Lonnie Grinnup's Shack|Tent (Location Key)

Over the years some of the antebellum plantation mansions in Yoknapatawpha remain lived in and well-maintained, even enlarged. Some fall into decay and burn down. Faulkner describes the decline and fall of Yoknapatawpha's first big planter, the Old Frenchman after whom Frenchman's Bend is named, in two different ways. His huge house, the Old Frenchman place, begins to fall into decay during or immediately after the Civil War; in Sanctuary it becomes the home of a moonshiner before becoming the site of a series of horrors. The one descendent of the Old Frenchman, a cognitively challenged man named Lonnie Grinnup, lives instead in a squalid ramshackle hut located "in almost the exact center of the thousand and more acres his ancestors once owned" (71). That's a quotation from the short story "Hand upon the Waters," which describes the hut "a conical hut with a pointed roof, built partly of mildewed canvas and odd-shaped boards and partly of oil tins hammered out flat. A rusted stovepipe projected crazily above it" (67-68). Lonnie is murdered in that story, but his 'home' appears again in Intruder in the Dust and The Reivers to remind readers of how regularly Faulkner represents history as a destructive force. In this last novel it's a tent rather than what Intruder calls "a half-shed half-den [built] of discarded boards and pieces of flattened stovepipe and tin cans" (74).