- 10 months ago
In this episode of Biscuits & Jam, Sid Evans sits down with famed southern writer and the host of SEC Network’s ‘TrueSouth’, John T. Edge. John talks about his latest book ‘House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home’, which might surprise audiences by focusing more on his tumultuous Georgia upbringing with his larger-than-life mother than it does on his food expertise. Plus, listen as John discusses why southern cooking is worthy of scholarly study and how his life’s journey lead him from the frat house to academia.
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00:00Well, John T. Edge, welcome to Biscuits and Jam.
00:03Glad to be back. Thank you, Sid.
00:05So, John T., I wanted to start at the top just asking you about Birmingham,
00:11because I know that this is a place that you have a lot of connections to.
00:16You've been coming here for a long time.
00:18You've written about this city.
00:20It's a really meaningful place for you.
00:23But just tell me a little bit about your relationship with Birmingham.
00:26It's deep.
00:27I moved here not long after I flunked out of college in my first college run.
00:33I moved here soon after I got a corporate job.
00:37I was a salesman.
00:38I sold a data stream of financial analysis to fixed income traders and foreign exchange guys.
00:44A far cry from what I do now and lived in the South Side.
00:49And that's the first time I went to Highlands Bar and Grill.
00:52This would have been 1987, probably, 86.
00:55And, you know, that was the beginning of my love affair with this city, was that restaurant.
01:01I also went to some place.
01:03It was like a, it was a chili house.
01:06And they also had scuba diving equipment.
01:09Somebody in the audience is going to know who that is.
01:12Somebody in your audience for Biscuits and Jam is going to know it.
01:15Okay, see, I told you.
01:16Here we go.
01:16This has always been this beautiful, mysterious town to me.
01:20So I got to know this town better through the Southern Viewways.
01:24I see my work there.
01:26The founding meeting for that organization was held in this very building where we are today at Southern Progress, Southern Living.
01:34And then as my wife and I courted and married, this was the town to which we would escape.
01:44We'd come to eat at Chez Fon Fon and Highlands Bar and Grill in Bottega.
01:49And more recently, we'd come to drink at House of Found Objects and have lunch at Johnny's, which is what I did today for Greek and three food.
01:59I think they can stand up to anyone.
02:00So this is a place we return for joy, for great food, for great drink, for friends.
02:08Well, I hope you keep coming back as often as possible.
02:11It's always great to have you in town.
02:13I want to get right into your book because there's a lot to talk about.
02:18And it's called House of Smoke, Searching for Home.
02:24You know, as someone who's known you for a long time, I think I've known you for probably 20 years.
02:28And I thought I had an idea of what this book was going to be about.
02:35And I was wrong.
02:38There was so much more to your story.
02:42You know, I thought this might be a book that really kind of centered on your food journey.
02:47You had another fantastic book that came out called The Pot Liquor Papers, which was, you know, much more of an academic book in a lot of ways and kind of looking at Southern food culture.
03:06But this one is a very personal story.
03:10I wanted to just have you read the prologue, which is very short.
03:16And I think that y'all will get a very quick idea of why I was surprised as I got into this book and why it was kind of startling.
03:26I mean, this prologue is an answer to people.
03:30So you wrote another book about food.
03:33Food is in this book.
03:34It's throughout this book.
03:37But it is not the focus of this book.
03:40So I'll read this by way of explanation and introduction.
03:43The prologue is called Running.
03:44I burst out the screen door, bare feet on gravel.
03:50Twenty feet ahead, my mother runs toward the dark woods, her red house dress trailing like a cape.
03:57She couldn't take another minute inside our house.
04:01She couldn't take another minute inside her head.
04:05The light from our porch doesn't reach where she's going.
04:09At first, I can see the pistol in her hand.
04:12But as my mother crosses into the clearing, the red of her dress fades and everything turns black.
04:20The crack of that pistol splits open the night.
04:24I stumble, catch myself, and plunge forward.
04:28Past the sand pile where, just a few years before, I plowed toy dump trucks along pretend roads lined with mud skyscrapers.
04:38I find her in the rock garden, among the pink azaleas, beneath a cedar arbor.
04:45Mala sits on a bench beside the old jail kitchen that she never quite turned into an antique shop.
04:52She cries into her dress.
04:55Tears fall down her face.
04:57The pistol lies on the ground.
05:00Smoke trails from her cigarette.
05:02Was that a warning shot?
05:04Did my mother push the door open and run toward the woods to fire her pistol into the blue-black sky?
05:12Or did she plan to shoot herself?
05:15Did she aim above her earrings, change her mind, and crumple to that bench?
