Searching South

TO LOOK AT HIS WORK, you’d think John T. Edge knows the South like almost no one else.

Throughout his career, the writer and researcher has focused on Southerners’ stories, especially of the culinary kind. For more than 20 years, he directed the Southern Foodways Alliance, a nonprofit organization that is widely regarded as a vessel for the region’s unique brew of regional race, class and food culture. In 2017, building on that experience, he published The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, which builds on the work done by the SFA in a narrative that spans the civil rights movement to the present.

And since 2018, as host of the Emmy-winning SEC Network program TrueSouth, he has crisscrossed his home region with a curious mind and a hungry belly, introducing viewers to shop-owners and songsmiths, quilters and farmers, gas-station cooks, pitmasters and miners. Always, food is at the heart of the story: Each episode conjures a keen sense of place through local restaurants, flavors and specialties.

It’s easy to see Edge at the center of it all and assume he has all the answers. The man himself, however, might argue with you about that.

“As I've traveled to make TrueSouth,” he says, “I've come to understand that if I'm genuinely asking questions and handing the mic off to people who are different from me—look different from me, think differently from me—I won't ever fully know the South. These travels and the destinations are inexhaustible. That to me is emboldening and exciting.”

This fall, this lifelong Southerner treads new territory with a memoir, House of Smoke, in which he turns the questions on John T. Edge seeks all the region’s flavors. himself, telling the story of his upbringing in a historic home in Clinton, Georgia, and the wide-ranging journey that took him away from that place, through Athens, Ga., and Atlanta in the 1980s, and onto Oxford, Mississippi, where he makes his home today with his wife (and fellow Southern lifer), the artist Blair Hobbs.

In the book, Edge doesn’t shy from revealing hard truths and difficult moments. For years, he admits, while starting important discussions around Southern food, he looked everywhere but his own past. “I was running from something while telling myself I was running towards something,” he says. Now, he opens up about childhood trauma, college fumbles and controversies about racial representation that led to his resignation as SFA leader in 2020. An air of self-discovery hangs between the lines like the scent of a home-cooked meal rising from the oven.

“I was doing my work to make change in the South,” he says, “but now I realize that I need to make change in myself and change in the South. One depends on the other. That came out of this book.”

Edge’s storytelling seeks to dismantle the idea of a single South, or one that’s stuck looking backward. The region is simply too multifaceted and rapidly evolving for such a simplistic narrative to hold any weight. And so his journeys continue. This fall, in season eight of TrueSouth, he visits Ocean Springs, Mississippi; Charleston, South Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; and, in a poignant return, his own hometown of Clinton, where he grew up in a house once owned by a Confederate general.

He sees no shortage of other spots to seek out. Galveston, Texas, ranks high among his current fascinations.

“There are parts of Galveston that feel quite broken,” he says, “and where you can see the mending happening. And there are parts that feel as though they've endured without much change since the 1800s.” Another place that holds mystery for him is one he first explored long ago: Atlanta’s Buford Highway, a renowned road lined with restaurants representing the world’s cuisines and traditions. The area illustrates Edge’s idea of what it means to be a Southerner now: Less hanging onto history, more driving the future.

“Are you contributing to this region? That's what it means to be a Southerner in my mind,” he says. “The training wheels for that kind of thinking for me came as I drove Buford Highway. The South is defined more by change than it is by tradition.”

Considered in sum, Edge’s work forms a rich portrait—a complex slice of our complex country’s pie. And if less certainty is, in fact, kind of the point, Edge’s work has led him to one significant point of clarity. A popular notion of the South is that it’s defined by duality. In the Drive By Truckers’ song “The Southern Thing,” on the band’s 2001 Southern Rock Opera, Patterson Hood sings, “Proud of the glory, stare down the shame.” When I bring this up with Edge, he nods in recognition. It’s an old line, after all, and once upon a time it made sense to him, too. But today, he longs to motor past it. That thinking, he explains, is rooted in anger. And what the South needs now is love.

“Anger drives you away from acceptance,” he says. “I want to channel that anger into something constructive to make a difference in my place.”