SWEPT UP BY LOVE
Man turned to broom making after losing his farm, but was saved by the love of his life
MCNAIRY COUNTY — Inside the broom maker’s little workshop where hickory dust floats in the fading light, somehow time has been swept away.
It could be 1925. Or 1952. Or 2004. Or yesterday. Broomcorn grows out back in a holler full of hickory, cedar, oak and ash. The smell of your grandparents’ fireplace wafts through the trees.
They call this spot “The Bottom.” It’s a little stretch of farmland in a 100-year floodplain outside the tiny West Tennessee town of Selmer. It has only flooded once, and only because, as the legend goes, Papaw Hockaday killed two snakes in the corncrib and hung their carcasses over the back fence bellyup.
Everybody from around here knows it floods when dead snakes are hung belly-up.
The wood floors creak inside Eddy Jack Martin’s workshop, which is full of sticks and straw, hatchets and awls, sadness and joy. Martin is 70 now and the fact that his life has been redeemed by the presence of a good woman is an ingredient in every broom he makes.
You walk into his shop thinking you’re going to see brooms. You walk out knowing you saw love.
A good man is hard to find
It takes a particular skill to make a broom you would proudly bring home to your parents.
The ability to wait.
“You can’t be in a hurry,” said Martin, black bandana wrapped atop his head. “You can’t make broomcorn seed germinate faster than it’s going to germinate.”
It can take five months for the broomcorn to grow to its maturity. Martin carefully strips it, bundles it, whacks its bristles into broom-length, spins it around a sturdy handle and then
sews it flat or round.
After spending a few hours with Martin, you come away thinking a truly good broom is as rare as a truly good person.
A broom maker “has to enjoy helping somebody else,” he said.
He makes between six and 10 brooms in a day. The prices top out at $40, which is so cheap because the guy who designed his website died in the dial-up days and Martin doesn’t know how to go in and change the prices.
Everyone tells him he’s got to charge more.
“I’m afraid to ask for too much,” he said.
Baby Doll
He was destined to be a farmer.
Born in 1953 on the 300-acre Hockaday family farm, Martin wanted the same lifestyle as his ancestors. His mother, Mildred Hockaday, had married Charles Edward Lester Mckinley Martin, who everybody called “Shorty.”
Martin took over the Hockaday row-crop farm − cotton, corn, cowpeas and soybeans − until a drought that lasted from 1981 into 1984 wiped him out.
He declared bankruptcy and was able to keep only 11 acres.
Martin says he succumbed to the pressures of nouveau-poverty.
He smoked a lot of dope in the mid-1980s. When he heard that a local drug dealer wanted a new television set, Martin broke into a house and stole the TV to trade for a couple of bags of weed.
He was arrested and brought before Judge Revere, whose nickname was “Severe Revere.” Martin was sentenced to two years in prison.
He was prisoner No. 73-846, and he felt like such a smaller number.
When he got out, he found himself in the Happy Time bar drinking his feelings. The Happy Time bar was popular because it had a stage and featured local bands.
“I had lost everything,” he said, including his dignity.
That night at the bar, Martin heard a voice.
“The hair on my neck stood up,” he said.
He turned around and saw a beautiful brunette bellowing the blues.
When he mustered up the courage to greet her, the first thing he ever said was a lie.
She was 36 years old with two kids. He was 32, but he told her he was 36.
She had sung on the “Red Foley Show” when she was 4 years old. And she became a regionally respected singer with regular gigs in Memphis where, as her career progressed, she would wow audiences with her power on “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and then punch them in the gut with “The Thrill Is Gone.”
Her name was Virginia Catherine Fisk. Everyone called her Dee.
After he got to know her, and after he fell in love, Martin called her something else.
Baby Doll.
A kiss that lasted 30 years
Sometime near the end of 1986, Martin and Baby Doll were sitting in a truck at a shrimp fry. A drunk guy came to the truck’s door, and thanked Martin for bringing 100 pounds of shrimp. While talking with the truck door open, the drunk fell into Baby Doll.
She retreated across the truck seat and ended up in Martin’s arms.
He kissed her.
“I wasn’t planning nothing,” he said. “But after that kiss, we didn’t leave each other for 30 years.”
They were married in 1987.
Martin was working on an oil rig at the time. He got some time off and invited Baby Doll to visit his family farm. Every relative he ever knew, and some he didn’t, showed up to take a look at her.
“They loved her,” he said.
