En Route to the Diddy-Wah-Diddy Landfill While the Dogwoods Were in Bloom

By Malcolm R. Campbell

Every spring, fast food junkie Peter Martin packs his wife, Mary, and son, John, into his SUV and crisscrosses the back country of the Florida Panhandle searching for Diddy-Wah-Diddy, a legendary town offering travelers all the free food they can eat. Mary thinks they’ll never find it. John draws maps to show where they’ve been in years past. Peter has more hunches than fleas on a hound dog about the town’s location. More often than not, they get lost.

This year, they find Diddy-Wah-Diddy. It’s better than they expected. They begin to eat more than they should. Then Peter has a horrifying accident and disappears. While the powers that be treat Peter’s fall from grace as business as usual, Mary and John wait for him, and while they wait they keep eating all they can eat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Jul 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386658566

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En Route to the Diddy-Wah-Diddy Landfill While the Dogwoods Were in Bloom

Stories from Tate’s Hell

by

Malcolm R. Campbell

Copyright 2017 Malcolm R. Campbell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author, with the exception of brief quotations within a review.

This book is a work of fiction. While some of the places referenced may be real, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

For Lesa

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Author’s Note

En Route to the Diddy-Wah-Diddy Landfill While the Dogwoods Were in Bloom

Also by Malcolm R. Campbell

Author’s Note

Diddy-Wah-Diddy is, perhaps, the best known of Florida’s mythical places. The original story about a hidden-away town with unlimited food was among the folk tales collected by Zora Neale Hurston while working with the Federal Writers Project in 1938. Hurston wrote that Diddy-Wah-Diddy was reached by a road that curves so much that a mule pulling a wagonload of fodder can eat off the back of the wagon as he goes.

Bo Diddley further popularized the legendary town in his song Diddy Wah Diddy recorded for Checker Records in 1955. You can find an unadorned re-telling of the original folktale in Kristin G. Congdon's Uncle Monday and other Florida Tales. En Route to the Diddy-Wah-Diddy Landfill While the Dogwoods Were in Bloom is a re-imagining of the town in modern times.

En Route to the Diddy-Wah-Diddy Landfill While the Dogwoods Were in Bloom

COME SPRINGTIME WHEN the Florida dogwood was in bloom across the panhandle between the Apalachicola and Ochlocknee rivers, Peter Martin made a crown of the flowers that still suffered Christ’s scars