The Fiddler on Pantico Run

August 27, 2012
L.A. Times reporter Mozingo's thorough scouring of his genealogy from Africa to Jamestown, Va., is a quirky, often exhausting, and finally satisfying account.Having wondered all his life about his mysterious surnameâhis family believed it was either Italian or BasqueâMozingo finally acted on intelligence that the name is actually Bantu, from Central Africa, and that most of the Mozingos in America could be traced to a black slave living in Jamestown, Va., in the 1600s. This information comes in the first chapter of Mozingo's work, following which he describes years of tortuous research into the life of forebear Edward Mozingo. Edward was most likely a young teenager when he arrived in Jamestown, became a servant of one of the colony's major planters, was freed as a result of a lawsuit, married a white woman, and, while living on a Virginia farm called Pantico Run, fathered several children who passed as white. The fiddle-playing Edward died in 1712. With irony and wit displayed in encounters with unprepossessing relatives, the author challenges received notions of race and class.