One October evening in 2021, John T. Edge met colleagues at the door of his home in Oxford, Mississippi, for a good-bye party, handing each a flute of Veuve Clicquot as they stepped inside. His wife, the artist Blair Hobbs, worked the crowd, passing out cheese wafers.
The occasion was bittersweet. After more than 20 years leading the Southern Foodways Alliance — the University of Mississippi-based organization dedicated to bringing diverse minds together to wrestle with the region’s painful legacies by delving deep into stories of the foods that define it — Edge was stepping down.
By all measures, SFA was a resounding success. Within 15 years of its first gathering of 50 Southern writers, chefs, and academics recruited by Nashville writer and activist John Egerton, the organization under Edge’s leadership had grown to 1,500-plus members with an annual budget of more than $1.5 million.
Credit: Crown
Credit: Crown
But for years, critics had complained that he’d been in the job too long. He was a middle-aged white man who controlled stories of women and people of color that weren’t his to tell, they said. Some accused him of using his position to bolster his reputation as a kingmaker of emerging voices waiting to be heard while expanding his influence as a leading Southern food authority to win book deals and other lucrative media gigs.
Edge assured them he recognized an exit strategy was needed and was in the midst of raising funds for a successor. But patience was running out.
He received his comeuppance in a webinar panel discussion sponsored by the James Beard Foundation that went live in summer 2020, three weeks after the murder of George Floyd. One word set the internet aflame: gradualism. He’d used it when asked what organizations like SFA could do to facilitate the radical change needed to achieve racial equity in food media. Nigerian-born chef Tunde Wey pushed back hard on Edge’s cautious, step-by-step response. Wey argued the power structure needed to change — fast. He said the time was past due for Edge to step down from his position and turn his job over to a Black woman.
Within days, Ronni Lundy, an SFA founder, wrote a letter and started a petition calling for Edge to resign. The New York Times got wind of it and published a lengthy story filled with his detractors’ grievances as well as his supporters’ defenses.
Social media mobs declared him a racist and a sexist. He lost his gig with the Oxford American, which had been publishing his pieces for more than two decades and had recently announced a celebratory retrospective of his work. And by the end of summer, SFA’s parent organization, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, called for a change in leadership, citing Edge’s use of the term gradualism in their decision.
As a former SFA member who’d gotten to know Edge at various symposiums and conferences and edited some stories he’d written for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution during my tenure as food editor, I often wondered how the ordeal had affected him.
I found answers in his new memoir, “House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home” (Crown, $30), which goes on sale Sept. 16. The book follows each stage of his life: Barbecue-loving Little Leaguer soaking up Confederate lore in small-town Georgia. Hard-partying UGA frat boy. Deal-making salesman in Atlanta cultivating a taste for world flavors. Earnest student at the University of Mississippi searching for new ways to move past Old South myths. Later in the book, he addresses that fateful webinar and its painful aftermath head-on.
Credit: Crown
Credit: Crown
In a video call, I asked him why he thought the word “gradualism” triggered his undoing.
“In the peculiar history of the American South, gradualism was a way to throttle civil rights,” he told me. “And for a white Southerner to endorse gradualism, given that context, is wrongheaded. It shows a lack of historical knowledge and reflection. And that’s not the person I want to be. I thought I had something to say when Black people were literally dying in the streets and while smart and urgent voices are straining to be heard. That’s textbook hubris. And I accept that about myself.”
He continued: “Do I regret my performance and comportment that day? Yes. But you know, that ended up being a pretty amazing prompt for me to do some work. And you know, I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my life. I know myself better.”
In the four years since he cleared out his office in Barnard Hall and his longtime SFA associates Melissa Hall and Mary Beth Lasseter took the reins, Edge has turned his focus toward interior work, rewriting the parts of his story he’d spent his life running from: a tumultuous childhood in a rambling old house beset by violence and alcoholism on the rural outskirts of Clinton in Middle Georgia where racism lurked behind Lost Cause lore.
He credits his late friend, Valerie Boyd, the Zora Neale Hurston biographer and University of Georgia professor, for convincing him his own story had value and showing him the way.
“Our son Jess was getting ready to go off to college, and I was trying in a multitude of ways to prepare him for that,” he explained. “I wrote a little instruction manual with different forms of advice. I also realized he knew a lot of stories about our family, but he didn’t know the story of my mother. I had kind of cloaked that story and removed it from the repertoire of stories we tell. So, I wanted to make that right.”
A historic marker in front of his childhood home extolls the valor of a Confederate general who was born there. As an only child who relished an audience, Edge climbed atop a washpot and regaled friends with the Old South myths he’d been fed. His mother, a gregarious woman with a flair for emotion and bravado, bought into those tales, often embellishing them with her own exaggerations.
Alcohol and depression brought out his mother’s worst self, he said.
To illustrate, he opens the book with a jarring memory of him darting out the screen door chasing after her, barefoot, at night as she disappears into the woods, and hearing the crack of a pistol. Fearing she’d shot herself, he instead finds her crumpled on a bench, sobbing, with the warm gun lying on the ground.
Drunken rants and suicide threats were common. He witnessed violence in other forms. Thieves regularly ransacked their home. He tells a horrific story of finding a young boy who did chores for them lying dead in his parents’ bedroom, having shot himself in what authorities ruled to be an accident.
To escape the tensions of home, he and his father, a calming force with a keen mind and voracious reading habits, would often take long drives that ended up at Old Clinton Bar-B-Q, the hometown joint he came to think of as his second home.
Later, when he’d landed a corporate marketing job in Atlanta after majoring in partying at the University of Georgia before flunking out, he began to realize the myths and lies of his heritage. He dug into the history behind that Confederate general immortalized on the family property and discovered he wasn’t a hero but a coward. Edge immersed himself in progressive politics and civil rights studies at the University of Mississippi, determined to rewrite those myths and right the wrongs he had inherited.
Credit: Erin Austen Abbott
Credit: Erin Austen Abbott
That work continues, but hard lessons through the years have reshaped his approach.
“Right now, it’s how I move through the world with empathy and apply myself every day when I get up at 5:30 in the morning,” he said. “What’s the thing I’m going to do that advances my morals and beliefs? It doesn’t mean I need to be out in front of a crowd with a microphone. It doesn’t mean I have to leap into somebody else’s struggle. It can mean I’m leading by example.”
These days, he spends his early mornings and weekends writing episodes for “True South,” the Emmy Award-winning food and travel program he hosts. Now in its eighth season, it airs on the SEC Network and ESPN and streams on Disney and Hulu. “It’s joyful work,” he said.
He is a writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, mentors students in UGA’s narrative journalism program and, three years ago, became director of the Mississippi Lab, a humanities project launched by Ole Miss. It will soon unveil Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, a literary retreat on land that was once William Faulkner’s mule farm.
“I believe this is something that will serve generations of Deep South writers,” said Edge. “So that’s my way of giving back to the state that has made my career possible and made my life possible.”
AUTHOR EVENT
John T. Edge. The Atlanta History Center presents Edge in conversation with Francis Lam, host of “The Splendid Table” on NPR, 7 p.m., Monday, Sept. 22. The event is part of the Sidney Isenberg Lecture Series. $12. McElreath Hall, 130 W. Paces Ferry Road, Atlanta. 404-814-4000, atlantahistorycenter.com
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
