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April 1992
Saints Alive!
Eddie Owens Martin, a visionary artist of extraordinary range and raunchiness, died in 1986. This fall, the gates to his fantastic hideaway deep in the heart of the Bible Belt are swinging open at last.
Pasaquan, the dazzling one-monk monastery that Eddie Owens Martin--aka St. EOM--spent nearly 30 years building on a sandy ridge in west Georgia, has turned a corner.
It's been six years since Martin, a self-taught artist and architect who said he was guided by inner voices and by visions that popped up on the screen in the back of his head, laid out the African chieftain's robe he wanted to be buried in and fired a bullet into his right temple. Martin, who was 77, apparently killed himself when the accumulated pains of heart, kidney and prostate ailments grew too great.
After his death, his estate and its trove of hundreds of oil paintings and water colors, thousands of pages of drawings and mounds of costumes and ceremonial jewelry were in legal limbo for several years. He had never paid income taxes. The overseers of an art museum in Columbus, a mill city 30 minutes northwest of Pasaquan, on the other side of the sprawling Fort Benning military reservation, considered taking custody of Martin's exotic estate and then got cold feet.
But now, thanks to a local historical society that's bestirred itself, and the prodding of Fred Fussell, until recently the Columbus Museum's chief curator, Pasaquan is being looked after. Starting this fall, volunteers will be on duty at Pasaquan--it's about five miles from Buena Vista, in Marion County, just up the road from former President Carter's hometown--six days a week to show visitors around for $5 a head.
You might remember Martin. It's been seven years since he received, posthumously, his allotted 15 minutes of national fame and then some with the publication of Tom Patterson's St. EOM in the Land of Pasaquan. That was the slim but richly illustrated, wildly engaging oral biography--reviewed glowingly by, among other publications, The New York Times--that sketched his bizarre two-part life.¯
Part One covered the Ratso Rizzo years that Martin, who ran away from home when he was 14, spent in the streets and gutters of New York City as a male prostitute and minor-league hustler, and, after his body began to wear out, a gambler, pimp and fortune teller. Part Two commenced in 1957. That's when Martin, heeding the advice of his inner voices, returned to a farm house and a plot of scrubby land, up a gentle slope from the Kinchafoonee Swamp, that he inherited from his mother. He called himself St. EOM--his initials, pronounced "ohm"--and set about constructing the garden of other-worldly delights that is Pasaquan.
I toured Pasaquan a few weeks ago with Fussell, whom I've known since our Explorer Scout days in Phenix City, Ala., until the early 1950s a wide-open gambling town across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus. We were accompanied by his wife, Cathy, who teaches English and drama in a Columbus high school and who grew up in Buena Vista, and their 10-year-old son, Jacob Xerxes. Jake, who took his middle name from a potter Fred knows, was wearing an REM t-shirt and wooden beads that had been strung by Martin.
St. EOM's wonderland is quite a sight. Left alone by his neighbors, inspired by a vast store of home-grown marijuana ("Roll me a fat one," he would often tell visitors), Martin made Pasaquan a brightly colored, orderly, one-stop display of many of the world's religious symbols. It's one of the grandest such arrays anywhere, incorporating every shade of exterior house paint ever mixed by Sherwin-Williams.
Martin told Patterson, a regional arts writer who recorded his raunchy recollections off and on for three years, that Pasaquan means "the place where the past and the present and the future and everything else comes together." And so it does. The walls of Martin's kitchen are lined with images of levitating human figures dressed in the "power suits" that, Martin said, would allow people whose thoughts were right to defy gravity. He surrounded the house with loopy walls studded with shields and the faces of people he said he'd known, including Tillie the Toiler, Stella Dallas and a couple of Hell's Angels. Some walls are topped with hammered tin, others with throbbing rattlesnakes. One stretch seems to be capped with the silhouettes of seals and big beach balls. On special occasions--and nearly every occasion was special when he had an audience--Martin would slowly descend a curved walkway from the pagoda to a raised, round sand pile, beating time with a drum and chanting. Once in the sand, he'd trace cosmically significant patterns with his toes.
"If there's ever a time when the word unique applies, it applies to Martin and to Pasaquan,'' says William A. Fagaly, assistant director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, which year after next will stage a major exhibition on southern visionary artists. "What he did was extraordinary. Pasaquan is like a shrine."
