NONFICTION
‘The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, a Search for Family’
By Joe Mozingo
Free Press, 304 pages, $25.99
Joe Mozingo knew from an early age that his family name sounded “different.” While attending elementary school in Southern California, Mozingo heard his teachers stumble over the name, as they apparently never grasped that it sounds just like it is spelled. He looked Caucasian. His parents told Joe that “Mozingo” probably derived from Italian roots. So Joe asked no more questions, despite the occasional comments about the name’s foreign-ness.
Blue-eyed Joe Mozingo knew his mother’s side of the family had traced roots to Sweden and France. His father showed no interest in national or ethnic heritage, however, and so the son asked no questions. Part of the post-World War II baby boom, Mozingo did as expected, attending college in San Diego and graduating with a biology pre-medical school degree. Then his career planning stalled. Eventually, Mozingo decided to seek a journalism graduate degree in Los Angeles. That decision changed more than his career path.
On the first day of his journalism graduate studies, Mozingo met a professor named Sherrie Mazingo. She was African American. Mazingo told Mozingo that their family names constituted variations of the same root. She told the new student that the Mozingo/Mazingo line descended from Edward Mozingo, captured in Africa during the early 1600s and shipped to North America as a slave. Edward Mozingo won his freedom from slavery in 1642 and started a family in what would become the state of Virginia with a Caucasian wife.
Mozingo found that possibility unlikely, especially given his physical appearance, so did nothing to follow up on the information from Professor Mazingo. And yet, the possibility of African ancestry would not leave his mind altogether. Gradually, he learned about genealogy. Gradually, he began conducting research about the Mozingo heritage in the United States. Gradually, then not so gradually, the search for his roots took over Mozingo’s waking hours and sometimes his dreams.
Becoming a newspaper reporter at the Los Angeles Times, Mozingo received permission to write about his search for the 17th century Edward Mozingo. The support of his editors for a newspaper series allowed Mozingo to travel around the nation and around the world, with some expenses paid by his employer and eventually also by a book publisher.
Although the book is nonfiction, not a suspense novel, a spoiler alert might normally be appropriate here, because Mozingo’s real-life search for his ancestry is suspenseful indeed. But the publisher pretty much gives away the outcome in the book’s subtitle.
Mozingo was not upset by the possibility that he had descended from an African man forcibly relocated to North America. He learned quickly, though, that plenty of folks who had always considered themselves pure Caucasian felt negatively about the possibility. Much of the book consists of Mozingo traveling around the United States talking to other Mozingos and encountering hostility. Yes, “educated” folks understand that the DNA profile of Barack Obama, the DNA profile of Mitt Romney and the DNA profile of Nelson Mandela are something like 99 percent similar. In societies that have evolved in murderous ways to become race-conscious, though, it is the approximate 1 percent difference that counts. “Brothers under the skin” is not a universally accepted phrase. Just ask Joe Mozingo.
The book is suspenseful. The book is thoughtful. The book is interesting. The only substantial flaw is repetition. As Mozingo accomplishes his visits to Caucasians and African Americans who might be distant family, the receptions echo one another to the point of monotony. Mozingo’s own thoughts about race as social construct are repeated and repeated and repeated, too, to the point of monotony. If I were editor of the book, it would have been maybe 50 pages shorter.
The monotony dissipates when Mozingo travels to the continent of Africa to find traces of Edward Mozingo history before his forced journey across the ocean. With the help of various guides, Mozingo visits the present-day nations of Angola and Cameroon. He felt he had to go, leaving his wife and children without him for a while. After all, as Mozingo explains, Virginia was the soil to which Edward had been “transplanted and forced to adapt in the most hostile of settings. It was not the homeland. The line just passed through there…His separation from his people and his past, from Africa, had to be at the heart of his story and ours. ”
Mozingo never has regretted his journey to the African continent. Neither will his readers.