After that first supper, he took her for a tour of the property. He showed her the abandoned workshop where his grandfather had made brooms years earlier.
When she saw the tools, she asked what this place was. He explained his grandfather had taught him how to make brooms there.
“This,” Martin said, “is a lot of work.”
“This,” she said, “is folk art.”
In that moment, their lives were changed.
In her eyes
Eddy Jack stopped oil rigging and started making brooms because it made him feel like something more than a failed farmer and a convict in Baby Doll’s eyes. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her,” he said. They started going to craft shows where they would charge a dollar to see a broom-making demonstration. Watching Martin pirouette through the process is like watching a horse run.
There is beauty in every twitch.
He and Baby Doll would pile into a ‘69 Cadillac with a trailer hitch and pull their broom-making show all over the South. He would get $50 from each school to appear, and another $300 from selling brooms to the teachers.
Martin calculates that he has made brooms in front of countless school children in more than 30 years. “We thought we was in hog heaven,” he said.
At a craft show one day, a boy asked Martin a question, and the broom maker didn’t have an answer. He had been caught unprepared.
It was Baby Doll who grabbed Martin by the beard and said he needed to put more effort into his connection to the children. He needed to tell stories about the brooms and his people.
“So I became a storyteller,” he said.
The first lady’s broom
The Martins decided to market their brooms by sending freebies to famous people. They started sending brooms to the governor’s office, and they were given the Tennessee Folklife Heritage Award by former Gov. Bill Haslam. Current Gov. Bill Lee and his wife Maria recently visited the workshop.
They put their brooms to use.
“We have one broom in our kitchen for everyday cleaning as well as an old-fashioned cobweb broom we love using to keep our back porch neat and clean,” Maria Lee said. “Every time we use one of the brooms, we’re reminded of our time spent with Mr. Martin at his shop ...”
She appreciated Martin’s skill.
“The brooms we received are great works of craftmanship that have spanned centuries in his family,” she said. “Each handle is unique and beautifully made, and their sturdiness is a testament to the quality of their timeless design.”
He’s had his brooms on Broadway. He made one with a breakaway handle for Stacy Keach in “The Taming of the Shrew.” He made one for Christopher Walken in “Peter Pan Live!” He sent brooms to Walt Disney World. He made a broom for musician Keb Mo.
He almost became world famous when he heard the first movie was being made about the Harry Potter book series. He sent them a curve-handle hickory broom. He got a polite letter back saying the production company wasn’t interested.
He remembers going to see the movie with Baby Doll. When Harry rode his very similar looking Nimbus 2000, Martin leaned over to Baby Doll and said, “It’s probably some kind of plastic sh**.”
He has traded brooms for everything — a set of tires, hotel rooms and a bedazzled jacket that Baby Doll liked.
Once, outside a club in Memphis, a drunk got obnoxious and got too close to Baby Doll in the parking lot. Martin pulled out a broom and beat the man with it until he went away.
One more trade
In 2012, Baby Doll was performing in Memphis when she noticed she couldn’t catch her breath after one of her power ballads.
She was diagnosed with lung cancer.
And then it spread to her liver.
Then to her blood.
Martin took her to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, praying for treatment to bring his wife fully back to him.
“I made a broom for every one of her doctors,” he said.
But the magic of the brooms couldn’t bring her back. Dee “Baby Doll” Martin died Dec. 16, 2015. She is buried at Mt. Gilead Cemetery on the outskirts of Selmer, a couple of hills away from the little workshop.
Eddy Jack Martin hasn’t cleaned up the place much since she died. He lives in 1,400 square feet of homemade brick and used-to-be with his two dachshunds — Sulphie and Trixie. (For Sulphie, he traded a broom).
In her last days, she gave the love of her life a gift that caught him completely by surprise.
It was a drum kit.
She told him it had been used by the drummer for Bo Diddley.
He thought he was a crappy drummer until Baby Doll told him he could play. She always saw what he didn’t see.
“You’ll need something when I’m gone,” she told him.
Not long before she died, she booked him his first gig because he might never have done it on his own. He said he practices enough to be an ok “2 and 4 drummer,” meaning he can keep a beat.
Martin now plays in a band called Dawg Creek. The drum kit sits in the corner of the workshop across from the stacks of broomcorn. As he tells a stranger to look closer at the kit, a tear drips out of his eye.
He keeps a small picture of Baby Doll on the snare drum.
Reach Keith Sharon at ksharon@tennessean.com.