Jeremy Jones is a non-fiction writer and professor of English at Western Carolina University. His new book, Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries, is out September 16, 2025. It follows Jones’s journey to decode the notebooks of his ancestor William Thomas Prestwood, a 19th-century southern farmer who journaled incessantly about his relationships with women, the enslaved, and everyday life in the Carolinas.
Enjoy my conversation with Jones about reckoning with inheritance and the history of slavery in Appalachia.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Daily Yonder: Do you want to start by just telling me a little bit about who you are and where you’re from, just your bio?
Jeremy Jones: My name is Jeremy Jones. I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina in a little community that’s called Fruitland, where my family has been for a very long time, and I left for like 15 years but live here again now. I teach at Western Carolina University, which is in Cullowhee, North Carolina, about an hour from where I grew up.
DY: Great. And what kind of things do you teach?
JJ: I teach creative writing here. I’m a professor in the English department, and I focus primarily on nonfiction, which is what I tend to write and what I tend to teach. And I think that, for better or worse, a lot of my work and interests are kind of connected to place and family and history.
DY: Well, on that topic, do you want to tell the readers about the inspiration for this book, Cipher?
JJ: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s this panic after you finish a book that sometimes happens where you think you’ll never write another book. And so after I finished my last book, Bearwallow, the publisher wanted to include some family photos in the book. So as it was on its way into production, I went down to my grandma’s house to look for specific photographs to go in that book. Along the way, she handed me this newspaper clipping from 40 years ago that told about the discovery of these 19th century sex diaries, basically. That’s how they were framed in the article. And so I read that and thought, “thanks for handing me this kind of lewd clipping that you saved, Grandma.” And then she told me that the diarist had been her great, great grandfather. And I didn’t believe her, but soon found out she was right. So in some ways, it was purely accidental that I even stumbled upon the clipping, and then ultimately these diaries, which span like 50 years of the diarist’s life in the 19th century. So that’s one answer.
The other answer is that I found them, they were fun and curious, but as I spent time with them, and simultaneously experienced the birth of my first child, it added some questions into the mix. And so I started following his life, but started immediately asking, “What does this mean for me? What does this mean for the people who come after me?” And so in some ways it was an accidental discovery, but the questions that came up were prompted by sort of existential questions about who I am and where I’m from.
DY: This might be a difficult thing to do, but I guess I want to ask you to make the connection more explicit between this story of your deciding to move back home and deciding that you want to raise your family in Western North Carolina, and the story of this long lost ancestor. Why do you think those two halves of the project came out together?
JJ: The writer, Sarah Viren, I think coined this term “biogoirs,” which are like half biographies, half memoir. And so that’s how I’ve been conceiving of the book. His diaries were written in code, so I started thinking about codes and imagining what would my life look like coded through his, if I use his life as a lens to examine my own. And some of that was just an exercise in the beginning. But the more that he became a kind of flesh and blood person in my mind, the more that he was no longer just like this novelty that I found in a box in my grandma’s house, but was a real person who had lived a life. I think I started wondering about these big questions of inheritance.
And then we had these sort of reverse trajectories where I was living at the time in Charleston, South Carolina, not far from where he was born in Darlington County, South Carolina. And he moved away as an adult into the mountains of North Carolina. I left the mountains of North Carolina as an adult and wound up in South Carolina. And so there were all these similarities, I think, in our narratives that started pulling them together for me, like he had become a teacher. I was a teacher. He clearly processed the world by writing. He was often writing letters for people and forging passes for enslaved people. And so these connections that I kept finding were sort of linchpins for the narratives, but they also raised the question, “Oh, did I inherit this?” Is this all just coincidental? What do I make of these parallels? So I tried to bounce back and forth.
I will say, if anybody’s doing the math, and I’m sure they’re not, but that my first book came out in 2014, and this book is about to come out in 2025. So that’s a long stretch of time between when I first found out about the diaries and when I finally finished the book. And one of the hardest things for doing that parallel work was finding a shape for it, finding structure that would hold what I wanted to hold in the book. And I don’t know if it works, but that’s what took so long, figuring out how to pull it together.
DY: It seems like you also had to do a lot of historical research. As you said, the diaries were written in code. And then even if they hadn’t been, it’s difficult enough to parse out what somebody’s trying to say about their life 200 years ago.
JJ: Yes, and my 19th century history was mostly informed by my high school wrestling coach. So it was very bare-bones. Like I had to do research just to figure out the context that he was living in.
