Cipher
Decoding My Ancestor's Scandalous Secret Diaries
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this searching account, memoirist Jones (Bearwallow) delves into the salacious diaries of his 19th-century ancestor, a white Southern farmer named William Thomas Prestwood, and attempts to piece together Prestwood's life while comparing it with his own. The diaries are written in a cipher that Prestwood invented; the codebreaker who cracked it in the 1970s noted that these "pathetic little books" told the colorful story of an American "Everyman"—sex-obsessed, gold-obsessed, and occasionally trying to outrun the local sheriff. While Prestwood's diary-keeping is laconic and full of gaps, it picks up the pace during his many affairs, and Jones keeps things fresh by linking Prestwood's life to larger themes in history—including by attempting to track down the descendants of children Prestwood fathered with an enslaved woman. But Jones's attempt to fill in the blanks with his own questioning—as he seeks to understand what this distant ancestor says about Jones himself—becomes wearisome, as does his frequent admissions that he wishes his ancestor were a better person. Best are the passages about Jones's boyhood rambling around his grandparents' property, as well as the tantalizing glimpses readers get of a "confounding, maddening nineteenth-century man." It's a unique look at private thoughts from a bygone era.
