“RAISE UP A CHILD"

Edith V.P. Hudley, Wendy Haight, and Peggy Miller

INTRODUCTION

Edith Valerie Patton was born in 1920 on a small family farm in Kennard, Texas. The sixth of eight surviving children and the youngest girl, Edith was her mother’s helper and apprentice. At an age when many children are still in preschool, Edith washed diapers on a washboard, churned butter, pieced quilts, and baked cakes. “Honey, I was a worrisome little child coming up. I wanted to know everything. My mother used to say, ‘Lord, Mr. Aaron, that’s the nosiest little child we’ve got.’ I could hear them talking, and I would try to get to where I could eavesdrop.”

When Edith was ten, her mother, Mamie, died from complications of childbirth, and she was called upon to help her father raise her younger brothers. Aaron realized that he would have to be father and mother to Edith, but, he did not face this challenge alone.

When his daughter brought him questions that he found inappropriate for a father to answer, Aaron would say, “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.” A little while later, a female relative or one of the women from the community would approach Edith with the answer. These “other mothers” played a crucial role in guiding Edith through the perils of impending womanhood. Their devotion set into motion what would become a lifelong pattern. Later, when Edith moved to Houston and then to Oakland, she sought out “other mothers,” stalwarts of the church, who were willing to provide the support and guidance that she needed. Eventually, Edith became an “other mother” to younger women, thereby claiming her rightful link in the chain of mothering.

This book tells the story of Edith Hudley’s life, largely in her own words. Because she has spent much of her life caring for children—her brothers, sons, grandchildren, and “adopted” offspring—this book is also about child rearing.

Why do we need another book about child rearing, and why would readers want to learn about Edith Hudley’s experiences? Our answers are rooted in our commitments as developmental psychologists and social work educators. There is growing awareness that children cannot be understood apart from the cultural and historical contexts that shape their lives. This is true of all children, but because African-American children and other minorities have been underrepresented in studies of child development, the need to imagine the contexts of their lives is especially urgent.

We believe that Edith Hudley’s story will stimulate readers’ imaginations. It may prompt you to question, enlarge, or reaffirm certain assumptions about child rearing or take a second look at what you thought another parent or child was up to. These imaginative forays are critical for understanding human development and for cultivating the kind of perspective taking that is fundamental to social work.

A compelling storyteller with a prodigious memory, Mrs. Hudley brings past and present contexts to life. Indeed, her storytelling demonstrates that it is impossible to segregate the two. A danger or a grief experienced decades ago or a word of wise advice from a long-dead parent intermingle with the present, informing what a parent does in the here-and-now. Although Edith’s experiences of growing up in the deep South and of raising her sons elsewhere have much in common with others of her generation, they are uniquely hers. She tells a personal story, and personal stories invite personal responses.

A Life Grounded in Religious Faith

Edith Hudley has strong opinions about child rearing. At the most basic level, however, her message to her many offspring is the same message that she received from the family and community into which she was born: religious faith is the most important force in life, the compass by which all conduct is oriented. It is impossible to be in Mrs. Hudley’s presence without becoming aware of the strength and radiance of her religious conviction. This is no vague abstraction; her faith is alive in the moment-by-moment play of her thoughts and feelings, her ceaseless storytelling, her daily actions.

At the heart of Mrs. Hudley’s religious conviction is a bred-in-the-bone belief in the power of love to anchor and transform. Edith Hudley always knew that her parents loved her. That experience has remained a lifelong touchstone, fueling her determination to put love to work wherever possible. Her life story speaks to bell hooks’ (2001) call for a return to an ethic of love in child rearing and in the struggle for racial justice. Hudley redeems hooks’ faith that “unrecognized visionaries” are in our midst (p. 255).

Although Mrs. Hudley’s commitment to love is evident throughout her life story, it is most clearly articulated in response to the racism that she and her family experienced. “[My parents] taught us all the time, ‘Don’t hate nobody.’ Now, that was one thing I praise God for, that they brought that to us, ‘Don’t hate people, regardless of what they do to you. . . .’ Leave it to God and He’ll fix it. I used to wonder, ‘Why do they tell us to leave it to God? How come God haven’t fixed it already? Well, Papa, how come He haven’t already fixed it?’ He said, ‘He’ll fix it in his own dear time.’ ”

As Edith Hudley’s adult life unfolded, male-female relations severely tested her commitment to love. This motivated her to raise her sons to respect women and to make sure that they got the sex education that they needed.

