In new memoir, John T. Edge explores Southern identity: NPR

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 has published cookbooks and culinary histories, and contributed to the New York Timesthe magazine now closed, Gourmet, the Food Network and NPR Weekend all things considered. He also hosts the television show True South.

Edge, the former director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, explored a wide range of topics, including Mississippi’s hot tamale trail, Atlanta’s multicultural Buford Highway, the history of fried chicken and the unsung cooks who fed civil rights activists.

Now he turns the lens on his own family’s troubled history in a new memoir titled House of Smoke: a southerner goes looking for a home.

Edge has been reluctant to tell his own story…until now

“I told myself for a very long time that I was looking for something new, that I was running towards something when I was writing,” Edge explains. “I realized that because I wasn’t writing about my own upbringing, my own life, I was running from something and I had to stop running.”

“Running” is the title of the book’s prologue. He opens up with what he says was the hardest memory from his childhood growing up in rural Clinton, Georgia.

“My mother – drunk, angry, scared – grabbed a gun and ran out the back door of our house,” Edge recalled. He ran after her.

“Is my mother going to shoot herself? Is she going to point the gun to her head and shoot, or is she just going to shoot that gun in the air? Is she going to create a spectacle or a horror?”

Edge’s father traveled the South as a federal probation and parole agent. His mother was a gregarious Little League Baseball broadcaster and history buff, but also a life-long alcoholic.

“I found her there with this gun on the ground next to her. She was crying into her blouse, as if inconsolable,” he remembers.

This was not an isolated incident. “She always said, ‘I’ll be different on the other side.’ And we never made it to the other side. »

But Edge says yes, and that’s what the book is about.

Finding a new Southern identity

Edge grew up surrounded by Civil War folklore and relics. His family lived on a historic farm 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 me in the 1960s, the Lost Cause was the shadow that loomed over your life,” he says. “And it weighed on mine, and it weighed on so many people who grew up in that era.”

The memoir recounts how he came to shed the mythology of the Old South and spent much of his career trying to tell stories showcasing a new or better South.

“It’s a complicated thing for me in this book because I recognize the hubris of it: thinking that I could really make a change in my area and who I’m making that change for,” Edge says.

In 2020, Edge left the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization he helped found, after some members called for him to resign. There were accusations that he, as a white man, had thrived while women and minority chefs and creators had not received such accolades or signatures. Edge says it was a disorienting time, but acknowledges the criticism.

“I was the loudest voice in the room at that moment. And I didn’t need to be the loudest voice in the room.”

Edge nevertheless says he is proud of the work accomplished during his two decades of tenure at the SFA to document the evolution of the American South.

“I think for all of us who love this place, on some level, I hope we can all recognize that criticism is an act of love,” he says. “It’s a desire and a desire to make your housing better, to have a small impact on your housing that makes the South better. That’s all the work.”

Armed with his cane, John T. Edge visits the former mule farm of Mississippi author William Faulkner. Edge is leading the University of Mississippi’s effort to convert the property into a writers’ residence called “Greenfield Farm.”

Debbie Elliott/NPR

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Debbie Elliott/NPR

A job that now takes him to a former mule farm in northern Mississippi, property once operated by literary icon William Faulkner.

Walking through the woods with a carved cane, he points to a towering oak tree in the horizon.

“Seeing this oak today, you recognize that Faulkner walked under this same oak, and the promise of what Faulkner dreamed of is still there.”

The land – Greenfield Farm – is now owned by the University of Mississippi, where Edge runs a lab that is developing the old mule farm as a residential retreat for writers.

“It’s a point in Faulkner’s life where he said, ‘My goal is to be a farmer who writes.’ And that was part of his philosophy,” 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 nourished Faulkner can now nourish 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 community, like Faulkner’s house, Rowan Oak, or Eudora Welty’s house and garden in Jackson.

“Mississippi has invested well in our writing history,” Edge says. “I want Greenfield to function as an engine of the future.”

He envisions it as a sort of new porch, a way to attract creative people to Mississippi.