Miss Reba

Miss Reba runs one of Memphis' best-known houses of prostitution. She is twenty years younger in this novel than in Sanctuary, where she first appears, and a much warmer person. Lucius describes her at first as "a young woman . . . with a kind hard handsome face and hair that was too red" (96). She is hard on the man she lives with, or at least on his failings, and also a hard drinker, and knows how to exert her authority as a prominent and wealthy woman, but in this story she uses that power selflessly.