For Edith Hudley, expressions of faith arise in connection with specific personal experiences, both positive and negative. One of the most striking features of her life story and approach to raising children is that she does not sentimentalize or deny the realities of life, however ugly. The concrete brutalities of racism and of male domination are acknowledged so that children can be forearmed with knowledge and with practical strategies for handling predictable dangers. We marveled at the frankness with which she—and her parents before her—discussed with their children matters that many families keep hidden.

How This Book Came to Be Written

This book owes its existence to the long-standing relationships among the three authors. Wendy Haight first met Edith Hudley in June 1992, three days after the birth of her daughter, Camilla. “My husband and I had moved to Salt Lake City with our three-year-old son, Matthew, the previous year to begin new jobs. We were apprehensive about moving our biracial family to this area. Upon our arrival, we were directed to First Baptist Church, a center of the African-American Utahn community.

“When Camilla arrived, somewhat earlier than we expected, the pastor, as well as Camilla’s godmother, Alzie, both urged us to speak with Mrs. Edith Hudley. The pastor informed us that Mrs. Hudley had done more for children than anyone he knew. She was an old-
fashioned church mother who took responsibility for all of the children in her community. Alzie said that Mrs. Hudley loved children and that she would always be there for the whole family. Needless to say, I immediately sought her out. She told me to bring the babies by her house. Of course she would care for them while I worked. And, she would teach them to call her, ‘Grandma.’

“Over the next three years, I came to enjoy my time at Grandma Edith’s house as much as my children did. As we cared for Matthew and Camilla, Edith recounted her own experiences as a child, parent, and grandparent. Listening to these stories, I worried about how my children, or children of any ethnicity, could grow up healthy in racist America. As I listened more closely, it became clear that for Edith, socialization is rooted in spirituality, strongly held and deeply felt personal beliefs about the meaning of life, including an ultimate love, which all may receive, and an ultimate justice, to which all are accountable.

“Subsequently, I began to do research, in my professional role of developmental psychologist, on the spiritual socialization of African-American children [Haight, 1998, 2002]. I wanted to understand how individuals like Edith have thrived despite profound, ongoing stress and then to consider the implications for parents, teachers, and social workers involved in the day-to-day socialization of children. Very little systematic research has explored the strengths of African-American children, their families, and communities, including the ways in which African-American adults, like Edith, socialize resilience. However, at this point, my research did not focus specifically on Edith but rather on the Sunday School at First Baptist Church.”

Wendy introduced Peggy Miller to Edith in September of 1997. Edith had come to Urbana to visit with Wendy and her family, and Wendy thought Peggy would be fascinated by Edith’s storytelling. Peggy and Wendy had known each other for a dozen years. Peggy was Wendy’s advisor in graduate school, and the two have been friends and colleagues ever since (Haight & Miller, 1992, 1993).

“Wendy brought Edith to my house for tea one morning. Although I have studied oral storytelling for much of my career, I had never before met anyone with such a passion to share her experience. The purpose of her storytelling, she soon made clear to me, was didactic. She wanted the next generation to learn, as she had done, from her exemplary parents. And she wanted to pass on lessons from her own life so that younger people could see, and be nourished by, how God has worked through her.

“I was reminded, as I listened to Edith, of the book Motherwit that I have used in my courses in communication and psychology at the University of Illinois. Motherwit is Onnie Lee Logan’s (1989) life story. Born in 1910 into a large African-American family in rural Alabama, accorded few opportunities for formal education, Logan spent her life delivering babies in and around Mobile. “I’d rather see a baby be born in the world than to eat if I’m hungry,” she said (p. 48). Like Logan, Edith has had a profound effect on many children and sees her life’s work as an expression of her Christian faith. In my classes, I found that Logan’s life story struck a chord with students from a variety of cultural backgrounds. What is it about her that these young adults find so arresting? Perhaps her sense of vocation.”

