The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family

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In this gorgeously written and vividly fascinating (Elle) account, a prize-winning journalist digs deep into his ancestry looking for the origins of his unusual last name and discovers that he comes from one of Americas earliest mixed-race families. My dads family was a mystery, writes journalist Joe Mozingo, having grown up with only rumors about where his fathers family was from Italy, France, the Basque Country. But when a college professor told the blue-eyed Californian that his family name may have come from sub-Saharan Africa, Mozingo set out on an epic journey to uncover the truth. He soon discovered that all Mozingos in America, including his fathers line, appeared to have descended from a black man named Edward Mozingo who was brought to America as a slave in 1644 and, after winning his freedom twenty-eight years later, became a tenant tobacco farmer, married a white woman, and fathered one of the countrys earliest mixed-race family lineages.Tugging at the buried thread of his origins, Joe Mozingo has unearthed a saga that encompasses the full sweep of Americas history and lays bare the countrys tortured and paradoxical experience with race. Haunting and beautiful, Mozingos memoir paints a world where the lines based on color are both illusory and life altering. He traces his family line from the ravages of the slave trade to the mixed-race society of colonial Virginia and through the brutal imposition of racial laws. A captivating debut that reads like an adventure novel (Los Angeles Times), The Fiddler on Pantico Run is both the moving story of one mans quest to understand his past and the larger story of lineage, identity, and race in America.

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