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"In this gorgeously written and &#8220;vividly fascinating&#8221; (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&#8217;s earliest mixed-race families. &#8220;My dad&#8217;s family was a mystery,&#8221; writes journalist Joe Mozingo, having grown up with only rumors about where his father&#8217;s family was from&#8212;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&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s history and lays bare the country&#8217;s tortured and paradoxical experience with race. Haunting and beautiful, Mozingo&#8217;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.  &#8220;A captivating debut&#8230; that reads like an adventure novel&#8221; (Los Angeles Times), The Fiddler on Pantico Run is both the moving story of one man&#8217;s quest to understand his past and the larger story of lineage, identity, and race in America."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://books.simonandschuster.com/The-Fiddler-on-Pantico-Run/Joe-Mozingo/9781451627602>