“In an e-mail conversation the next day, we came up with the idea of writing a book with Edith. Wendy broached the matter with her. Would she be interested in working with us to write a book about her life and experiences raising children? We were not surprised when she agreed enthusiastically: she had enjoyed talking to Wendy’s psychology students at the University of Utah and was delighted when Wendy quoted her in a paper that she wrote about First Baptist Church. These activities allowed Edith to reach a wider audience, and a book would do the same.

“Interviewing” Edith Hudley

A few days later we sat at Wendy’s kitchen table, with two tape recorders and the few remaining slices of Edith’s sweet potato pie. (She had baked and distributed a dozen pies to Matthew and Camilla’s classrooms.) We asked her to tell the story of her life any way she wanted to tell it. She proceeded to talk nonstop for four hours. During this time, she did not eat or drink or get up to stretch. In fact, she barely moved except to use her hands to picture events she was narrating. We listened and drank tea, and occasionally Wendy managed to interject a question. Three hours into the recording session, we devoured the pie. When Peggy left an hour later, walking home in a daze, Edith was still going strong. After a break for dinner, Edith talked on to Wendy, with Matthew and Camilla occasionally in attendance. Wendy had had the foresight to purchase a large supply of audiotapes. By the end of the day, twelve were filled.

This first recording session taught us that one does not really interview Edith Hudley. Although she had never before narrated so much of her life in a single sitting, her stories had a shape that had been honed over multiple tellings. We tried to respect the integrity
of her tellings by not interrupting or redirecting her talk. Such interventions would not have worked, anyway. Interviewers usually worry about how to get the interviewee to talk; with Edith the challenge is to figure out how to get the floor.

A few months later, in January 1998, we visited Edith in Salt Lake City. Our daughters, Camilla, age five, and Kathleen, age ten, accompanied us. We collected another eleven hours of recording. Again, our goal was to listen and to keep our interventions to a minimum. This time, however, we had some questions that we were determined to ask. We wanted to check our understanding of certain events in Hudley’s life, and we had a concern that we wanted to discuss with her.

Two (White) Coauthors?

The concern was this: How did Edith feel about teaming up with two white women to tell her life story? Did she have any reservations or second thoughts about this project and our role in it? These questions arose from issues within the academic disciplines that have shaped our commitments as scholars and teachers. (Behar, 1993; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Fine, 1994; Wolf, 1992). One of these issues concerns who can rightfully study whom. Given the realities of race and class is it acceptable ethically for a white person to study a black person, for a formally educated person to study one without formal education, for a person who has access to certain forms and audiences of professional discourse to study someone who does not? Would it even be possible for a person whose background and life experiences are radically different—who did not grow up in the deep South, who has not experienced racism firsthand, who is from a younger generation—to come to know that other person?

Wendy broached our concern toward the end of our four-day marathon recording session in Salt Lake City. She told Edith that some of her colleagues had objected to this project on the grounds that it is inherently exploitative for two white women to work with a black woman on her story. How did Edith feel about this?

Wendy pursued this line of questioning further, but Edith would not give an inch. She simply will not grant that the racial divide necessarily makes a whit of difference between individuals, a position that coexists comfortably with her unflinching recognition of racism and of the toll it has taken on her life. Edith’s enthusiasm for this project, her conviction that we could work together, and her trust in our judgment have allayed our doubts about our role in this undertaking and have sustained us throughout.

It may sound odd to say that Edith had to allay our doubts. This seems to deny the very power differential between researcher and subject that scholars have rightly insisted must be acknowledged. But the issue of power is never simple, and in this case, the greater power that we have, by virtue of our education and professional status, could not diminish another asymmetry in which the greater power, indisputably, lay in Edith’s hands. Within the structure of moral authority that Edith has always recognized—in which the older and wiser instruct the younger—we are the ones in need of guidance. What was Wendy thinking, taking a three-day-old baby to church? The reason that Peggy can’t make pie dough is that she has no patience!

And there is still another circumstance that allowed us to work together. Edith embraced this project from its outset because it dovetails with the animating purpose of her life: to share her wisdom and to make a difference in other people’s lives: “I thank God for what
He did for me, for keepin this within, that I can tell somebody else. And maybe it can help somebody else ’cause that’s the way my parents brought me up.” From this standpoint, we are not so much researchers as midwives. Our role is to assist Edith in bringing forth her vision—a vision that is already fully formed—to a larger audience.

