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The Fiddler On Pantico Run
Joe Mozingo
An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family
Free Press
October 2012
On Sale: October 2, 2012
304 pages
ISBN: 1451627483
EAN: 9781451627480
Kindle: B007EDOT6M
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
“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.
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