By Joe Mozingo
“My dad’s family was a mystery,” writes prize-winning
journalist Joe Mozingo. Growing up, he knew that his mother’s ancestors were
from France and Sweden, but he heard only suspiciously vague stories about
where his father’s family was from—Italy, Portugal, the Basque country. Then
one day, a college professor told him his name may have come from sub-Saharan
Africa, which made no sense at all: Mozingo was a blueeyed white man from the
suburbs of Southern California. His family greeted the news as a lark—his uncle
took to calling them “Bantu warriors”—but Mozingo set off on a journey to find
the truth of his roots.
He soon discovered that all Mozingos in America, including
his father’s line, appeared to have descended from a black man named Edward
Mozingo who was brought to the Jamestown colony as a slave in 1644 and won his
freedom twenty-eight years later. He became a tenant farmer growing tobacco by
a creek called Pantico Run, married a white woman, and fathered one of the
country’s earliest mixed-race family lineages.
But Mozingo had so many more questions to answer. How had it
been possible for Edward to keep his African name? When had some of his
descendants crossed over the color line, and when had the memory of their
connection to Edward been obscured? The journalist plunged deep into the
scattered historical records, traveled the country meeting other Mozingos—white,
black, and in between—and journeyed to Africa to learn what he could about
Edward’s life there, retracing old slave routes he may have traversed.
The Fiddler on Pantico Run is the beautifully written
account of Mozingo’s quest to discover his family’s lost past. A captivating
narrative of both personal discovery and historical revelation that takes many
turns, the book traces one family line from the ravages of the slave trade on
both sides of the Atlantic, to the horrors of the Jamestown colony, to the
mixed-race society of colonial Virginia and through the brutal imposition of
racial laws, when those who could pass for white distanced themselves from
their slave heritage, yet still struggled to rise above poverty. The author’s
great-great-great-great-great grandfather Spencer lived as a dirt-poor white
man, right down the road from James Madison, then moved west to the frontier,
trying to catch a piece of America’s manifest destiny. Mozingos fought on both
sides of the Civil War, some were abolitionists, some never crossed the color
line, some joined the KKK. Today the majority of Mozingos are white and run the
gamut from unapologetic racists to a growing number whose interracial marriages
are bringing the family full circle to its mixed-race genesis.
Tugging at the buried thread of his origins, Joe Mozingo has
unearthed a saga that encompasses the full sweep of the American story and lays
bare the country’s tortured and paradoxical experience with race and the ways
in which designations based on color are both illusory and life altering. The
Fiddler on Pantico Run is both the story of one man’s search for a sense of
mooring, finding a place in a continuum of ancestors, and a lyrically written
exploration of lineage, identity, and race in America.
About the Author
Joe Mozingo is a
projects reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He won a Robert F. Kennedy Award
for his coverage of the earthquake in Haiti and helped lead a Miami Herald
reporting team whose investigation into the crash of the space shuttle Columbia
was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Fiddler on Pantico Run was named a
finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, administered by
Columbia University and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. He lives in Southern
California with his wife and two children.
ISBN 978-1451627480, Free Press, © 2012, Hardcover, 320
pages & Index. $32.00
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