The Moaner’s Bench

The Moaner’s Bench is a 1998 semi-autobiographical novel by Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) native Mars Hill. The book is narrated by Mark Andrew “Sun” Hughes, the youngest child in a middle-class Black family in a fictionalized Pine Bluff called Pine Ridge. Publishers Weekly described The Moaner’s Bench as a “rambling but ingratiating debut about an African American boyhood in Depression-era Arkansas” that, “even at its most long-winded, is warm, funny and wonderfully observed.” The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

The novel opens with thirteen-year-old Sun being sent to live with his Uncle Pet and Aunt Janie (called “Aint Babe”) following the death of his father (Andrew Hughes, called Papa) from diabetes. Uncle Pet is a leader in the local Missionary Baptist congregation, and the book takes its title from the “moaner’s bench” (also called the “mourner’s bench”) where those who have not been “saved” must sit during revival, awaiting the influence of the Holy Spirit. Sun also notes that he “was used to discipline from Mama and Papa; however, it was discipline with love,” while Uncle Pet “clearly enjoyed what he was doing in the name of his Christian duty.”

With the fourth chapter, the narrative rolls back to 1924, when Sun’s father is still alive and three-year-old Sun still lives with his parents and his seven siblings (four older sisters, one older brother, and one younger sister) in the large house Papa built on Highway 15: “My pains, my rejoicings, my sorrows, my home, my world took shape and sculpted my being on those acres,” Sun narrates. Although Sun has family members who have fled for places like Chicago due to the threat of racial violence, he is largely insulated from such concerns at the farm and store his father owns and operates, and he sees many examples of men and women he knows standing up to white people who attempt to denigrate them. Much of the novel from here on consists of vignettes of country life for a young boy: becoming delirious from a rattlesnake bite, harvesting such crops as sorghum and cotton, attending school, fishing in Bayou Bartholomew, and more.

About halfway through the novel, in late 1929, Sun becomes aware that adults are talking about bank closures, and more and more often at the store “regular good customers who had kept abreast of their bills weren’t able to pay.” With the family’s own growing bills, the children of the Hughes family have to hire out for work, while Sun’s mother goes door to door, peddling their crops and wares. At this time, Sun begins to receive his first lessons in the racial caste system of Jim Crow Arkansas. Meanwhile, Papa’s health begins to deteriorate due to diabetes, and a new highway is “snaking its way south through farms, forest, and fallow fields, over creeks, bayous, and up and down hills, leaving wrecked properties crippled and dispossessed in its wake of eminent domain.” The new highway ends up being built right through the orchard and front yard of the Hughes family house.

By 1933, Papa’s health is worsening, and that spring, locusts claim much of the recently planted crops. Papa is forced to close the store and hire out the entire family to chop cotton. After Papa’s death and funeral, the narrative returns to November 1935, with Sun reflecting that all the places where important things had happened, such as the blueberry patch where he had been bitten by a rattlesnake, “are all like the moaner’s bench in my life,” places “where I had to think, reflect, regenerate, and re-create myself.”

In an interview with Dr. Janelle Collins published in Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies, Mars Hill emphasized the necessity of repentance, saying, “The first step toward redemption is also the most difficult, especially for the proud and powerful. I believe this to be true for an individual and for a nation. To me, the essence of a naturalistic, universal humanist should be an unshakeable commitment to the prodding, dogged work of seeking out the truth and trusting that if and when we act on it, we will be better as individuals and a nation.”

For additional information:
Collins, Janelle. “‘Where the Redemptive Process Begins’: Mars Hill and The Moaner’s Bench.” Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 30 (December 1999): 212–225.

Hill, Mars. The Moaner’s Bench. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998.

“Review of The Moaner’s Bench.” Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780060191023 (accessed September 30, 2026).

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas