It All Started With Catfish Stew

How my mother's family recipe found a new life

- BY JOHN T. EDGE

I GREW UP IN GEORGIA in the late 1960s and early 1970s on barbecue pork that was doused in a ketchup-blushed vinegar sauce and hot dogs that were smothered with cinnamon-spiked chili and crowned with sweet slaw. By my thirties, I had learned to enjoy scooping up Ethiopian okra stew with injera and mopping up Indian collards with corn roti.

For much of my life, whenever I talked about my favorite foods, I mentioned restaurant dishes like those. That changed in the late 2010s, as my wife, Blair Hobbs, and I got our son, Jess, ready for college. We realized that he didn't know enough about my mother, Mary Beverly Evans Edge, whose life, cut short by alcoholism, ended 11 days before Jess was born.

My memoir, House of Smoke, begins when I was a boy, with my mother running out the back door of our home, bound for the dark woods, and me frantically giving chase. The story I tell spans the Deep South, from that Clinton, Georgia, house where a Confederate general once lived to Columbia, South Carolina, where my parents met, and resolves in Oxford, Mississippi, where Blair and I choose to live and work. Across time and place, House of Smoke moves toward a reckoning with the troubled South that shaped my worldview and an appreciation for the many gifts my beautiful and tragic mother bestowed. And it all started with a recipe for catfish stew.