Popeye Vitelli

In this novel the Memphis gangster who commits murders and abducts Temple is appears only in the descriptions of him by Temple herself and Gavin. In Sanctuary, where Popeye first appears, the third-person narrator never gives him a last name, but according to Gavin his "Italian name" is Vitelli (114). Temple refers to him as an "underworld big shot" (112). Gavin's descriptions are more lurid: he calls Popeye "a psychopath . . . a little black thing with an Italian name like a neat and only slightly deformed cockroach: a hybrid, sexually incapable" (110). In connection with Popeye's impotence, Temple says there was no sex "from him" (111), and in this novel's representation of the events described in Sanctuary Popeye's raping her with an inanimate object is not mentioned. After committing the two murders that are referred to in the novel, Popeye is "hanged in Alabama for a murder he did not commit" (114).