Baltimore riots, 1968: A man lies dead in the Free State’s largest inner city in the days following the assassination of Martin Luther King, who had been fatally shot outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

A Voice of Baltimore Feature, an excerpt from

     ROOBY TAWR, a novel in progress
     set in mid-20th Century Charm City
 
                             By Joel Foreman
 
Zebadee Fullwood took a bullet in the lung on Biddle Street during the 1968 riots and died on the way to Union Memorial Hospital.

He could have survived. The ambulance medic working on Zeb was a fully competent, seasoned fireman named Mick Braden. If Zeb hadn’t mouthed off, Braden probably wouldn’t have done what he did and Zeb would have lived.

Braden and Zeb knew each other — tangentially — from the time when Zeb was pulling the Rooby Tawr molds around the corner from Engine No. 38, the fire station on West Baltimore Street, slightly down from Fremont.

On warm days Braden was often out front jawing it up with his buddies. They’d get a laugh and snicker when Zeb passed by. Braden had been stationed at No. 38 since 1953, the year before the Department hired its first Negroes.

“We’re going to hell!” is what he had to say about that.

Anybody who knew Zeb would agree with Miles Michael’s opinion that Zeb “had a mouth on him.” Miles was Reuben Michael’s brother and Rooby Tawr partner. As the one who made up and handed out the small manila payday envelopes every Saturday, he’d had countless run-ins with Zeb.

In Zeb’s opinion, which he shared more than once with Deuteronomy Graves, “Ruby and Miles got the money. And we be the ones makin’ it for them.

“For what? $50 a week! They got cars. They got houses. That dips**t punk Roger come in here with his new shoes. His new pants. His new sweaters. And what I got? Holes in my soles! A room in a slum landlord’s piss-poor property. Hand me downs from the Salvation.”

Miles confronted Zeb once, wanting to know, “Why don’t your people help themselves, the way the Jews did?”

Zeb had replied, “Jews never been slaves in America. Slavery’s the devil’s curse on this mu’f**kin’ country. Maybe there ain’t no niggers in chains no more, but the poison of slavery — that’s still here.”

Zeb always said his Momma raised a son who wasn’t about to defer to no man, black or white. That’s why Zeb had to get out of his home town of Doddsville, Mi’ssippi. Life there was intolerable.

April 1968 Baltimore Evening Sun an- nounes imposition of 4 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew in wake of riots following assassi- nation of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

A cartoon in a copy of the Chicago Defender smuggled into the family’s sharecropper shack is what triggered the young man’s decision to head for the Mason-Dixon Line. The cartoon showed the hand of the KKK holding a fiery cross next to the uplifted arm of Liberty with the blazing torch of Democracy held defiantly in her hand.

Being up north felt like a liberation. For a while. Like Zeb had escaped from a chain gang. But Zeb learned quickly, if you a colored boy in Baltimore, you gonna live in the ghetto. You don’t have no choice about that. The white man still the straw boss.

Zeb learned that, when a long exploratory walk during his first days in the city carried him into a forbidden zone near Druid Hill Park. Before long a patrol car pulled up and the police were pushing him up against a wall with a nightstick driving into his chest and them asking him what he was doing in this neighborhood.

“We’ll give you a ride home,” one of the officers said, and they carried him down to the Pine Street Station and gave him a rubber-hose lesson in Baltimore etiquette.

Thereafter Zeb would say, “Don’t be telling me that America is the leader of the Free World. Don’t be puttin’ that bulls**t on me. You gotta be a nitwit to believe that load of crap.”

Nobody knows exactly what Zeb was doing on Biddle Street when the rioting started in the aftermath of the MLK assassination. Nobody knows how or why Zeb got shot. But the story of what happened to him en route to Union Memorial circulates to this day among retired members of the BCFD whenever talk comes up about the riots of ’68.

Lying on the gurney in the ambulance, Zeb just had to mouth off. Gasping, he told Braden, “Keep your mu’f**kin hands off me.”

Braden wasn’t about to let that go by, so he did something nasty with a pencil. It’s almost too ugly to describe, and it resulted in Zeb’s death.

Roger Michael heard of Zeb’s demise when he unexpectedly encountered Deuteronomy Graves in 1980, two decades after Rooby Tawr went bankrupt. The gruesome details fixed themselves leechlike to Roger’s imagination and surfaced unpredictably every now and again as memories will, and as this one did in Taos in 2010.

This is where “Obama’s Monkey” comes into the picture.

Roger was on a ski trip, sharing a condo with five politically conservative members of the Baltimore Ski Club. People he had never met before.

They were good people as long as a bleeding heart like Roger didn’t get them riled up with the wrong kind of talk about politics. They watched Fox News, of course, which was always playing on the big flat panel in the living room during the après ski hour when the group typically gathered for beer-and-pepperoni and conversation.

Mary Eckard, a boisterous Highlandtowner who could blather away with an animated, elevated voice about nothing of much consequence, had just returned from an afternoon prayer service at the Grace Brethren Church of Taos. Just as she walked into the living room, Fox News cut to President Obama stepping up to the State Department podium.

“Hot damn,” Mary exclaimed as she picked up the remote control and changed the channel, “Get that damn monkey off the screen.”

Several days later, as Roger’s wife drove him home from BWI and asked how his trip went, he reported Mary Eckard’s comment and noted how it brought to his mind the long-gone Zebadee Fullwood’s lamentable end. Alice thought it was all disgusting, urged Roger never to repeat any of it to anyone else, and asked him to explain how there could be any possible connection in his mind between the President and the Rooby Tawr employee.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Roger replied.
 
joelforeman@voiceofbaltimore.org
 
CHECK OUT EXCERPTS 1-5 OF ROOBY TAWR  (ROGERS ROOBY — Waiting for a streetcar in 1930s Baltimore; PAGET’S DISEASE — Deuteronomy’s grave vision of a vortex, while trimming tawr teats; ‘ANY BONDS TODAY?’ — Bugs Bunny and the Good Jew; ARMISTICE DAY — Baltimore’s German heritage and the Great War; and BUDDY YOUNG SPECIALS — Adlai Stevenson and hard-shell crabs)  by clicking here,  here,  here,  here,  and  here.
 
EDITOR’S NOTE:

The working title of Joel Foreman’s book, Rooby Tawr, refers to the main character Reuben Michael and the Baltimorese pronunciation of the word “tire.”

The novel in progress Rooby Tawr is Foreman’s initial foray into fiction.  (For his complete thumbnail biography, click “Staff” under the Main Menu at left.)