Issue link: http://maconmagazine.uberflip.com/i/1538147
August/September 2025 | maconmagazine.com 29 LEFT The author as a boy (long hair and glasses, at center) with friends on a Little League All Star team. Photo courtesy of John T. Edge. fed the Allman Brothers; and the Nu-Way Weiners on Emery Highway, where my father and I ate chili dogs for breakfast. But something funny happened on the way to publication: Writing about these restaurants as second homes, I realized that I hadn't faced down the reasons I left my rst home. That's how, in the spring of 2023, I came to drive east out of Oxford, Mississippi where I live with my wife Blair Hobbs, bound for a motel that smelled of cumin and asafoetida. To write "House of Smoke," the memoir that arose from the ashes of the book my agent sold, I dug unsuccessfully for the Jones County Sheri report on the young man who died on the oor of my parents' bedroom. But I did nd a Georgia Bureau of Investigation report about the killing of a preacher, whose body was set on re in the back of a car just down the road from our house. Inspired by the Southern Studies degrees I earned at the University of Mississippi after unking out of the University of Georgia, I also tracked the reappraisal of the Confederate brigadier general who was born in our house and began to reckon why I saw him as a childhood lodestar. On a path to commune with my father, John Thomas Edge, who died in the summer of 2022 on his 96th birthday, I walked Cherry Street in Macon, bound for the corner where we watched the blind bluesman Pearly Brown play guitar and sing with a sign strapped around his neck that read, "God Love a Cheerful Giver." And I turned down the alley that connected the white marble federal courthouse, where my father worked as a probation and parole o cer, to the lunch restaurant he knew as Len Berg's and Macon now knows as the Kimchi Factory. Photos saved by my mother, Mary Beverly Evans Edge, who we lost to complications from alcoholism 11 days before our son Jess was born in 2001, brought my boyhood into focus, courtesy of a Jones County Little League game from around 1972, when she doused Bob Woodcock and other players on my victorious Red Sox team in Champagne, much to the chagrin of the Baptist mothers who heckled her from the stands. With those pictures as my guide, I returned to spring afternoons at Luther Williams Field in Macon, when Bubber Adams was the Stratford Academy coach, and my mother and I watched the Eagles Painting Home Our kitchen in Clinton, captured here by my friend Noah Saterstrom, the acclaimed narrative painter from Nashville, was so narrow and short that my mother compared it to a ship galley. She cooked vegetable soup here, forti ed with marrow bones; okra pods, not much bigger than my thumb, simmered with homegrown tomatoes until they roped. At rst, when I stared into the painting Noah made, I couldn't help but sense the menace that red stove eye suggests. Now, though, as House of Smoke begins to nd readers, and I step before crowds to tell stories about my brilliant and tragic mother, I focus on the big love that came out of that very small space. play from quilts we spread atop the cement roof on the home team dugout. A photo of my father's Karman Ghia boomeranged me to 1980, the year I graduated high school, when Wendy Chandler and the other bat girls for our Tattnall Square Academy team would "borrow" the car I borrowed from him, x a wire net to the bumper, and drag the in eld before baseball practice. A viewing of John Huston's 1979 classic "Wise Blood," inspired by the Flannery O'Connor novel and lmed in Macon, got me wandering the city in search of the pathways of my youth. That led me down an alley to the Downtown Grill to drink Richie Jones's whiskey and chat with friends new (a nancial adviser who collects antique silverware) and old (Katherine Walden, mother to my late childhood playmate Philip.) "House of Smoke" went to the printer in early April of this year. Two weeks later, I sat at the horseshoe counter of the Nu-Way on Hillcrest Boulevard with Johnny Hollingshed, while our "TrueSouth" crew captured the scene. He wore a big white hat and a big wide smile. Over a chili-slaw dog and a burger, as a long black hearse idled in the drive-through, we talked about the power of a place like Nu-Way to catapult a man back to childhood. The episode we lmed that day will premier September 2 on SEC Network, then re-broadcast on ESPN and stream via Hulu and Disney. Five years after my agent sold that other book, having now researched and written a more true version of my story, I recognize that I will always be the boy who answered the phone at 986-3426, studied history with Mrs. Fluker at Stratford and English with Mrs. Watson at Tattnall, and once ate three Old Clinton barbecue sandwiches on a random Monday. And I will be forever thankful to the people of Clinton and Macon who gifted me the stories I got to write and rewrite on a path to become the man I am today. "We talked about the power of a place like Nu-Way to catapult a man back to childhood." Keep reading! You can order "House of Smoke" by John T. Edge now from your favorite bookstore. Or pick it up in person on September 16.