05:21Five decades later, I stand at the edge of that memory and peer back in,
05:27like I'm watching a scratched print of a black-and-white film about my childhood.
05:31She wanted to make a break.
05:34She wanted to make a change.
05:36And there was no better way to mark before and after than a run toward the woods and a shot in the night.
05:44I ran for a long time, too.
05:46Away from that house.
05:48Away from my family.
05:50Away from what my past taught.
05:53Away from what the South demanded.
05:55Until finally, I turned to face the dark woods.
05:59I just want y'all to say that for a second.
06:03I mean, that, you know, that's an incredibly powerful way to open a book.
06:10And John T., I want you to tell me a little bit about your mother.
06:15You know, this book is so much about her.
06:17And I'm curious, you know, what was she like kind of in that moment?
06:26And why did you want to start the book where you did?
06:31Opposite those words is a picture of my mother in this book, a black-and-white of my mother holding me on high.
06:38I'm maybe two months old in one of those dressing gowns that a two-month-old boy wears in the South.
06:45And she's holding me high up against a mirror.
06:47And you can see so much pride in her face.
06:51My parents didn't think they'd be able to have a child.
06:54My father volunteered for Big Brothers.
06:56And my mother pined for a child.
07:01So when I was born, she was 41, especially when I was born in 1962.
07:08It was a bit of a miracle that I came into this world.
07:12And my mother was this woman of great social intelligence.
07:17If she was in this room, she's the person y'all would all want to talk to.
07:21She was bigger than life.
07:23There's a part in the book where I explain, like, my mother took me to go see, took me and my father to go see Elton John on his Goodbye Yellow Brick Road tour.
07:34My mother talked us backstage.
07:39Just bonkers.
07:41My mother from small-town Georgia at the Fox Theater in Atlanta.
07:45We were backstage with Elton John because my mother talked them into it.
07:49On that same trip, she befriended Rosie Greer.
07:52Remember Rosie Greer, the football player turned actor?
07:56And Joel Gray at another event.
07:58Like, just crazy.
08:00And there was such beauty in my mother.
08:02And in this book, you will see that.
08:04You will come to know her.
08:05But there was another side of my mother.
08:07And alcohol stole my mother from me and my father.
08:12Depression and violence, quite frankly, that defines the first fifth of this book.
08:19It gets brighter.
08:20The book does.
08:21I get brighter.
08:23I promise what I've shared with y'all is not the whole of this book.
08:28But that tension between my mother's great joy and beauty and then a darker side, that's the stuff of the South as well.
08:38And in many ways, my relationship with my mother is kind of a mirror of my relationship to the South, too.
08:45Yeah, one of the things that I found so compelling about this story, your story, was that your mom, in a lot of ways, was a source of trauma for you.
09:02And you went through a lot with her.
09:04But she's also someone that you have a lot in common with.
09:08Yeah.
09:08You love a stage.
09:12You love a story.
09:15You love a good story.
09:17You know, you kind of learn more and more about that throughout the book.
09:22And so I'm just wondering if you could maybe tell like a, you know, a funny memory of her or something that, you know, touches on that side of her.
09:32The kind of grandiosity, the in search of a stage mother.
09:36You know, when I was a boy, I have two friends here from my high school years at Tattano Square Academy in Macon.
09:47I'm going to tell a story from a few years before that when my parents had sent me to a different private school, Stratford Academy in Macon.
09:54And my mother, this was, I was maybe, I don't know, fifth grade, sixth grade, something like that.
10:00We'd go watch baseball games and that was at Luther Williams Field, which was their equivalent of Rickwood Field here in Birmingham.
10:08A grand old stadium with beautiful bleachers reaching back up from the field.
10:15My mother would bring a quilt when we'd go watch the Stratford Eagles play.
10:19My mother would always bring a quilt and a picnic basket and she would have, she would have Cokes and the like and the picnic basket and the quilt.
10:28She's spread on top of the dugout.
10:31So she, you know, you can sit in, you can sit, you know, right there in the stadium and watch.
10:36It wasn't a full room.
10:39You can get really close to the action.
10:41My mother wanted to get closer still.
10:42So she would lay that quilt on top of the home team dugout.
10:47And we, my mother and I, would climb over the rail while everybody watched.
10:53Um, and then we would lay that quilt out and we would sit there perched on the edge of the dugout, almost on the field.
11:00And my mother would say, don't look back.
11:02Don't give me your detractors an audience.
11:04And now you just sit on the dugout every time when you go to a baseball game.
11:13Yeah.
11:13Give me the dugout every day.
11:15I want to ask about something else that's, that's a little dark to say the least, John T.
11:20And then I promise we'll move on.
