Lonnie Grinnup

Lonnie Grinnup was christened Louis Grenier. He is, as Intruder in the Dust notes, the only living descendant of the elegante Frenchman, the first Louis Grenier, whose vast antebellum plantation gave Frenchman's Bend its name. Lonnie has no conception of his aristocratic heritage; he is "a cheerful middleaged man with the mind and face of a child" who lives in a decrepit shack twenty miles away from the mansion his ancestor built (74). In the earlier "Hand upon the Waters," his murder is the occasion for one of Faulkner's detective fictions. He was seriously handicapped mentally, but generous, "pleasant, equable," willing to share the little he has with anyone and a devoted foster "brother and father" to the man named Joe (71).