It's not a shrine for the faint hearted; St. EOM was a little short on couth. One stretch of wall you encounter when you leave the house by a particular side door is covered by renderings of supernaturally endowed men and women. In the early 1970s, Martin added Pasaquan to a local annual garden club's tour of homes. And his single condition was agreed to; everyone had to leave the house by that side door. Martin stood by, decked out in full costume, smiling wryly, as clusters of blue-haired ladies stepped from the dim house, squinted in the bright Sunday Sun and saw the wall.
Visionaries like Martin are said to be hot stuff these days. That could be, but many visionaries--people like Martin who've had one or more guiding spirits stop by from time to time for consults--labor anonymously or in vain. After they're dead, their paintings or sculptures or whatever is often as not tossed into the garbage, left to buckle and rot or be bulldozed.
Over the years, Martin made friends who have helped keep the bulldozers at bay. One is Fussell. During his tour at the museum, he spent much of his time cruising the lower Chattahoochee Valley's two-lane blacktop roads looking for folk artists whose stories were eventually told in a book and in a record album. Fussell first met Martin in 1961, when he drove out to have his palm read.
Other rescuers and friends of St. EOM's live in Buena Vista, a prosperous county seat that looks like it hasn't been touched by the recession. Until recently, if you wanted to take in the splendors of Pasaquan, it would help if you knew about In Season, a knick-knack/antique/flower shop on the town square. Call 912-649-4669, and a volunteer would be tracked down to guide you. The crowds have been growing larger even though Pasaquan's not officially opened to the public yet. A few months ago, Pasaquan made it into a "Presidential Pathways" guide of tourist attractions in the slice of west Georgia between Warm Springs, where Franklin D. Roosevelt had his Little White House, and Plains, just southeast of Buena Vista, Jimmy Carter's hometown.
You don't have make your way to Marion County to see what St. EOM wrought; some paintings and sketches are already in a museum near you or may be soon. Fussell says Martin's pieces are in the collections of museums and galleries in Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Montgomery, Chattanooga, Columbia and at several institutions in Georgia.
Like many artists, visionary or otherwise, Martin left his financial affairs in a mess. In life, he seems to have all the cash he needed. When he wasn't painting, he told fortunes at $25 a pop--his customers included carloads of officers' wives from Fort Benning and college students out for a kick. (Martin once told an interviewer that he learned how to penetrate a client's "psyche barrier" on the streets of New York. There was so much danger, he said, "You had to develop a third eye in the back of your head.") After his death, nearly $40,000 was discovered in a checking account. Another $46,000 was stashed in an ammunition box of Martin's. Fussell found nearly $3,000 in a paper bag hidden in a pile of blankets and old newspapers. But the cash wasn't immediately available for Pasaquan's guardians; Martin had never paid state or federal income taxes, and he had never taken out a social security number. It all took a while to untangle.
The matter of who would take title to Pasaquan was anybody's guess for a time.
And so it's been Buena Vista to the rescue. Many people there earn regular paychecks in a poultry processing plant, plucking and deboning the chickens whose nuggets are eventually served up by fast-food outlets. A two-tone gray courthouse sits in the middle of the town square. The town, originally called Pea Ridge, needed a snappier name after becoming a seat of county government in 1840s; by coincidence, things were going well for the United States in the war with Mexico, so Buena (not pronounced Spanish style) Vista, site of a battle won by greatly numbered America troops, it was.
To anybody who grew up in the Old South, where there was little tolerance for weirdness (among the poor, anyway), seeing God-fearing businessmen pitching in to preserve the blasphemous works of a share-cropper's son, a fellow who, at one point in Phase One of his life, was known to his New York chums as the Tattooed Countess, is a wonder. A Pasaquan Society, a more or less independent offshoot of the Historic Society, was established two years ago; it's got about 150 active supporters. In addition to locals, the Society has attracted writers, college faculty members and other "artsy types" from all around the region. Rock musicians from Athens and Atlanta have also chipped in. In the early 1970s, Martin, an enthusiastic if not especially gifted guitarist, sometimes drove to Atlanta to sit in during club sessions. For the past two years, the Society's thrown a party at Pasaquan on July 4th, St. EOM's birthday; the county sheriff sometimes details convicted drunk drivers with community service time to work off to pull weeds.
