OXFORD, Miss. — Writer John T. Edge has spent much of his career telling stories about a changing American South filtered through the lens of food and culture. He's published cookbooks and food histories, and he's been a contributor to the New York Times, the now-shuttered magazine, Gourmet, the Food Network, and NPR's Weekend All Things Considered. He also hosts the TV program True South.
Edge, the former director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, has explored a wide range of topics — including the Mississippi hot tamale trail, Atlanta's multicultural Buford Highway, the history of fried chicken, and the unsung cooks who fed civil rights activists.
Now he has turned the lens on his own family's troubled history in a new memoir called House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home.
Edge shied away from telling his own story ... until now
"I told myself for the longest time that I was going out in search of something new, that I was running towards something when I was writing," Edge says. "I realized that because I wasn't writing about my own upbringing, my own life, I was actually running away from something and I needed to quit running."
"Running" is the title of the book's prologue. It opens with what he says is the hardest memory from his childhood in rural Clinton, Ga.
"My mother — drunk, angry, frightened — grabbed a gun and ran out the back door of our house," recalls Edge. He ran after her.
"Is my mother going to shoot herself? Is she going to aim that gun at her temple and pull, or is she just going to fire that gun into the air? Is she going to create a spectacle or a horror?"
Edge's father traveled the South as a federal probation and parole officer. His mother was a gregarious Little League Baseball booster and history buff, but also an alcoholic living in the balance.
"I found her there with that gun on the ground beside her. She was crying into her blouse, like inconsolable," he remembers.
It was not an isolated incident. "She always said, 'I'll be different on the other side.' And we never got to the other side."
But Edge says he did, and that's what the book is about.
Finding a new South identity
Edge grew up surrounded by Civil War folklore and relics. His family lived in a historic farmhouse that had belonged to a U.S. senator who helped lead Georgia's secession from the Union and his son, a Confederate general.
"If you grew up like I did in the 1960s, the Lost Cause was the shadow that hung over your life," he says. "And it hung over mine, and it hung over so many people who grew up in that time."
The memoir recounts how he came to shed the mythology of the Old South and spent much of his career trying to tell stories that highlighted a new or better South.
"That's a complicated thing for me in this book because I recognize the hubris in that — to think I could really make change in my region and for whom I make that change," Edge says.
In 2020, Edge left the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization he helped found, after some members called on him to resign. There were accusations that he, as a white man, prospered while women and minority chefs and creators didn't get such accolades or bylines. Edge says it was a disorienting time, but acknowledges the criticism.
"I was the loudest voice in the room at that point. And I didn't need to be the loudest voice in the room."
Still, Edge says he remains proud of the work accomplished during his two-decade tenure at SFA to document a changing American South.
"I think for all of us who love this place, at some level, I hope we all can recognize that criticism is an act of love," he says. "It is a want to and a drive to render your place better, to make some small impact on your place that makes a better South. That's the whole gig."
A gig that's now taken him to an old mule farm in North Mississippi, property once farmed by literary icon William Faulkner.
Trekking through the woods with a carved walking stick, he points to a towering oak tree in the skyline.
"To see that oak today, you recognize that Faulkner walked beneath that same oak, and the promise of what Faulkner dreamed is here still."
The land — Greenfield Farm — now belongs to the University of Mississippi, where Edge directs a lab developing the old mule farm as a residential writers' retreat.
"This is a phase in Faulkner's life when he said, 'I aim to be a farmer who writes.' And that was part of his ethos," Edge says. "This place was almost like an agricultural theater for Faulkner, and he could observe agricultural life and write about it."
The hope is that this bucolic environment that fed Faulkner can now nurture and inspire a new generation of writers. Edge says the residency will foster something different from traditional writing programs at universities or tourist attractions for the literary set, like Faulkner's home Rowan Oak or Eudora Welty's house and garden in Jackson.
"Mississippi has invested well in our writerly past," says Edge. "I want Greenfield to function as an engine of the future."
He envisions it as a sort of new front porch, a way of attracting creative people back to Mississippi.
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