Every family tree has secrets, but sometimes it’s the family name that conceals the biggest secret of all.
As a kid I always thought Cumby was odd-sounding, a little embarrassing, and nothing like the Scotch-Irish names of the other white families in my small Southern town. MacDonald. Spencer. Kennedy. Those were regular names. Cumby sounded like a cartoon character. Its history was a mystery; if anyone knew its true origin, they had decided to keep it to themselves.
My hometown of Tallapoosa, Georgia is situated in the Appalachian foothills near the Alabama border. There, as in all tight-knit Southern communities, your family name establishes your bona-fides, and despite the unusual pronunciation, Cumby was a respected name. In fact, other than my great-uncle Eugene, who got mixed up with some shady characters and ended up stuffed piecemeal into the trunk of his Cadillac, the Cumbys were known to be big-hearted good-old-boys, prone to a little recklessness now and then, but never going so far astray as to affect the family reputation.
As a boy in the 1960s, I thought the Ku Klux Klan was just another charitable social club with a funny name, like the Rotarians and the Jaycees. I remember the Klan peacefully soliciting donations in buckets from cars at the town’s main stoplight, alongside the men from the volunteer fire department (some of whom may have volunteered for both groups). At that time, in the rural South, racism was a core cultural value, just as embedded into our psyches as patriotism and the love of family and God. For kids like me, it wasn’t until racial integration at school that we began to glimpse the ugly legacy of bigotry. It was a confusing time, trying to reconcile our fierce Southern pride with the dawning realization that racism might actually be a great evil.
Last year, inspired by a photograph of an ancestor in Confederate uniform, I set out to trace the family lineage, expecting it led across the Atlantic to Scotland, like so many other Appalachian surnames. I searched genealogy websites, exchanged emails with other Cumbys, and scoured old graveyards in Georgia and the Carolinas. After months my research hit a dead-end with an ancestor named Stephen Cumby, a Revolutionary War soldier born in North Carolina. It was as if Stephen had deliberately tried to hide his parentage.
Perhaps he had. I finally realized that Stephen had changed the spelling of the family surname, and that the name Cumby was a corruption of the original name of Cumbo. The discovery of this missing link enabled me to trace the family name all the way back across the Atlantic, not to Scotland as expected, but to the most unlikely place of all, the Kingdom of N’Dongo, in what is now Angola. To my great surprise, my original patrilineal ancestor, the one who brought the Cumby name across the Atlantic, had been an African slave.
His name was Emanuel Cumbo. In the 1600s, Angola was a Portuguese colony and the primary source of slaves for the cane-fields of Brazil, where Emanuel was bound until his slave ship was attacked by a Dutch privateer and rerouted to the new English colony at Jamestown. Slavery was not yet an institution in the British colonies, and he somehow managed to keep his African surname and ultimately earn his freedom. After three hundred years of intermixing with Europeans and Native Americans, his African name was bequeathed to me, a white blue-eyed Southern boy from Tallapoosa, Georgia.
I found myself looking in the mirror, wondering what Emanuel Cumbo had looked like and what he must have endured. I began researching and learning the true horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and the lesser-known horrors of Jamestown, where evidence of cannibalism was recently discovered. When I investigated his homeland of Angola, I located a little village in the north named Kumbo, a potential source of the family name. I wanted to visit the village, to see the place where Emanuel may have lived four hundred years ago. But going to war-torn Angola, home to a million unexploded land mines, wasn’t as simple as visiting an ancestral castle in Scotland.
I contacted one of the very few Angolan tour operators and discovered I wasn’t alone in my journey. The guide told me that another blue-eyed white American named Joe Mozingo had recently hired him to help discover the roots of his own odd-sounding name. I emailed Mozingo, who turned out to be a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and we shared notes of our remarkably similar tale. Joe’s ancestor, Edward Mozingo, was another African that landed in early Jamestown. It’s likely that Edward and Emanuel were neighbors, and that both had probably married white women during the brief period of time in colonial history when interracial marriage was legal.
Joe has chronicled the journey of the Mozingo family name in a memoir, “The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family.” As I read about Joe’s discovery of his African ancestry and the humorous and gut-wrenching reactions of his kin, I saw reflected in his story my own family’s struggle to accept the truth of our heritage. Like Joe’s family, some of my relatives simply shook their heads and sprouted a wry off-color joke, while others denied it vehemently and may never speak to me again. Many of us though, Mozingos and Cumbys, now think a little bit differently about who we are.
Names are important, and people should know their roots. To me, Cumby is no longer an oddity, it is the proud name of an African man who had the strength to survive horrors that none of us could ever imagine, who earned his freedom in Jamestown, and who spawned a family that scattered across the New World and that now numbers in the tens of thousands. It includes people that call themselves black, white, even American-Indian. Emanuel Cumbo was one of the very first Americans, and over the past four centuries his family has helped shape the destiny of this country. I’m a living irony—a blue-eyed white Southerner with an African surname and ancestry. But maybe it’s not irony at all, just a simple, obvious truth. As our nation continually endures racial paroxysms, we should all take note of how intertwined the roots of America’s family trees are. Plenty of McDonalds and Spencers and Kennedys have Cumbos and Mozingos hidden in the attic. Maybe it’s time we let them out for some air.