Audiences for This Book

Because Edith Hudley’s understandings about how to raise children are deeply rooted in African-American experience, we hope that her story will be interesting to parents and grandparents of African-American children. Christian believers—especially those who affiliate with the Baptist church—will hear familiar echoes and may find inspiration in a child rearing philosophy that is informed by faith. Yet Edith Hudley’s message is not limited to black Americans or to Christians. Her understanding of how to combat racism (or hatred of any kind), of how to raise adolescents to be respectful of the opposite sex, of how to discipline children—is worthy of consideration by anyone who wants to raise strong and loving children in twenty-first-century America.

As scholars, we hope to reach several professional audiences as well, especially social workers, but also educators and clinicians, who daily face the challenges of enhancing children’s growth and well-being. In each of these fields there is a growing effort to ground policy and practice in knowledge of the variety of pathways toward healthy development that different cultural and ethnic traditions promote. We provide examples of how we responded to Mrs. Hudley’s story and sketch some of the questions and implications that her life poses for social workers: differentiating between physical discipline and physical abuse, coordinating mentoring for teen mothers, and making religious resources available to ill children.

We also provide examples of how to integrate two important research traditions within social work: quantitative research, a cornerstone of modern, empirically based social work, and qualitative, case-based understandings. Many of our students have difficulty relating quantitative and qualitative approaches, often referring to quantitative “or” qualitative approaches and identifying themselves with a perceived superior tradition. This is hardly surprising since scholarship in the social sciences is similarly polarized. For us, however, the boundaries between quantitative and qualitative approaches are blurred. Effective practice requires a dual focus on the context of particular cases and on group trends.

It also requires a broader and deeper understanding of the plurality of developmental trajectories, particularly those that are available to children from minority backgrounds. Practitioners and policymakers look to the field of human development for insights into how socioeconomic and cultural contexts shape children. However, as developmental psychologists by training and cultural psychologists by inclination, we know that African-American voices are heard too little in these fields of inquiry. The latest edition of the preeminent reference volume on child psychology reports that the number of studies involving African-American samples in mainstream developmental journals is very small and has decreased from 1970 to 1990, a state of affairs that itself deserves study (Fisher, Jackson, & Villarruel, 1998). When African-American children and parents are studied, they are often portrayed as disadvantaged or at risk. Although many of these studies originate in a desire to address the poverty that disproportionately affects African-American children, the focus on vulnerability risks reinforcing powerful negative stereotypes of black Americans. Accurate, compassionate, and unbiased understanding of children’s lives and life conditions—isn’t that what scholars of child development hope to promote? And yet this goal, as it applies to African-American children and their families, is undermined by several other patterns in the literature: the lack of study of middle-class black children, invidious comparisons of minority children with their more privileged counterparts, and descriptions that fail to take into account the socioeconomic, cultural, and historical contexts that would render children’s and parents’ actions intelligible.

Although the importance of context is widely acknowledged, scholars sometimes dismiss as “unobjective” work that attempts to understand the experiences of African-American families on their own terms. When such work prominantly portrays individuals’ strengths, it may be treated as especially suspect: the researcher must be operating out of a biased political agenda. Yet, in a curious case of myopia, when research systematically omits the experiences and meaning systems of poor and minority children, it may not be recognized as serving, however inadvertently, its own political agenda.

Fortunately, there are some studies that do portray African-American families on their own terms. Edith Hudley’s enduring ties to family and to other “kin” who are not related biologically (her beloved “other mothers”) will remind some readers of Carol Stacks’ classic work All Our Kin (1974). Her prodigious storytelling can be seen as her own continuation of African-American traditions of oral narrative, of which many fine studies and compendiums exist (Etter-Lewis, 1993; Davis & Gates, 1991; Goss & Barnes, 1989; Goodwin, 1990; Heath, 1983; Labov, 1972; Shuman, 1986; Smitherman, 1986; Sperry & Sperry, 1996). The ways in which she finds strength in spirituality and religious community can be linked to an incipient literature on the role of spirituality in children’s development (Coles, 1990; Haight, 1998; Hale-Benson, 1987; Zimmerman & Maton, 1992). Her commitment to education may bring to mind Diana Slaughter-Defoe’s studies of middle-class black families as well as James Comer’s biography of his mother (Lee & Slaughter-Defoe, 1995; Slaughter & Johnson, 1989; Comer, 1998).