11:22But this is really, you know, an important part of, of your story.
11:27And you lived in a house that was, that was broken into over and over again.
11:32I mean, just, uh, it sounds like it was a regular occurrence that you almost came to expect.
11:38From the woods.
11:39You remember the prologue I read about the dark woods?
11:41Yeah.
11:42You also, um, had, uh, someone who, um, who died in your house.
11:49Um, a very young man, um, a young boy, um, who was what, 12 years old, um, who shot himself
11:58in your house.
11:59Just tell me about that moment and, you know, what, how you, how you processed that.
12:07How did you, uh, get through that?
12:11Yeah.
12:11Um, so Sid's describing a time from when I'm about eight till I'm about 16 where, um,
12:18unreasonable violence, um, defined my childhood in ways that, you know, my friends here who
12:26were sitting in the audience who knew me that age didn't know any of this.
12:29Um, I didn't know what to make of this, but you know, it, it, it, um, I discover the young
12:36man, I heard my mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table.
12:39We were conjugating verbs.
12:40I can remember that.
12:41And we had salmon croquettes for dinner and grits.
12:44I can remember that.
12:44Um, and I can remember, um, hearing a small pop in the other room.
12:50Um, and my mother heard the pop too, but it was an old house.
12:55Like our house was not a fancy one, but it was built in 1821.
12:58So it was always some odd sound.
13:01Y'all know what old houses are like.
13:03They're creaking and cracking.
13:04Um, but this set, this sounded different.
13:06So went through the hall to my parents' bedroom.
13:10When I was researching this book, I went back to my house to kind of retrace the steps to
13:14make sure someone else lives there now, obviously.
13:17Um, but to retrace the steps, make sure I had it right.
13:19So I get to the other side and there I find this boy, not much older than me, bleeding
13:26to death on my parents' bedroom tiller.
13:29And then Sims describes the attacks from the woods.
13:32Um, I didn't know what all the make of it.
13:36Um, I didn't know how to process it.
13:39Um, it left me unsteady moving out of those moments because, you know, when violence comes
13:46at you, the rational mind wants to understand, so what happened?
13:49What did I do to bring this on?
13:51I couldn't make sense of it.
13:53And in a lot of ways that's left me unsteady for a long while, not being able to make sense
14:00of what was coming at me.
14:01And it also left me with a great abhorrence of guns.
14:06Um, it left me, um, forever, um, fearful of violence and it left me, you know, so many
14:14people, I'm sure there are a lot of hunters out here and I don't disrespect hunters' use
14:20of guns, but my relationship to the woods is different than many of your relationship
14:25to the woods.
14:26Um, for many people, the woods are a place of solace and quiet.
14:30Um, for me, the woods were a place where violence began, um, because those attacks on our house,
14:38people came from the woods, like sneaking up tree to tree.
14:42My father one time stayed home, um, to potentially intercept the people who break into our home,
14:48um, and found these young men who lived in the, lived just on the other side of the woods
14:54from our house, like 200, 300 yards from our house.
14:59Um, so the, it changed the way I thought about the woods.
15:02Um, it changed the way I thought about, um, myself moving through the world.
15:07I couldn't make sense of what was going on.
15:11I couldn't make sense of my environment.
15:13Can we talk about something?
15:14Let's start.
15:15Yeah, we can.
15:15I mean, we can, we can.
15:17Um, I mean, you know, the, the first, the first, the prologue that you read was called
15:21running, but you know, you, it was about your mother running.
15:25It's also about you running.
15:27Right.
15:27And, and you were, you spent a long time running from a lot of that.
15:33It wasn't until we made a true South show in 2020.
15:37Um, and we made, and we went back to my mother's grave.
15:39I was estranged from my mother for a long while.
15:41Um, she died 11 days before our son, Jess was born.
15:45Um, Jess never knew her in 2020.
15:47We made a true South show.
15:49We went to my mother's grave, um, in Bowman, South Carolina, the first time I'd ever been
15:54there, um, and in that moment, we were making that show, we were writing that show, um, this
16:01line emerges and it is, um, you know, for the longest time I thought when I was traveling
16:07the road, going to eat at this barbecue joint or that hot dog joint, I always thought that
16:12I was running toward that, toward whatever that new discovery was, whatever the future
16:17held the next person to meet.
16:19And I realized in that moment in 20, we were making that show when I'd finally gone to
16:25my mother's grave that I could quit running because that was running away.
16:28It wasn't running towards something.
16:30I was running away from my past.
16:32Um, some of what I said in the prologue, running away from the South, running away from my family.
16:36Um, and I can, I realized that I could quit running away, um, that I was home and I was
16:40home with Blair.
