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At 6 a.m. on an October Saturday in Oxford, Mitchell and his brother Aubrey are inside a 53-foot trailer that has Mitchell's smiling face painted on the outside. Two hogs, each weighing more than 170 pounds, wait to be cooked on a pair of grills. A couple of symposium attendees stand outside the trailer in the morning chill and watch Mitchell work.

For their benefit, Mitchell narrates as the hogs are butterflied. As Aubrey cuts sheets of fat from a hog's rib cage, Mitchell says, "Later on, we're going to heat that stuff. We're going to make soap. ... We're going to do that in the new restaurant." (An hour later, Aubrey dumps the scraps of fat in one of the nearby Dumpsters. Asked if the soap at The Pit will be made of rendered pig fat, Hatem said they are open to anything.)

After the pigs are ready, Mitchell uses a garden hose to fill two aluminum trays with water. He empties a bottle of his own Pitmaster brand barbecue sauce into the trays, followed by apple cider vinegar.

"This is a real trade secret I'm getting ready to show you," Mitchell says to the couple, his breath coming out in wisps.

Mitchell adds black pepper to the trays, and then places a log in each. "We're marinating the wood," he declares.

Eventually, Mitchell tells his small audience what he learned about barbecue from his father and grandfather. They taught him to soak the wood in a vinegar and pepper marinade, not to sit up all night with the pig, replenishing the coals. He learned to "set it and forget it," arranging the hog over banked hot coals and wood, not lifting the lid until the pig is done.

Mitchell's mom and dad owned a small grocery store on the east side of Wilson. After high school, Mitchell earned a sociology degree from Fayetteville State University, served in Vietnam and lived outside North Carolina, including some time in Boston.

In the mid-1980s, Mitchell returned to Wilson to help care for his ailing father. This time in his late 30s, by Mitchell's own admission, was marked by immaturity, a love of all-night poker games and a belief that he was "a special gift" to the ladies. His father disapproved of the gambling and urged Mitchell to start a business, often lecturing while his son drove him to Greenville for cancer treatments. "If you use your talents, you could be a multimillionaire," was his familiar refrain.

Two weeks after his father died, Mitchell again found himself at a poker table. But he couldn't win a hand. In his frustration, Mitchell's mind flashed to his father's words: Stop playing poker and use your talents. "That's the turning point of Ed Mitchell being redefined," he says.

Cooking up a new business

His father died in June 1990, and his mother, Doretha, returned to the grocery store. One day, Mitchell says, he stopped by to find her depressed by the slow pace of business. She had sold only $17 worth of groceries that day. Mitchell offered to make her lunch to cheer her up. She said, "I have a taste for some old-fashioned barbecue."

Mitchell says he cooked a 34-pound pig on a cooker outside the store. He chopped the hog and his mother seasoned the meat. While they were eating lunch, a customer came in and asked, "Oh, Mrs. Mitchell, you all selling barbecue, too?" She looked at her son. Mitchell nodded. When Mitchell returned that night to see his mom home, she had perked up. She had sold all the barbecue. Just as they were closing up for the night, another customer asked if they had any more. Mitchell says he told them: "We'll have some more tomorrow."

"That's how it happened," he says. "That is how it started." Within months, Mitchell says, he was making barbecue at the store full time, and eventually the grocery became Mitchell's Barbecue.

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