{"id":2008686,"date":"2025-09-09T11:18:14","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T11:18:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2008686"},"modified":"2025-09-09T11:18:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T11:18:14","slug":"john-t-edges-memoir-confronts-southern-myths-and-childhood-traumas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/john-t-edges-memoir-confronts-southern-myths-and-childhood-traumas\/","title":{"rendered":"John T. Edge\u2019s memoir confronts Southern myths and childhood traumas"},"content":{"rendered":"

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But for years, critics had complained that he\u2019d been in the job too long. He was a middle-aged white man who controlled stories of women and people of color that weren\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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\u2019s cautious, step-by-step response. Wey argued the power structure needed to change \u2014 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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019 grievances as well as his supporters\u2019 defenses.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s parent organization, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, called for a change in leadership, citing Edge\u2019s use of the term gradualism in their decision. <\/p>\n

As a former SFA member who\u2019d gotten to know Edge at various symposiums and conferences and edited some stories he\u2019d written for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution during my tenure as food editor, I often wondered how the ordeal had affected him. <\/p>\n

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I found answers in his new memoir, \u201cHouse of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home\u201d (Crown, $30)<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Explore<\/span>Southern chef shares culinary identity shaped by terroir<\/a><\/section>\n
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Credit: Crown<\/p>\n

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In a video call, I asked him why he thought the word \u201cgradualism\u201d triggered his undoing. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn the peculiar history of the American South, gradualism was a way to throttle civil rights,\u201d he told me. \u201cAnd for a white Southerner to endorse gradualism, given that context, is wrongheaded. It shows a lack of historical knowledge and reflection. And that\u2019s 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\u2019s textbook hubris. And I accept that about myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued: \u201cDo 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\u2019m happier now than I\u2019ve ever been in my life. I know myself better.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\u201cOur son Jess was getting ready to go off to college, and I was trying in a multitude of ways to prepare him for that,\u201d he explained. \u201cI 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\u2019t 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

Alcohol and depression brought out his mother\u2019s worst self, he said. <\/p>\n

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\u2019d shot herself, he instead finds her crumpled on a bench, sobbing, with the warm gun lying on the ground.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 bedroom, having shot himself in what authorities ruled to be an accident.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Later, when he\u2019d 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\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Credit: Erin Austen Abbott<\/p>\n

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Credit: Erin Austen Abbott<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

That work continues, but hard lessons through the years have reshaped his approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, it\u2019s how I move through the world with empathy and apply myself every day when I get up at 5:30 in the morning,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat\u2019s the thing I\u2019m going to do that advances my morals and beliefs? It doesn\u2019t mean I need to be out in front of a crowd with a microphone. It doesn\u2019t mean I have to leap into somebody else\u2019s struggle. It can mean I\u2019m leading by example.\u201d<\/p>\n

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These days, he spends his early mornings and weekends writing episodes for \u201cTrue South,\u201d<\/a> 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. \u201cIt\u2019s joyful work,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

He is a writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, mentors students in UGA\u2019s narrative journalism program and, three years ago, became director of the Mississippi Lab<\/a>, 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\u2019s mule farm. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cI believe this is something that will serve generations of Deep South writers,\u201d said Edge. \u201cSo that\u2019s my way of giving back to the state that has made my career possible and made my life possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

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AUTHOR EVENT<\/b><\/h3>\n
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John T. Edge.<\/b> The Atlanta History Center presents Edge in conversation with Francis Lam, host of \u201cThe Splendid Table\u201d 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<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n