16:42Yeah.
16:42You know, you mentioned, um, you mentioned, uh, South Carolina and Bowman and, um, I've
16:49got to tell a funny story.
16:51So, uh, the last time that we did a podcast together, uh, I was asking John T about his
16:58family history and, uh, his mother's maiden name is Evans.
17:04And, uh, your son's name is Jess Evans Edge.
17:09Jesse Clifton Evans Edge.
17:11A lot of words.
17:12So, uh, we started talking about family history and, and, uh, he said, you know, yeah, that's
17:19where my family dates to.
17:20And I said, that's funny because my family actually dates to Orangeburg, South Carolina
17:24too.
17:24It didn't take us very long to figure out that we're actually cousins.
17:29Yeah.
17:29I mean, the, the, the same revolutionary war, like we got people who fought in the revolutionary
17:34war in our family.
17:35Um, one who, um, is killed by a Tory at a camp, at a camp meeting or something like that.
17:42Yeah.
17:44Yeah.
17:44It goes back to a guy named Roland.
17:47Roland and Richard.
17:47Yeah.
17:48Yeah.
17:48You do talk about your family history, um, in this as well.
17:52What did you kind of think about, you know, as you made some of these discoveries and,
17:59and started to learn more about, about your past?
18:02The thing I realized is as a boy, I didn't really know that much about my family history
18:06that dated back to the revolutionary war, because my mother, um, was a house proud woman who
18:12loved the house in which I grew up in Clinton, Georgia.
18:15That house had been owned by a U S Senator, um, Alfred Iverson.
18:20Alfred Iverson led the secession of Georgia from the union.
18:23His son, um, Alfred Jr.
18:26Was born in that house in 1829, took his first breath there.
18:29He, as a boy, I understood him to be a hero of the civil war.
18:33Um, as when I start researching this book, I realized something I had an inkling of before,
18:38but no more fully now that he, um, led his troops to slaughter at Gettysburg.
18:43Um, and so my mother, when I was growing up, kind of adopted that family, the Iversons as
18:51part of our own.
18:52And, and our family was kind of cloaked and kind of obscured from me.
18:56Um, I learned more about my family researching this, but my mother claimed the Iversons because
19:02they came with this kind of a lost cause mythology attached to them.
19:06And you, uh, were even as a young kid, kind of a, um, historian, uh, maybe a misguided historian,
19:16but you were standing out in front of your house and giving tours, right?
19:20I mean, people would come to see our house.
19:21It was a historical marker out front.
19:23Um, and I would give people tours that there was a wash pot out front turned over and I
19:28would climb on top of that wash pot and hold forth.
19:30Um, my mother in, in me then.
19:33So John T, you, you have a, you have a reputation as a, as an academic, you've spent your life
19:38in academia.
19:40Um, you have, uh, you have taught, you've written books.
19:46Um, uh, but your path was not always so clear when it came to academia.
19:52And, um, there's some very funny sections of this book about, uh, early days at, at Georgia.
19:59How did you go from animal house to, to, to academia?
20:06How did you go from someone who literally did not go to class?
20:10And I know this is a long story, but was there a, what was there a moment?
20:15Was there kind of a pivotal moment where maybe a light came on and you said, okay, this is
20:20not working.
20:21My challenge was I watched a second run playing of animal house in the summer of 1980 before
20:27I went off to college and I was like that, that's what I'm going to do.
20:30Um, and I'm not, I'm not even joking.
20:32Like that was like my instruction reel to watch.
20:36Um, and, and I did it.
20:38Uh, I had a great time in college.
20:40Um, I was lost.
20:42Um, but I had to hit bottoms.
20:45Like I, I was in, in Athens at the university of Georgia fraternity, social chair, booking
20:51really great bands like the flat new jets.
20:53I once booked the flat new jets for 50 bucks and a handle of gin.
20:58Um, and yet, you know, here I was flunking out of school, not going to school.
21:04So I had to hit bottom and start over.
21:06So, um, I made a rash decision and just moved out of attorney house, moved to Atlanta, got
21:13a job.
21:14I'm working at guest quarters, which was the first sweet hotel.
21:18There was one up on perimeter, um, up North of town.
21:21And I got a job there as a waiter and began learning.
21:24And within, um, I don't know, within about six months I was managing the restaurant.
21:29Um, within a year I was out.
21:31Uh, but I began a corporate career.
21:33Then I just knew I needed to make a change and I needed to prove myself that was something
21:38other than a drunken frat boy.
21:40But really it was, it was, uh, it was Oxford, Mississippi and where it seems like you, you
21:48kind of had an epiphany about what you wanted to do and what you wanted to study and devoting
21:55your, your life really to, uh, to food and, and the, the stories that can be told through
22:00modern food.