A great deal can be learned by asking the larger question—how do African-American children and their families create meaningful lives?—instead of focusing narrowly on the difficulties of growing up black. The larger question is likely to lead toward a more capacious vision of child development and a more interesting set of research questions.

In short, we believe that as Edith Hudley narrates her experiences as daughter, wife, mother, divorced mother, “other mother,” and grandmother she takes her place amidst the growing chorus of African-American voices who inform developmental psychology and allied arenas of practice. The study of child development will remain impoverished, and social work and educational and clinical practice will remain handicapped until these voices are heard. This does not mean that Edith stands as “spokeswoman” for an entire group. Like every human voice, hers is distinctive; shared values and interpretive frameworks are personalized within the idiosyncrasies of her experience. She speaks from her own corner within her own communities, but she reaches beyond, inviting other voices to respond.

Listening to Edith Hudley

The best way to hear Edith’s stories is face-to-face in a familiar kitchen or at the back of the sanctuary after church. If one listens more than once, certain recurring themes will become apparent; key events in her life, some dating back more than seventy years, will be evoked again and again. Like many gifted storytellers, Edith has an uncanny ability to evoke the past. Who could be better than she at calling forth the people who shaped her life and fashioned her outlook: her mother, Mamie; her father, Aaron; her “other mother,” Mother Ewing? By the end of our second recording session, they were nearly as alive as she was.

Encountered on more formal occasions, even once, Edith’s words can leave a powerful impression. Following are typical excerpts from the ungraded, anonymous journals of undergraduate students—everyone was white and most were from middle-class backgrounds—following Edith’s appearance in their child development class.

These undergraduates said that they were touched, inspired, refreshed, provoked to think anew by their encounter with Edith Hudley. They spoke in terms that mesh with Mrs. Hudley’s own intention of helping others by sharing her life experiences. Although they inhabited different worlds, these young (privileged, white) adults and this elderly (African-American) grandmother, both seemed to recognize that a particular genre—the inspirational life story—was in play.

Hearing and Not Hearing Edith Hudley

Is there a danger here? Might readers absorb Edith Hudley, the inspirational figure, into their stereotype of the virtuous, strong, black grandmother, facing innumerable obstacles, buoyed by religious faith, and ultimately undaunted? Might they thereby dismiss her as a stock character inhabiting a well-trod racial landscape? Some of our colleagues who share our goal of diversifying the study of child development argued that the match between Hudley’s perspectives and white readers’ stereotypes of how elderly black women think, talk, and raise their children is so close that it is bound to affirm racial stereotypes. From their perspective, there is an insuperable rhetorical challenge entailed in using Edith’s life to discomfit racial stereotypes. Thus, our hope that readers (at least white readers) will be moved to take her words seriously, to respond to her unique voice, is hopelessly unrealistic. One colleague also raised the problem of age stereotypes, arguing that Hudley’s advanced age “means that for young readers her wisdom will come across less as the beliefs of contemporary black Americans and more as an oral history of a quaint but antiquated and bygone era.”

We were startled by these comments, because we had been thinking about Hudley’s life story as a counterweight to the master narrative of risk and disadvantage. We saw her story as combating a racial stereotype implicit in a scholarly literature that tends to elide the strengths of African-American children and families. But by seeing Edith’s story as a challenge to that master narrative, had we romanticized her?

Everywhere one looks, Edith Hudley’s story keeps company with other stories, some of them deafening—master narratives of race, gender, and age; oral histories; inspirational tales; realist fiction. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1986), the well-known discourse theorist and philosopher of language, said that our words are never entirely our own. To wrest one’s own meaning from the discourses that surround and inhabit us, each of which is saturated with value and with the history of other people’s voices, is next to impossible. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison (1992) says, “there is no escape from racially inflected language” (p. 13).

