The Fiddler on Pantico Run by Joe Mozingo

Author:Joe Mozingo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

Chapter 12

Back to the Northern Neck

As he accepted the alabaster Christ and the bloody cross—in the bearing of which he would find his redemption, as, indeed, to our outraged astonishment, he sometimes did—he must, henceforth, accept that image we then gave him of himself: having no other and standing, moreover, in danger of death should he fail to accept the dazzling light thus brought into such darkness.

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

As I contemplated my travels, it still perplexed me that the Mozingos born and raised in the same corner of the Northern Neck where Edward and Margaret settled could so thoroughly have lost or buried any trace or connection to him. I decided to go back to Virginia to see if I couldn’t find some glimmer of recognition, some faint vestige of awareness, or at least understand when it was lost. On a deeper level, I had a different goal. I knew so much more about our entire story than when I first visited the Northern Neck. I hoped now that I would feel that sense of connection that eluded me on Pantico Run.

When I arrived in the Northern Neck, the June air was humid and electric, almost delirious. Cobalt dragonflies bobbed over the tall grass, and cicadas sputtered off in the forest like wind-up toys. A thundercloud was waking up in the distance, and a restless breeze set the entire landscape in motion.

I pulled up to Rhodie Mozingo’s small ranch-style home on Fallin Town Road, set under two great maples, about ten miles from Pantico Run. I had briefly met Rhodie on my earlier trip, after visiting Junior, his very different older brother. For twenty years Rhodie sold insurance door-to-door and now did commercial sales at a Lowe’s in Fredericksburg, where he lived most of the time. He was raising a grandson, struggling with chronic lung disease, and dreaming of retiring to Myrtle Beach. He struck me as being open-minded and thoughtful. He thanked the army for showing him the wider world, remarking that if he hadn’t enlisted he’d still be “chewing tobacco and being the biggest redneck in the world.” I had told him about Edward earlier, but had hedged on whether the ancestry was certain. I wanted to hear more of what he knew before he shut down on me. He kept his father’s house in the Neck and visited now and then, and he had agreed to meet me here to show me around Mozingo country.

Edward was Rhodie’s seventh great-grandfather. By the late 1700s, tax lists identified Rhodie’s fourth great-grandfather John, Edward’s great-grandson, as white, as they did his three brothers. But the brothers also appear on a registry of “Free Mulattoes” in Westmoreland County in 1801. John had moved back to neighboring Richmond the previous year and avoided the list. He also had more money and even owned a slave, so he might have had more clout to claim his whiteness.

There was no science to who was white, just as there is none today.

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