22:01Um, and I, I want to ask you about, uh, something specific, um, that I think seems like an early
22:09light bulb went off for you, um, when it came to hot tamales.
22:12So you, you go to, you go to Ole Miss and you're at the Senate Center for Southern Culture
22:18and, um, um, you figure out that nobody had really told the story behind, um, certain Southern
22:30foods and hot tamales was, it was a, it was a great example of that.
22:33Can you talk about that a little bit?
22:35Sure.
22:35So, um, I moved to Oxford to get a, uh, undergraduate degree and then a master's degree in Southern
22:40Studies.
22:41It's kind of interdisciplinary study of the South.
22:43And there were people, um, there who were studying the front porch as a social space in
22:49the South from an architectural perspective.
22:52And there were people studying beauty queen culture in the South and, and certainly literature
22:56and music.
22:57And I realized that I could study the food of the South, barbecue joints of my and the
23:03meat and three and the working class cooks of my childhood were worthy of documentation and
23:09study in the same way my colleagues were taking on other facets of the South.
23:14The thing that fascinated me most was I drove Mississippi.
23:17I began to explore, um, and, um, to the West in the Delta, not that far away from Oxford,
23:24people were selling hot tamales, um, by the side of the road.
23:28You'd usually buy six or a dozen at a time and you'd get, um, saltine crackers with it and
23:34a little hot sauce.
23:35And it made no sense to me.
23:38What is this food that we associate with Mexican American culture?
23:42What's it doing in the Mississippi Delta?
23:44Um, this place we think of as the most Southern place on earth, um, according to one book, um,
23:51why is it there?
23:52Um, it made no sense to me.
23:54And so I started doing, um, research.
23:57I ended up going to the Catholic diocese in Jackson, looking for records from the old,
24:05um, plantation commissaries.
24:07And because I had this suspicion that maybe it is because Mexican American workers came
24:14into the Mississippi Delta.
24:15And sure enough, in the, in the records of the Catholic diocese, we find that, um, in the
24:20early years of the 1900s, um, Mexican American workers were bought into the Mississippi Delta to
24:26harvest the cotton, um, because African American workers were leaving the Delta in droves when
24:31the getting was good.
24:33Um, so as Mexican Americans brought, um, their labor in, they also brought their foodways in
24:39and tamales are a remnant of that moment.
24:41What did you decide to do when it came to like telling that story?
24:45I mean, how do you kind of capture that, um, and bring that to life?
24:50One of the first efforts that the Southern Foodways undertook, Southern Foodways Alliance
24:54undertook was oral history work.
24:56So, um, an early colleague, Amy Evans was our first oral historian and she began traveling
25:02the Mississippi Delta.
25:03She also did a lot of work in the low country of South Carolina, um, and in barbecue pits
25:08all across the South to interview old guard tamale makers, to ask them to tell the story
25:15from whom did you learn this, um, why do you roll tamales?
25:19Um, is this your second job or is this, you know, do you see this as a business you want
25:23to build?
25:24Tell us the story of your family and how tamales came to you apart because most of the people
25:30you find now in the Mississippi Delta making tamales, um, are African American.
25:35They're not Mexican American.
25:37Um, this food that was once a part of the Mexican American culture has transferred fully
25:42into black and white culture in the Delta.
25:44So those oral histories, um, painted this kind of portrait of the Delta by way of that
25:49one food.
25:49So, um, you know, John T. mentioned at the beginning that, uh, Southern Foodways was founded,
25:55um, here.
25:56Um, it wasn't actually in this building.
25:59It was in the adjacent building where I think they, they held the first meeting, um, back
26:05in, in, yes, in 1999, um, which, uh, was an extraordinary gathering of people.
26:13One of the prime movers behind that whole, um, enterprise was, uh, a guy named John Edgerton.
26:20Um, and, and John Edgerton, um, you quoted him in the book.
26:26You said that he spoke to, quote, a pervasive spirit of inclusiveness that is deeply rooted
26:33in the belief that Southern food is the region's most positive and appealing symbol.
26:38So this is an organization that really started out with a really, um, just, you know, such,
26:45uh, a meaningful, uh, kind of mission statement.
26:50And I'm just wondering, what did John mean to you as a, as a mentor?
26:55Yeah.
26:56John had two big books and they imprinted on me in a big way.
27:00Um, one was called speak now against the day.
27:03And it was about the generation before the civil rights movement, the kind of wild eyed
27:07dreamers of the past.
27:09The second book was Southern food on the road at home on the road and in history.