This being the case, we can only forecast the challenge of active engagement with Edith Hudley’s story and hope that readers will want to make that effort. Our hope rests, in part, on Hudley’s exceptional powers of expression. Her eagerness to do this book implies a confidence in her own ability to command the attention of her audience. And why not? She has been doing that all her life in homes, churches, PTA meetings, and, more recently, college classrooms.

In this last venue, many of the students heard her words as relevant to their own lives—not as relics of some bygone era. In her memoir, Talk to Me, Anna Deavere Smith (2000) says that the problem is not so much that black people identify with white people but that such acts of empathy are seldom reciprocated. The fact that these students were moved to identify with Mrs. Hudley, again, prompts us to hope that others will do likewise. And although her inspirational message was appreciated by these students, it was not necessarily the only message discerned. Some responded to her playfulness.

It may be this quality—her vitality and sense of fun—that children find so compelling. During one of our visits, Camilla begged Grandma Edith to do her hair in corn rows. The hair braiding session lasted about two hours during which time Camilla had to sit very still. Wendy offered to read a story, which Camilla rejected. Instead, with a naughty gleam in her eye and in excellent imitation of the church mothers, she intoned, “Dear Lord, help me sit still!” Edith clapped her hands, bent double giggling, then stood up and proceeded to elaborate (with a straight face), “Lord Jesus help my baby sit still so I can do this pretty braid straight!” Camilla picked right up on this, and they continued to “pray” back and forth for several minutes. Then Edith looked at Wendy and instructed, “Now, this is what ya’ll should be taping!”

Edith Hudley, In Her Own Words

The experience of reading Hudley’s stories cannot be the same as hearing and seeing her in the flesh, with all the tonalities, textures, and rhythms of real-life, whole-body communication. We have tried, none-
theless, to stay as faithful as possible to her own words. Twenty-three hours of audio recordings were transcribed verbatim, yielding 346 typed, single-spaced pages. As transcripts got done, we passed along copies to Edith. Although much is lost in reduction to the verbal medium alone, the transcript does preserve the flavor of spoken language and of Edith’s individual style of expression. We are aware that there are complex sociolinguistic issues at stake in translating vernacular speech and performed oral narrative into written form (Bauman, 1986; Jaffe, 2000). We have aimed for expressive rather than linguistic accuracy, adopting conventions for rendering oral discourse (e.g., “gonna,” “makin”), retaining repetitions and not altering grammatical constructions. These choices are intended to convey the artfulness of Edith Hudley’s storytelling.

The biggest challenge as coauthors, has been to envision how a book could emerge from this mountain of transcripts. How to prune in a way that retains the essence of Edith’s message and the conviction of her telling? Is there any way to accomplish this without intermingling our voices with hers? Obviously, this introduction is nothing if not an intermingling. Again, our words are never entirely our own (Bakhtin, 1981). In the chapters that form the body of this book we try, nonetheless, to let our voices recede as much as possible, to let the only audible voices be hers and those whom she invokes.

Still, our shadow voices are there in the choices that we made. How many chapters should there be? Which topics should be covered? Which passages should be included and which excluded, and how should these passages be juxtaposed? Should the book follow some overarching principles of organization, chronological or topical? Again, these choices were ours and even though Edith approved them, there is no denying that our hands shaped her story as it appears in this book.

Luckily for us, her tellings are not without signposts. Her habit of repetition was especially useful in highlighting which events were most significant to her. We heard Edith tell certain stories—about her mother’s death, about the time that Mother Ewing pulled her back from the brink—again and again. Some of these stories recurred daily, and although each telling may have been nuanced differently, key phrases were sounded each time. This habit of repetition does not bespeak a faltering memory. Quite the contrary. It is closer to a kind of prayer or meditation, a way that Edith reminds herself of the timeless meanings and consolations of her life. In addition to these always relevant stories, other stories were revisited for several days running because of their aptness to current circumstances.

We have tried, then, to render Edith Hudley’s storytelling in a way that preserves its origins as an oral text. Those who are unaccustomed to such “speakerly” texts may be surprised by the “sound” of casual speech, by unfamiliar grammatical constructions and turns of phrase, and by other features of her narrative performance. Like many accomplished storytellers, Hudley not only repeats favorite or momentous stories but also uses repetition as a stylistic device. For example, in the course of telling a story she might draw attention to a dramatic moment by recycling that moment, or she might repeat a choice line from a quoted conversation. Listen closely, and you may get caught up in the rhythms of her speech and hear echoes of the storytellers in your own life.

