Joe Mozingo - The Fiddler on Pantico Run.An African Warrior His White Descendants A Sh for Family: Joe Mozingo

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The handwritten entry in the Jamestown colonial court record of October 5, 1672, noting the judges ruling that Edward Mozingo should be freed after twenty-eight years of indentured servitude.

For Noaki and our children,
Blake and Lucia.
And for my mom and dad.

University of Texas Libraries. Adapted by Doug Stevens, from the map of Africa in Cambridge Modern History Atlas, 1912

Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. Adapted by Doug Stevens from A map of the most inhabited part of Virginia containing the whole province of Maryland with part of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and North Carolina. Drawn by Joshua Fry & Peter Jefferson in 1751

T his was where the thread first came into view, an old stone palace miles up a rutted dirt track, alone in the gum resin trees and elephant grass. We parked next to the wives quarters, a small village of soot-blackened walls and peaked zinc roofs. Young men in frayed clothes guided us through a twisting corridor to the kings court. My friend Walter and I waited on benches until the eighty-year-old king, the fon, beckoned us from his wood throne in the fading gray light. We crossed the courtyard in an extended bow. The fon, wearing a black skullcap and a light blue boubou robe, sat rigidly erect in his chair, sipping a local liqueur called Marula Fruit Cream from a Baltimore Orioles mug. His face was long and stolid, thin clenched lips and cold rheumy eyes. He spoke haltingly in his language, showing teeth like weathered pickets. Walter translated that the king was welcoming us, and I nodded and smiled as the palace guard hissed at me to take my hands out of my pockets. After further formalities, I was told to kneel before the king and cup my hands at my mouth, as he poured a blessing of the liqueur so copious it streamed down my right arm under my jacket. Walter whispered to me that this was the highest honor, to show effusive gratitude. I sighed, knowing my sleeve would be stuck to my skin until my next shower, whenever that might be. As evening came, the young men, whom I had taken to be street hustlers and now realized were princes, guided me to a perch in the canopy on the high ridge. I let them walk off so I could have a moment alone.

As I listened to the dry rasp of the elephant grass, I gazed out over the Kingdom of Kom. A narrow gorge threaded through the lush terrain below, opening into a smoky blue chasm in the distance, the Valley of Too Many Bends. A cluster of white streetlights hovered on a dark crest a few miles awayNjinikom, a town to which earlier kings once banished sorcerers and foreign missionaries. The crumpled topography of these mountains had long repelled invaders, colonists, and change. Many villagers still lived in red earthen huts with grass roofs, collected firewood before dusk, and poured libations of palm wine on the ground for their ancestors. The view from this spot had not changed much in centuries. Only that tremulous constellation of electric lights broke the deepening shades of blue.

The footpath wended down into the darkness, almost two thousand feet below, where I was told a momentous baobab tree stood near the river. The story is that it fell one day, years ago, cried and cried all night, and the following morning was standing again. Villagers call it the talking tree.

Mythical stories abound up here, filling the void left by an unwritten history. It is said the Kom were led to this very spot by a python. But the story that no one talks about is the true story of the people removed from this land. This belt of fertile savannah in western Cameroon rested at a terrible crossroads, with no forest to hide in when the marauders arrived. The kings may have been safe in their fortified isolation, but their people were not. They were taken first by Arab invaders in the Sudan in the north, and then by the southern peoples who found that humans were the commodity Europeans most desired.

Captured and bound together, they were driven on long marches, some south across the sweltering lowlands to the mangrove estuaries of the coastal kings, some west through sheer mountain rain forest to the Cross River, where merchants loaded them onto canoes and rowed three hundred miles south to the port of Old Calabar. Those who survived had been handed from tribe to tribe, through too many hostile foreign territories to dream of escaping and returning home. And then off they went, into the sea.

High on a ridge, three hundred miles by road from the Atlantic, I sat at the headwaters of that outward movement, imagining the people flowing away like the rivers below. I pictured a boy, gazing down into that blue mountain cradle, the grass dry-swishing in the breeze, the drums coming up with the night. A boy suddenly pulled into the current and scrambling to reach the bank. A boy unable to imagine the ocean and sickly white men in big wooden ships and the swampy, malarial settlement called Jamestown where he would be sold to a planter in the year of their lord 1644.

This is the beginning, I said to myself. The beginning of my familys story, the point just after which my forebears obscured the truthand nearly buried it forever.

A FEW DAYS later, on the coast, I caught a motorcycle taxi to a ferry terminal late at night. The air was fresh and fragrant as we sputtered along the edge of an old botanical garden where the German colonials tried to find tropical medicines. At the port, the driver dropped me at a hulking stone warehouse, where I had bought my ticket that afternoon. The boat was to leave at three-thirty in the morning. Passengers milled about or slept on straw mats under high ceiling fans. Bleary and dry-eyed, I handed my passport to an officer behind a desk. He inspected it briefly, then leaned back in his chair, arched his eyebrows, and opened his palms in mock challenge. Mozingo. That is your name?

Yes.

He smiled and shook his head. That is not an American name.

I know.

He turned to two women behind him and showed them my passport. They joked in the local pidgin language, and he turned back to me. That is a Cameroonian name. How do you have it?

I might have had an ancestor from here.

So your father came from Cameroon? he asked, rightfully dubious. I am white, with straight, light brown hair and blue eyes. No one has ever mistaken me for anything else.

Not my father, an ancestor. Way, way back, I said.

Your grandfather?

No, long before him. I had already come to realize that the past here, unrecorded almost until the twentieth century, was somehow compressed. When events beyond memory were not fixed in writing, they swirled about, unmoored from linearity, and 358 years didnt mean too much more than a long, long time.