27:14And that was a history of Southern food that came out before the book on the civil rights
27:19movement.
27:19And he taught me that by studying the work of cooks, um, I might get at the power dynamics
27:27in the South, um, I ended up writing, um, in the pot liquor papers about a woman named
27:32Georgia Gilmore, who went to that first meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association in
27:37Montgomery as the bus boycott was beginning and showed up with a hamper of fried chicken
27:41with the idea she would sell bone-in chicken sandwiches on white bread to raise money for
27:47the bus boycott because she knew they would need, if they quit the buses and began using church
27:53station wagons and the like, they would need gas for those station wagons.
27:57They'd eventually need and tires for those station wagons.
28:01So she's the literal example of the power resonant in food culture.
28:07And I would have never written about her if I hadn't read John and if John hadn't mentored
28:11me, um, both as director of the Southern foodways Alliance, but also as a writer and friend.
28:16So they elected you as the director of the Southern foodways Alliance here at that first
28:22meeting, right?
28:23But John was a mentor for you for, for a long time after that.
28:28Um, even kind of, uh, deep into, um, when you were doing lots and lots of programming,
28:34correct?
28:35When did John die?
28:36Yeah.
28:37John passed away.
28:38He passed away in 2013.
28:392013.
28:40So, um, he must've been there through, through quite a bit of that, that early kind of, um,
28:48programming.
28:49You also said in the book that John was really one of the first people, um, to kind of recognize
28:56this connection between food and civil rights and, um, and I'm wondering if you can talk
29:02about that a little bit more, especially being, you know, where we are here in Birmingham.
29:05John was the person who paved the way for us to do an event here in Birmingham in
29:092004, it launched the 40th anniversary of the civil rights act of 1964, which is y'all
29:16would call, um, forced the integration of restaurants across America.
29:21Um, one of the single places, the, the suits that was the basis for that was Ollie's
29:27Norwegian, which for the longest time was on 65, just out the downtown.
29:32Some people in the audience are nodding, you know, it, um, that case, um, which I didn't
29:38know about until John introduced to me was one of the things on which we focused when
29:42we came here for that event.
29:44For that event, we also, by way of the introductions that John made, we met with Chris McNair, um,
29:51the father of Denise McNair, one of the little girls killed in the 16th street church bombing.
29:57Um, we had, um, a breakfast of sausage biscuits and ambrosia, um, in his office as he showed
30:06us a relic from that bombing.
30:09Um, he showed us one of his daughter's shimps.
30:12Um, it was just a surreal and beautiful moment.
30:15Um, and in that same moment, Charles Moore, the great photographer from here in Alabama
30:19who shot many of the kind of iconic photographs, you know, from Life magazine and other sources,
30:26he joined that as well.
30:28You know, those were people that were kings to me.
30:31I would never have known those people would never run a program of events like that if
30:35it hadn't been for John.
30:36Um, so John C., you left the Southern Big Ways Alliance in 2021, uh-huh, and have really
30:43been focused on, uh, True South, uh, which is your series on the SCC Network.
30:49Um, but you've also been continuing a lot of the same kind of work, um, talking to as many
30:56people as you can, shining a light on places around the South that, that are not getting
31:01covered, um, everywhere else.
31:04Um, and, uh, a recent episode, you actually, uh, took a trip back to Clinton, Georgia and
31:14back to your old house.
31:16Uh, talk about that a little bit and what that, what that experience was like for you.
31:20True.
31:20My work with the SCC Network on True South is this passport to travel the region.
31:26And for the most part, we focus on, you know, working class restaurants in various towns
31:32across the South.
31:32We set them in conversation.
31:34We usually focus on two restaurants in one place.
31:36We set them in conversation with each other to tell some truth about the place.
31:40We did an, uh, an episode last year in Jasper, um, Alabama, not far from here.
31:46One was a working class sushi restaurant and one was a biscuit restaurant.
31:51You know, the South's future and past in one place.
31:53But this time for this episode, this year, we went back to Clinton, Georgia and, um, it
32:00functioned in two ways.
32:01We got to go to the restaurants.
32:03My father introduced me to, we've talked a lot about my mother here.
32:07Um, but you know, my talent as a writer, um, and, and really my moral grounding comes from
32:13my father and my love of restaurants comes from my father as well.
32:17Um, we went to new way wieners, um, which was, you know, as a boy, I would eat chili dogs with
32:23there with my father in the afternoon and before school, we would eat breakfast at new way.
32:28Um, fresh air barbecue was also in that episode.
32:32Um, my father was a federal probation and parole officer, which means he was on the road a lot
32:37like I'm on the road now.
