Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries

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. (Sept.)