Read an early ~3000 word excerpt from the Catfish Dream book project that appeared in the Southern Foodways Alliance Gravy Quarterly publication.
The neighbor jerked the wheel and pulled to the side of the dirt road to watch. He left his door open and scrambled onto the hood of his car to get a better look at the farmer, Ed Scott Jr., who was standing about a hundred yards off on a bluff of freshly exposed clay in what had recently been a soybean field. Scott was looking down at six feet of absent earth that stretched for acres. From a distance, it appeared to the neighbor as if Scott was staring into a crater left by a meteor. Even atop the hood of the car, the neighbor couldn’t see what was down there. He saw Scott wave his hands and whistle. He heard an engine roar and saw smoke billow. From the neighbor’s vantage point, it looked like the smoke came spewing directly from the earth. This optical illusion only heightened the magic. Scott is speaking to the ground, the neighbor chuckled to himself. And it’s doing as he says...