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Cargando... The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Familypor Joe Mozingo
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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 America's earliest mixed-race families. "My dad's family was a mystery," writes journalist Joe Mozingo, having grown up with only rumors about where his father's 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 father's 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 country's 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 America's history and lays bare the country's tortured and paradoxical experience with race. Haunting and beautiful, Mozingo's 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. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Mozingo followed his family's trail from the Northern Neck of Virginia through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky, through southern Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, to California. He read Faulkner's Light in August on his travels, seeing parallels between his mixed race ancestors and Faulkner's Joe Christmas. When Edward still seemed out of his reach, Mozingo realized that he needed to go to Africa to see the place where his ancestor's captivity began.
Although genealogy is at the heart of Mozingo's story, this isn't a standard genealogy/family history. It's part memoir, part a history of slavery, and part a sociology of race. It's a surprising story, and a hopeful story. On one of his trips to Virginia, Mozingo visited a white Mozingo cousin whose grandchildren are all mixed race. Reflecting on this meeting, Mozingo writes:
More than three centuries after whites and blacks were forced to stop mixing in this part of Virginia, they were blithely doing it again. It struck me that America, finally easing away from its cursed preoccupation with race, was looking forward to some grand moment to proclaim the battle was over, when really it might finally just sputter out like this, quietly, family-by-family, with a shrug. ( )