From mountainx.com
No one word can capture a book, but in the case of Jeremy B. Jones‘ latest work of literary nonfiction, Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries, happenstance is certainly a prominent component of the story’s origin.
Jones’ introduction to the coded diaries, which were written by his quadruple-great-grandfather William Thomas Prestwood, came about by chance.
In 2014, the Henderson County native was preparing for the publication of his memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland. His press requested photographs for the book. While searching through his grandmother Betty Jean Prestwood Jones’ home, he discovered a 1979 article from the Asheville Citizen Times with the headline, “Secret Journals Yield Honest Picture of WNC.”
Jones, it turned out, would become the latest in a small but significant group of individuals intrigued by these mysterious pages that documented a span of over 50 years (1808-59). Entries included encrypted accounts of Prestwood’s everyday life — from his capturing of runaway horses to his many sexual conquests — written in a cipher that combined numbers, unusual pictographs and some letters.
One of the diary’s other key guardians was Steven Scott Smith, who in 1975, stumbled upon the collection of writings in a heap of trash outside an abandoned home on the verge of being razed. The odd hieroglyphics were indecipherable, but as Jones writes in the book, “[Smith] knew enough to know that old might mean valuable[.]”
Three years later, through a mutual friend, Smith was connected to Nathaniel Browder, a retired National Security Agency (NSA) cryptanalyst.
“After a hundred and twenty years of the notebooks passing from hand to hand; after three years of Steven Smith carrying them to libraries and archives, Browder sat down with a handful of pages and his magnifying glass and broke the code in half an hour,” Jones writes.
More than 35 years later, standing inside his grandmother’s home in Fruitland, Jones read through the 1979 newspaper article, which characterized his kin as “an intellectual,” “a naturalist,” “a mathematician” and “a tireless lover.”
Jones’ grandmother smiled. “He was one of ours,” she told her grandson. “My great-great-grandaddy.”
Little did Jones know that over the next decade, a significant portion of his life would be spent researching this relative. And while Prestwood’s unrelenting sexual desires were initially a source of amusement, Jones’ ancestor’s ties to slavery quickly complicated the writer’s understanding of his family history.
“I am a man born in the South, from families settled in the South for hundreds of years,” Jones writes. “Finding slavery in one’s family tree is like finding salt in the ocean. And still, I thought the mountain poverty of my people might have spared me.”
Beyond biography
I met with Jones, a professor of English studies at Western Carolina University, in October, on land his family has owned in Fruitland for over a century. His wife and two children are temporarily living in his now-deceased grandmother’s home, displaced by Tropical Storm Helene.
We toured a portion of the 100-acre property, which is scattered with old barns and other structures. Eventually, we settled on a wooden bench outside the home that belonged to Jones’ great-great-grandparents, Asbury and Clementine Prestwood.
“I think that I imagined that the 19th century was a long, long time ago,” Jones says in discussing his early mindset while researching Cipher. “That allowed me to go into the diaries with a comical intent.”
But the longer he waded through William Thomas Prestwood’s pages, “the more I realized that the things that show up in the 19th century are still showing up today.”
While Prestwood’s journey is at the heart of Cipher, Jones’ book is not a biography by any stretch. His ancestor’s lifetime overlaps with key events in U.S. history, many of which are touched on and contemplated in Jones’ writing.
For example, President James Madison authorized a failed invasion of Canada during the War of 1812, with ideas of expansion and/or securing a bargaining chip with Great Britain. A few decades later, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Jones, who began writing the book during President Donald Trump’s first administration and completed final edits during President Joe Biden’s time in office, says the parallels he initially explored on the page between Trump’s push to build a wall on the southern border and Jackson’s desire to push Indigenous people westward have taken on a new meaning in Trump’s second term.
At the time of our conversation in October, federal agents were still several months away from overwhelming cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis; Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were still alive. But even then, the administration’s push for mass deportations had triggered a number of controversies, including the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident with protected status, to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.
“Some of the things that I thought were a little more subtle [during Trump’s first administration] are just louder now in terms of parallels between things that were happening in the 19th century and the [current] Trump administration,” Jones says, looking out onto his family’s property from our location on the bench. Whereas Trump’s initial term focused primarily on preventing entry into the U.S., he notes, his second term is more in line with Jackson’s direct efforts to remove groups of people.
These parallels, however, are not unique to Jackson and Trump. As Jones writes in Cipher, the two men, separated by centuries, are mere instances in a deeper history often characterized by the desire to cling to “a narrow American identity … so obviously desperate and doomed that it made me want to scream and laugh all at once. And yet we carried on, as we’d carried on since we declared our independence: sorting out who belongs and who doesn’t.”
Talking to the dead
Despite the book’s exploration of heavy and consequential topics — from white privilege to toxic masculinity — there is a joy in reading Jones’ Cipher. Part of this stems from the author’s complex relationship with Prestwood.
Though separated by centuries, Jones nevertheless engages with his ancestor throughout the book, often in letters addressed directly to Prestwood. In one, he writes, “Because I read your pages while knowing much of your future, I know you’ll lose a child next year. I’m sorry, William. It’s an uncomfortable power I have on this side of history.”
A few pages later, Jones reaches the portion of Prestwood’s diaries in which his quadruple-great-grandfather has surpassed Jones’ current age. “He was finally my elder,” the author writes, “experiencing stages of life I’d not yet encountered.”
In other chapters, Jones imagines the future, contemplating his own death and what his life’s story will mean for subsequent generations of his family tree.
“They will unearth me in 2220 and not understand how I could stomach stepping into an airplane that burns up the atmosphere, slowly boiling the planet they’ll inherit,” he writes. “How I drive sixty miles to work, dumping poison into the air they’ll breathe. I will plead with my descendants about how I didn’t know what to do, tell them about how it’s all too big, too systematic, too woven into everything for me to make a change.”
As this passage and others reiterate, Jones is unafraid of applying the same critical eye he casts upon Prestwood to own life choices. By extension, he invites readers to contemplate their own complicity in today’s social, political and cultural issues, all of which will inevitably turn into tomorrow’s history.
Throughout our conversation on that wooden bench in Fruitland, Jones and I return to this reality: That we are here for only a moment. And we have no real say over how the future will judge us.
But as with his book, Jones and I agree there is a certain liberation in knowing so much is out of our control; that the most we can do is strive to live a decent life void of self-serving exploitation.
Near the end of Cipher, Jones recalls a conversation he had with novelist Wendell Berry, who declared to Jones that he didn’t believe in hope.
“We’re living in a cult of the future right now; everyone is panicked about what might happen, about all these hypotheticals and end-time scenarios,” Jones remembers Berry telling him. “They’re paralyzed. But what can you do about that? All most of us can really do is find the problem in front of us and get to work there. Find the need where you live. Hope can go wrong far too easily.”
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