John T. Edge, the celebrated “Faulkner of Southern food” and author of The Southern Belly gets my award for one of the most cogent and insightful comments about what it means to be Southern that I’ve ever read:
I believe that the South has been a benighted and tortured place for a long time — it still is benighted and tortured, but I love it — and one of the few things that blacks, whites, Jews, Christians, whomever can hold high and say we created this together is our music and food. It’s not stratified by way of class and not divided by way of race or religion: It’s something in which Southerners can take pride. I want to write about a South that’s evolving. Because I recognize that South myself; I recognize a multifaceted, multihued South that isn’t stuck in 1865, codified when the Civil War ended. The evolution of the South didn’t cease in 1965 during the Civil Rights movement: The culture evolved.
