The Devil Inside Me

Given the boom of the ancestry industry, Americans apparently have a limitless appetite for learning about their lineages. What happens, though, when one discovers a family history filled not with titans of industry or trail-blazing scientists but with knaves and hate-mongers? Jeremy B. Jones faced this dilemma when he stumbled across encoded journals written by a 19th-century forebear who owned slaves and recorded an astounding number of sexual conquests. Jones chose to meet the unsavory past head-on. In Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries, Jones does an admirable job of addressing his family’s connections to historical injustice and asking pointed questions about this distasteful patrimony.

Jones, a professor at Western Carolina University, makes no attempt to disclaim his relation to William Thomas Prestwood, who accounts for just 1/64 of Jones’ genetic make-up but who founded his family’s home in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, where Jones’ family continue to live. Jones feels a deep attachment to his ancestry — “a people who’d abided in this very spot, living out quiet lives for generations” — and views “my whole story” as an accumulation of “the bodies that surround me,” living and dead. He naturally asks about Prestwood, six generations removed, “What slice of me is he?”

Cipher begins with a brisk history of the happenstances that led to Jones’ learning about the diaries. Prestwood left no instructions for their disposition; being written in a substitution code that employed foreign alphabets made them obscure to his children, virtually assuring their relegation to the trash heap. And they were thrown out, a century later, and then saved by a stranger and transported to a library, where they miraculously fell into the hands of just the right person, a retired cryptologist for the National Security Agency, who spent years translating each handsewn volume. The sheer unlikelihood of the diaries’ eventually coming to Jones’ attention commands his interest long before he gets to the naughty bits.

In addition to interrogating his relationship with Prestwood, Jones raises a number of ethical questions regarding the publication of private scribblings. “I had begun wondering if I should be doing any of this: unearthing the purposefully buried life of a man,” Jones writes. “Was I shrinking his life by bringing it out into the open?” Jones solves the quandary by turning the investigation into a dialogue. As he reads William’s diaries, he responds by writing “Dear William” letters and sharing relevant episodes from his own life. This exchange gives the book its structure, with each phase of his ancestor’s decoded life followed by personal essays on love, work, and manhood.

Prestwood’s diaries are “scandalous” for their raw exposure of the writer’s sex life and for his involvement in slavery. The former makes Jones feel embarrassed; the latter makes him ashamed. Jones admits that he wanted to tell the story of an ancestor who pursued “a small but personal and dangerous fight against evil” and who “holds himself chaste for the love of his life.” That fantasy dissolves when Jones reads about Binah, an enslaved woman approximately Prestwood’s age whom he raped regularly for two decades. The fates of Binah’s offspring do not make edifying reading: though they were clearly Prestwood’s, he never acknowledged them and, years later, sold them to a local trader. As a young man, Prestwood did help to hide a runaway slave, but in the larger picture that one brave act recedes in significance.

The accounts of consensual sex offer few salacious details other than references to “bubbies” and “emissions,” among other, more Germanic terms. Prestwood tabulated his sexual activities exactly as he documented his labors, the two occupations often separated by a mere period. “Holp [help] thresh wheat. Lay with P. Sellers,” reads one of the more palatable entries. In his 60s, perhaps feeling his vitality waning, he kept a running tally of his encounters (and their locations) with each of his lovers, e.g., “CR fence (23).”

In the reflective passages, Jones speculates on the lessons he can draw from his ancestor’s life to pass on to his own young sons. Is Prestwood’s sexual abuse of Binah a cautionary tale about outmoded masculinity or a precursor of the toxic attitudes still prevalent today? Though in Jones’ youth the South distanced itself from overt racism, he trembles at the last decade’s populist movements that celebrate the Confederacy and the imprisonment of immigrant children. How can we consign slavery to the past when its legacy haunts every sector of Southern society?

Near the end, a newly discovered cousin tells Jones that their ancestor’s life is uniquely “an American story,” not as fodder for patriotism but as a microcosm of our complex identity. For a people who, as Jones points out, “invented themselves out of thin air,” Cipher counteracts abstract national myths with a concrete reminder of our disturbing origins.