32:39Um, and he loved barbecue and barbecue was his reward, his kind of grail for his own road
32:45trips throughout Georgia.
32:46And we all traveled often to fresh air in flow Villa, um, Georgia open since 1929, the
32:56kind of mother church of Georgia barbecue.
32:58Um, I got to return there, um, to bring our camera crew who were from all across the country
33:04and watch them fall in love with that barbecue restaurant.
33:06Just the same way I did when my father took me there.
33:08And didn't you grow up building a place called old Clinton bar?
33:11I did.
33:12In, in old Clinton, um, like many restaurants, there's a place called old brick pit in Atlanta
33:17in a similar way that were inspired by fresh air.
33:21If fresh air is 29, you see other places open in the fifties and sixties and seventies.
33:25And even look of them as comparable.
33:28They're low slung buildings with, um, a big wide porch.
33:32Um, cedar holds up the porch.
33:35Um, there's oftentimes wood shavings and sawdust, um, out front, um, you know, a, a dog leg flu
33:43cooker.
33:43So the, the smoke cools as it goes through that dog leg concrete flu cooker.
33:49That's all starts with fresh air and old Clinton, the joint that was a mile up the road from
33:55my house borrowed from fresh air as well.
33:57What was it like for you to go back to that house?
34:00It was surreal to step back into my house.
34:03You know, if you, y'all know this, if, if you've moved away from the home in which you
34:07grew up, when you step back into that, when you cross that transom, you're eight again
34:12or 10 again or 12, you know, whatever that age is.
34:15That's the way it was for me.
34:17Um, the gentleman who owns our house now, I like him a whole lot.
34:21His name's Chuck Johnson and Chuck and I could not be more different.
34:25Um, our political views, our social views, um, who our heroes are to each other, completely
34:31different.
34:32Um, he looks at the South and he looks at Clinton and that house kind of in the way I did when
34:38I was a boy.
34:39Um, but he's been so kind in welcoming me back to his house.
34:43He works now as a subtler, which is, um, a term I didn't know until I began researching
34:48this book, a subtler is someone who, um, supplies troops, um, as they're on the move.
34:55So he supplies Confederate and, and Yankee reenactors, um, civil war battles with uniforms
35:03and the like when they're doing reenactments.
35:05Of that trip, um, you spent how many days there?
35:09Filming, um, that was a four day trip.
35:12So you spent a good amount of time there.
35:14Um, was there, was there one kind of singular moment, um, that stood out to you?
35:20You're kind of facing some old ghosts and you're living in those same woods and that
35:25same property where all those things happen.
35:28Um, was there something that kind of stood out out of those four days?
35:31Yeah, there's the two moments.
35:33Um, one is dark and one's light.
35:36Um, the darkness is standing on the patio outside of our house at about the pot, about the
35:42spot where that wash pot was.
35:44I told y'all about that.
35:45I would stand on the lecture about the Confederate general, um, look standing there.
35:51And then I realized that I was looking straight at my bedroom window.
35:55Um, and then when I looked the other way, there were the woods.
35:59And I realized that, you know, every, every day of my childhood, I was always looking at
36:04those woods.
36:05I didn't even think about that before those woods from which the threat came.
36:09Um, the lightness came, um, when we threw a party for my old little league friends, I
36:16was a fiendish little league baseball player.
36:17I loved, I lived for little league baseball.
36:20Um, I was never any good, but I could, if you get me on first base, I could steal home.
36:25Uh, I'm not joking.
36:28I, I, I loved baseball.
36:30Uh, but my friends with whom I played little league baseball, um, came to this little club
36:36house just outside of town.
36:38Um, and like people I hadn't seen in 45 years since I left Jones County, Georgia at the age
36:45of 17, came walking in the door and we fell back in the conversation.
36:49We were talking about the carpool lines that we were in.
36:52We were talking about their parents and my parents, you know, people were telling me stories
36:57about my mother.
36:58My mother was perennially our team mother.
37:00Um, and people remember those days, like in midget league football, my mother convinced
37:06Rankin Smith, who at that point owned the Atlanta Falcons to send us all assigned football
37:11for the start of our season.
37:13You know, my mother was that person.
37:16Um, and my friends remembered her so finally, they didn't know any of the darkness.
37:20Um, they just knew what a great champion of our team and those young men she was.
37:27Um, and that was such a gift to me because in that moment, you know, I got to recognize
37:32that the best of my parents, my father's talent for words, my father's morality, my mother's
37:40social skills, the best of my parents now lives in me.
37:43Um, in a way by writing this book, I got to jettison some of that worst of me.
37:49Um, I got to welcome my mother back into my life.
