Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor's Scandalous Secret Diaries

“Jeremy Jones's lean, meticulous Cipher lays bare the life of his fourth great-grandfather, William, with a rigor befitting the diaries William kept and encoded over the course of his life. What begins in amusement at his ancestor's sexual escapades deepens for Jones into a contemplation of William's role in slavery, the Trail of Tears, and his own family. One of the secrets Jones mulls is so wrenching and monstrous, I still hold my breath when I think of it.” —Maud Newton, author of Ancestor Trouble

“Jeremy Jones' Cipher introduces us to a lost ancestor’s coded diaries and brings them to life with prose as intricate and revelatory as the secrets they contain, unraveling the vivid, conflicted world of William Thomas Prestwood—a nineteenth-century farmer, philosopher, and flawed human being. With lyrical precision and unflinching honesty, Jones transforms archival fragments into a haunting meditation on history, inheritance, and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders

"Cipher is part memoir and part mystery, part how to and part dare not. I've never read a book this deliciously dark, scathingly funny, and deeply felt. The fact that Jeremy Jones is able to make a centuries-old mystery so relevant to our lives and times is truly a wonder. Readers will not forget Cipher, not the journey this story took to land in Jeremy Jones's hands, nor their own trembling hands as they rapturously turned its pages." —Wiley Cash, author of When Ghosts Come Home

"Spellbinding...a tale of ancestry that doubles as a story of this very country. I could not put this one down.” —Sarah Viren, author of To Name the Bigger Lie

In the 1800s, Appalachian farmer and rogue William Prestwood kept salacious coded diaries, leaving his descendent, Jeremy Jones, to reflect on his complicated legacy.

In 1975, a man stumbled upon a box of hand-sewn notebooks in a house set for demolition in Wadesboro, North Carolina. After thumbing through the delicate pages and finding them written in code, he passed the books to a retired NSA cryptanalyst who deciphered them, uncovering the recorded life of a white Southern farmer named William Thomas Prestwood. The diaries offered a ground-level view of a 19th-century man who passed his days recording eclipses and dissecting rabbits and calculating planetary orbits and reading Goethe and sneaking into barn lofts and closets with dozens of lovers. “The reader is left,” the codebreaker wrote, “with the lasting impression that here in these pathetic little books is the very essence of Everyman’s life from the cradle to the grave.” But to author Jeremy Jones, this strange farmer was no Everyman. He was his great-great-great-great grandfather. 

Cipher reanimates Prestwood, warts and all, following the author’s ancestor as he courts women and hides runaway slaves, as he fathers children with his wife and with an enslaved woman, as he mines for gold and befriends Daniel Boone’s great nephew, and as he rubs shoulders with a young Zebulon Vance and raises sons soon to die on the fields of Gettysburg. With research, Jones fills in the blank spaces of this Everyman’s life. Along the way, Jones begins tracking his own life alongside the fascinating arc of this long-ago forefather, forging an intimate relationship with a man whose own account, in Jones’s expert hand, begins to take on texture, drama, emotional resonance—even as the author uncovers curious and disturbing details about his ancestor. And thus, about his family. About himself.

hardcover ISBN: 9781958888537

Try out Prestwood’s cipher!