DY: Right, exactly. And it seems like another thing that really motivated you was figuring out your family history as it related to slavery. I definitely related to the way you wrote about your Appalachian family, and the assumption that “We must have been too poor to have anything to do with that.” I think a lot of sort of transappalachian white people have that cop out on deck. So I wondered if you could speak a little bit more to the process of discovering that actually your family wasn’t exempt from those horrors and what that process was like for you.
JJ: Yeah, I mean, I write in the book that if you’re a white southerner, you shouldn’t be surprised to find that there’s slavery in your past. That’s going to be there no matter what. But I did feel a little bit like maybe we’d skirted some of it because my family’s been in Appalachia for the most part since, in some cases, the late 18th century. And so there’s just not a lot of land. Slavery in the mountains was different. It was still here, but it wasn’t large scale plantations. It was enslaved people working in shops. And my family didn’t have a lot of money. So I hadn’t found much slavery in that family history until these diaries, really. But this branch of the family was coming from the lowlands of South Carolina, where there were big plantations, and there was slave labor in this family. So the diarist has an ongoing relationship – I mean, relationship is not the right word, but a sexual relationship with an enslaved woman. And in an attempt to try to figure out if her children had been his children, I used 23andMe. But I think what was most telling about that experience is that I found people related to me, people with whom I share DNA, and I expected all of them to track, to trace back to that relationship. But the truth is they didn’t. There were so many people who are Black Americans with these mixed histories, who are connected to me, related to me, and not through this clear history of enslavement that I found through the diarist, which means even people who weren’t slavers were still taking part in the industry of slavery. So yeah, there’s no sort of escaping it. And I think that’s good in some ways that we have to reckon with it. I’m just not sure that we’re always doing that.
DY: How has it changed your relationship to your hometown to have done all of this research?
JJ: I mean, just following up on the slavery question, thinking about inherited land has really grown more complicated for me. I grew up on land that the grandson of the diarist settled. And so it’s been in our family for, at this point, five generations. My kids would make six. And I think we’ve, we felt lucky to have it, but it was just land, it was just sort of where we were. And even though there was not, as far as I know, slave labor working that land, being able to look back and see that my great great grandfather had some money because his grandfather took part in the slave economy has been complicated. So I think the sheer presence of family land has changed in my mind, because I’ve just been thinking about how insidious the history of slavery is in everything. And that we can’t just say, “That happened so long ago, it doesn’t affect me,” the fact that we still get to have land that is in a family for generations is, in many ways, a byproduct of slavery.
DY: Have you found any sort of productive outlets for those realizations? Are there any efforts in your home community to reckon with the legacy of slavery?
JJ: Yeah, not really. This may feel like a real thin answer to that question, but I feel like there are a lot of people I know, and grew up with, who don’t engage with these questions because they feel like, “That didn’t affect me. I never owned slaves.” And my hope is that just having a conversation about it will change something. Like I was talking to one of my cousins the other day, and he was asking, “Were our ancestors pretty wealthy to have had this much land? And how lucky is it that we still have this much land?” He wasn’t thinking about that as a byproduct of the slave economy of the South. But I feel like those conversations are something, just having the opening is something. But the short answer is no.
DY: You’ve been talking about western North Carolina this whole time. What do things look like in your hometown this far out from the hurricane?
JJ: I’m a natural optimist, but I’m struggling a bit to see a lot of progress, to be honest. Even though I know there has been progress. In fact, I just finished writing an essay about recovery. And so I’ve been talking to lots of people and looking for examples. But a lot of things are still pretty devastated, including my house that was flooded and looks the same now as it did in October. So I’m sure that’s coloring my own perspective. But I think, searching for that optimism in this answer, there are a lot of good conversations that are happening right now about how we build things back. I live in a place people want to move to, which is mostly great. But it also means that there is a lot of strain on infrastructure and the natural world. And it creates lots of cultural problems, I feel like. And so I think having conversations about, “Oh, well, we have this chance to redo these trails or redo these roads, or we have to build back in this kind of way. What is it that we’re trying to do here? Like, what does tourism look like here?” I think those are good conversations. And I’m hopeful that they’ll be nuanced and not just about, “How do we bring as many fishermen in as we can?” So I think that’s one thing that potentially could look better in the future. But I keep thinking about these sites around the county where I live, where all the downed trees and logs and wood debris is hauled and then they’re mulched. And it’s just mountains of like mulched trees that haven’t moved for what, nine months at this point? There’s just so much, it’s hard to even imagine how much stuff is down and spread across the county. So yeah, I think there are good conversations happening, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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