That's the way Peggy Miller remembers it, when she first met Edith Hudley. Storytelling seemed "interwoven into the very fabric" of Hudley's life, Miller said. More than that, it seemed "a moral and a spiritual obligation." Her stories from life experience were the means by which she sought to pass along lessons about life and child-rearing.
Miller had studied storytelling for years. "But I had not heard anybody quite like that before."
For the storytelling and the story -- but also for the perspective it would bring to faculty peers and students -- Miller and colleague Wendy Haight thought Hudley should be in print. The result, being published in December 2002, is "Raise Up a Child: Human Development in an African-American Family" (Lyceum Books), written by Hudley, Haight and Miller.
Hudley is an African-American in her 80s, raised in pre-civil-rights rural Texas, who later lived in Oakland, Calif., and Salt Lake City. Haight is a professor of social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who first met Hudley at a black Baptist church in Salt Lake City, where she was known as the "church mother." Miller is a professor of psychology and of speech communication at Illinois who often collaborates with Haight, and who met Hudley through Haight.
The book is part autobiography, part oral history and part scholarship. It centers on the story of Hudley's life, told in her own words thanks to hours of audio taping. What comes through consistently, Haight noted, is Hudley's love and concern for children and her overflowing positive outlook, despite a life that began in poverty and was filled with hardships.
Between the sections of narrative are interludes in which Haight and Miller discuss how Hudley's story relates to the study and practice of social work, developmental psychology and other fields related to children.
"Her life and the stories she tells raise so many questions that havenÕt been answered or haven't been answered in enough depth," Haight said. Hudley's perspective also challenges some of the common wisdom in these fields, and perhaps controversially.
Hudley advocates spanking children, for instance, seeing its limited use as necessary in light of the greater danger she often saw come to African-American boys who misbehaved in public. Hudley also sees religious and spiritual development as "absolutely fundamental" in the raising of children, Miller said, and yet "it's not on the map" in child development research.
Despite the hardships in Hudley's life, her story is one of "great riches" in terms of her family, her community and her faith, said Haight, who also recently wrote "African-American Children at Church" (Cambridge University Press). Too often, Haight said, the strengths of black families and communities are not recognized, since the stereotype is of deprivation and being "at-risk."
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