One additional quality of Edith Hudley’s speakerly stories needs to be pointed out. Like many works of modern fiction, Hudley’s stories do not necessarily follow a straight narrative line. She relates the mystery of Kathareen’s parentage from several temporal vantage points. When invoking an event that happened in mid-life, she interposes advice received decades earlier. Sometimes Hudley steps back and surveys the whole of her life. Sometimes she notes how the meaning of an early event ripened in the wake of subsequent events. Although Edith Hudley’s story is a story about the past, it is not just about the past. It is told and listened to in the perishing present and oriented to the future, undertaken in the hope that it will interest and enlighten.

Constructing a Hybrid Text

We hope to reach both a general readership and a more specialized audience of scholars and practitioners. How, then, to balance the needs of this dual readership? How to create a text that is accessible—unencumbered by technical reference—yet locates her stories and reflections in a scholarly context?

Our solution to this dilemma, as it pertains to those who simply want to hear Edith Hudley tell her life story, was to create chapters that stand alone and to allow her words to flow, without interruption, from her childhood in rural Texas, through her adolescence, marriage, work in the shipyards of Oakland during World War II, raising her sons, divorcing her husband, remarriage, and so on. These numbered chapters are organized by chronologically ordered phases: “Childhood,” “Youth,” “Married Life,” “Raising Children,” and “Later Years.” We preface each phase with a prelude that orients the reader to the setting, historical context, events, and people who figure importantly in this phase of Hudley’s life.

For readers with a professional interest in child development, we punctuate Edith Hudley’s life story with a series of scholarly interludes: each phase of her life is followed by an interlude, a pause for reflection on the cluster of chapters that preceded it. For example, after the several chapters comprising “Childhood,” the reader encounters the first interlude: “Religion and Spirituality.” The book thus follows a call and response structure. Mrs. Hudley tells a portion of her story, and we respond with perspectives from the relevant literature. Our intention is to enter into a dialogue with Hudley’s story. Once again, Bakhtin has been our guide: If active understanding is a joint creation, then our task as listeners is to prepare a rejoinder (Morson & Emerson, 1990).

Other interludes take up the topics of oppression and resistance, mentoring, physical discipline, and narrative. In settling on these topics, we left out many others that deserve attention. We chose topics that represent a mix in terms of the distance between Mrs. Hudley’s life story and the topics and issues currently in play in the fields of social work and human development. In White Teacher, a meditation on race and difference, Vivian Paley (2000) speaks of “unasked and unanswered questions” (p. 122). The first two interludes, “Religion and Spirituality” and “Oppression and Resistance,” are oriented to these kinds of questions. These interludes invite readers to see how the ways in which Edith Hudley’s life and perspectives on child rearing raise questions that rarely, if ever, get asked in the developmental literature. They point to whole arenas of life that are largely uncharted from a developmental perspective.

By contrast, the succeeding interludes on mentoring and physical punishment reveal a closer match between Mrs. Hudley’s concerns and the concerns of scholars and practitioners. These interludes invite readers to revisit questions that have been asked but that deserve deeper answers. These are the interludes that speak most directly to social workers. Hudley’s life story does not furnish recipes for intervention, but it does provide much needed context and perspective for some of the most vital issues in the practice of social work. For example, Edith Hudley enters into the debate about spanking as a passionate advocate for physical punishment. Some readers will not agree with her. However, her memories of what happened to black boys in rural Texas in the 1930s or in Oakland decades later whose parents did not discipline them show how she came to hold this position and what is at stake for her. They provide the context that allows readers who grew up in different worlds to imagine their way into hers.
The final interlude provides an opportunity to reflect on Edith Hudley’s life story as a story. There are many different literatures
on narrative; Hudley’s story fits neatly in some and not so neatly in others. Once again, it raises fresh questions for developmental researchers and practitioners.
In sum, this book is constructed to allow readers to enter the text by two routes—as listeners to the story of Edith Hudley’s life and as partners with her and with scholars and practitioners in a conversation about human development. Once readers enter her world, many pathways are opened.

References