Volunteers have been cheerfully helping out. During a midday meat-loaf and pecan cobbler break the Fussells and I took in Buena Vista, Chris Rodgers, a cousin of Cathy's who sells real estate and operates a B&B, paused at our table to tell us about two bus loads of elderly Baptists from Columbus he'd shown around Pasaquan a couple of weeks earlier. He said he'd misplaced his keys to the front gate, so they'd had to make their way through the underbrush to reach the compound (the eight-foot high fence topped with three strands of ferocious barbed wire that stretches across the driveway is essentially a facade, there to make a statement to potential intruders). It was rough going; some of the visitors were on walkers. But there was plenty of giggling; Martin's X-rated book had been passed around on the busses. A good half dozen people recalled that they had been to Pasaquan, when they and St. EOM were younger, to have their fortunes told.
Why is everybody bothering? Some of Pasaquan's neighbors sound as cynical as St. EOM. "When he was alive, Martin was that homosexual out there in the woods doing God-knows-what," said a world-weary resident of Buena Vista. "Now people are talking about the value of preserving folk art. They see dollars signs in their eyes. They envision all kinds of tourists flocking to Buena Vista."
There's also the fact that Martin was, well, local. Not many people in Buena Vista knew much about his Phase One. Many of those who did joked about his "New York ministry." After the Patterson book appeared, a sister-in-law of Martin's spread the word, howling with laughter, that in one picture of Martin posing drag, he's wearing one of her dresses.
"He'd drive into town in his bright red Ford station wagon in full regalia," Mulkey W. McMichael, president of the Historic Society and the owner of In Season, recalled. "Turban. Bright robes. Maybe a cape. Black pants with bells on the side. Beads in his beard. Little children would run. Most other people thought he was off-center. But they knew his family." To most people, he was just old Eddie who could read cards and tea leaves. Where he lived was "Eddie Martin's place." To reach there, you drove out "Eddie Martin Road." And he wasn't a charity case. If on one of his weekly trips into town for another load of paint, cement and roofing material, he stopped by a snack bar on the square to wolf down a plate of raw hamburger, so what? Or that he once kept a pet boa constrictor? He paid his own way.
Martin, who had been on that next-to-the-bottom rung of the local socio-economic ladder, that of a white field hand, before fleeing to Greenwich Village, was close to many of those on the bottom, Marion County's blacks. They called him "Big Mama." He usually hired young black men to be his assistants and paid them more than the prevailing local wage. Typically, he'd detail the outlines of a design with a trowel, dab on a spot of Sherwin-Williams and leave it to a helper to fill in the blanks. A former assistant, Thomas Williams, was elected Buena Vista's first black mayor a few years ago. He subsequently became the first mayor of Buena Vista to be convicted of cocaine distribution charges and sent to prison.
There is a master plan of sorts for Pasaquan. Simply put, it's to eventually squirrel away enough money to shore up the house, which is showing traces of dry rot, install a sprinkler system, provide parking for cars and buses and rehang some of the paintings and watercolors that have been in storage since his suicide.
In 1983, Martin, who could be oddly prophetic, told a writer for Smithsonian that he didn't expect Pasaquan to survive him for long. "There's no place like this anywhere, and people will come and deface it when I die," he said. "And then everything I've done will be forgotten." There has been vandalism--Pasaquan was quickly stripped of its kitchen appliances, hot-water heater and window-mounted air conditioners after Martin's death--so one day, maybe, a full-time watchman will be provided for. And the rest of the fence.
In the meantime, Richard Hyatt, a senior writer with Columbus's daily newspaper is living, rent free, at Pasaquan in a one-room shop where St. EOM once cut metal and dried marijuana. The Society wants to have somebody around, coming and going, to discourage disrespectful teenagers and turkey hunters.
A few days after my visit to Pasaquan, I gave Hyatt a call. He said he living there because, after a recent divorce, the price was right. I told him it must be a hell of a place to take a date. He laughed, and said that Pasaquan has an almost magical effect on his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. "She's been here maybe a half dozen times, and she always gets a little hyper," he said. "She's excited by the colors, and she's especially drawn to the big totems. She has to touch them and talk to them. I think Martin was on to something."
Michael Wright