37:52Um, and I got to recognize that the things that I do to serve the larger good are so much
37:59grounded in my father's impulses.
38:00I mean, so there was, there was a, there was a therapeutic aspect of this book.
38:06There's a therapy for you in a lot of ways.
38:08I would say that writing it in therapy because it's too damn hard to be therapy.
38:12Um, but, um, I would say that the, the end result of this is a bomb.
38:18I would say that the end result of this is an acceptance and a love of my, of my people
38:24and my place.
38:25There's only one recipe in this book.
38:28And, uh, we actually ran it and I still have done it in the last issue of Southern Living.
38:34Um, and it's called Blair's Catfish Stew.
38:38Yeah.
38:39And, uh, the real cook in the family is Blair, honestly, sitting right over there.
38:43So, also a brilliant artist.
38:45But this is, this, this, her Catfish Stew is a riff on your mother's Catfish.
38:49Right.
38:50And I'm wondering of all the recipes in all the world, um, and all the recipes that have
38:55been in your life.
38:56Why did, why did this feel like the one that you wanted to put the book and what is this
39:00recipe need to be?
39:01Yeah, I mean, this recipe was the pathway, um, for me to reconcile with my mother.
39:08Um, when Blair and I were young in our marriage, um, we decided together to cook that recipe,
39:17um, as a way, um, for my mother to have some presence in our lives.
39:21I, for the most part, shut her out of our lives.
39:25So that recipe dinner by dinner over time, um, brings her back into our lives.
39:31My mother's Catfish Stew was her documentation of her father's Catfish Stew, which she cooked
39:38on the Edistow River, um, in the low country of South Carolina.
39:41It's really good.
39:43It's, um, there's a little bit of bacon.
39:46My mother used streakling.
39:47Blair used, Blair uses Alan Benton's bacon, advisedly so.
39:52Um, there's a little bit of potatoes in it.
39:55Blair borrows, um, some from Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock.
39:59Their great book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, um, includes a Catfish Stew recipe as well.
40:05Um, but that recipe is included because that recipe set me on a path to write this book.
40:13That recipe was, um, a mechanism for me to bring my mother back into my life.
40:19And the end result of this book is, um, a reconciliation, um, with my mother.
40:26And there's no better way to, to, um, memorialize that than by that recipe.
40:32Well, it sure does look good.
40:34It's good.
40:34And, um, um, and I'm wondering, John T., like when you, what do you think about when you
40:40make it, what goes through your mind?
40:42I think about, I think about how much my mother would have loved to be at our table in Oxford.
40:49You know, my mother grew up in the small town South.
40:51My mother wanted out of the small town South so bad.
40:54She wanted to be like Betty Davis on Broadway.
40:58Like my mother wanted to be up and out of the small place that limited her.
41:04Um, and now Blair and I live in a different kind of small town South.
41:09We live in Oxford, Mississippi.
41:11Um, when Blair Kupstadt's stew and friends gather, they're artists and writers and poets.
41:18And my mother would have thrived in that world.
41:22Um, we oftentimes serve it in these Spode, China, uh, bowls that my mother, um, collected
41:29and eventually passed to me that have handles.
41:32And my mother loved to tell people that if there are handles in a bowl, you may drink from
41:37your bowl.
41:38Um, she loved the subversion of that and people looking at her.
41:41She also liked to eat asparagus and tell people, now you may pick up your asparagus with your
41:45hands if you wish.
41:46The other day, the, there's a passage at the end of the book where, um, someone sent us
41:52caviar, um, a couple of years back and I was in search of mother and Pearl spoon cause I
41:59wanted to get it right.
42:00My mama taught me right.
42:01Um, I was in search of a mother and Pearl spoon and couldn't find one.
42:04Um, and at the edge of my comprehension, I remembered, oh yeah, like my mother said that, that blown
42:11glass could be an acceptable substitute for mother and Pearl.
42:15And I had these cocktail stirrers on the bar that were gifted like many things from my
42:20mother.
42:20And, and I went to the bar to pick up those cocktail stirrers, um, and think, you know,
42:25they have a little divot on the end.
42:27Maybe those can work.
42:28And I realized, oh my gosh, these are not cocktail stirrers.
42:31These are my mother's caviar spoons.
42:33Um, so she's still with me in so many ways.
42:37Well, I'm going to leave it there.
42:39Um, and I just want to say thank you to, thank you, Bug.
42:42Um, thank you to, uh, Faisal Dali and House of Sound Objects.
42:48Thank y'all for coming.
42:49And, uh, John T. Edge, thanks for being on Bithkits and Dance.
42:51Thank you, Sue.
42:52Thank you, Sue.
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