister, George's wife and woman whom the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" calls "mamma" (265) - is greatly upset by Rodney's behavior, mostly because gossip about it would damage "the family's good name" (267). She is very class-conscious, but also genuinely concerned about her younger brother: "mamma cried and said how Uncle Rodney was the baby and that must be why papa hated him" (268).
Rosie, one of the family servants, seems to have a clear understanding of her employers' characters. In particular, she chastises young Georgie: "You and money! If you ain't rich time you twenty-one, hit will be because the law done abolished money or done abolished you" (265). Rosie, like Emmeline, has to do some of the cooking due to the absence of Grandma and Grandpa's servant, Mandy.
Georgie, the seven-year-old narrator of the story, serves his Uncle Rodney without questioning or recognizing Rodney's various forms of social and criminal misbehavior. Georgie's loyalty to Uncle Rodney feeds his own pervasive greed.
All we know about "Mrs. Jordon's"- the Mottstown house where Georgie is sent to spend Christmas Eve - is that it has "a persimmon tree" in the front yard (287).
This house is the home of the married woman in Jefferson with whom Rodney conducts "business" - i.e. has an affair - during his visit to town "last summer" (268). He pays Georgie a nickel to look out for Mr. Tucker during these assignations.
Trains travel directly between Jefferson and Mottstown (like the one that Rosie takes, 276), but to travel from either town to Memphis one has to switch trains, which explains why in this story Rodney "hires a rig" and travels to Kingston, where the "fast train to Memphis" runs on "the main line" (279). (There is a real Kingston in Mississippi, but it is in the southwest corner of the state, hundreds of miles out of the Rodney's way.
