UNEARTHING OUR ANCESTORS: An Interview with Jeremy B. Jones |  by Jessica Cory

Jeremy B. Jones’ most recent work Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries will come out in September 2025 with Blair Publishers. Cipher follows Jeremy’s fourth great-grandfather’s encoded writings while simultaneously grappling with the author’s own role in his family, particularly as a parent. This book offers a raw, honest look at the role of place and people in one man’s daily life, centuries apart.

Jessica Cory (Cory): So I requested an ARC of Cipher because it was marketed as discussing scandalous ancestors and, of course, I was immediately intrigued. I mean, how you came across these diaries and the fact that your ancestor is writing in code…

Jeremy Jones (Jones):  I know, and then to do it for so long and not get tired of it; it’s pretty wild.

Cory:  How long did the whole process take from when you learned about this and started researching it to the point that the manuscript was largely done?

Jones: It was really a decade, which feels kind of crazy to say out loud. The reason that I found it [the diaries] was when Bearwallow came out in 2014, the press decided they wanted some photos for that book, and so that’s why I went to my grandma’s house to look in boxes.

The advice is always, when you finish a book, you should start the next one and I really didn’t know what I was going to write about after Bearwallow. Then, I found this newspaper article about the diaries while looking for photos for the last book.

Cory: And now Cipher is coming out this September, so that’s a hot minute to be researching! One of the things I was thinking about, related to research, is the struggle you discuss in learning about William Prestwood and all of his philandering and enslaving people, and what have you. Like, he’s not the upstanding kind of moral man that probably most of us want to claim. How do we integrate these problematic people into our family stories?

Jones: Yeah, it’s a good question that I think I’m still wrestling with a little bit.

I mean, I think one thing that the book taught me is that family history is always going to be a myth, for better or worse. I don’t mean to say that it’s not going to be true necessarily, but we’re gathering up these stories to tell ourselves a larger story about who we are, where we come from. And I think there has to be a recognition that that’s always going to be a kind of mythology, and if that story feels too clean then that feels like a problem. If there’s not some dark secrets or if there’s not some missteps, then that’s not doing anything for you. Even if you’re thinking in completely self-important, selfish terms of family history as an origin story for who you are and if all you have is this great upstanding family history, it doesn’t help you in any way.

I know I write in the book about wishing that I had a more “man beyond his time” who was this abolitionist and I think that in a way that would have let me off the hook to do anything now. It wouldn’t really inform what I should do with my own life, what sort of action I should take.

I think the other thing that I realized, and maybe it feels really obvious, but wasn’t at the time to me, was just that the past was still the real world. You know, I think sometimes history feels black and white and static in this way that it’s easy to look back on. But the one thing that reading fifty years of this diary revealed is that everything was just as layered and rich and emotional as it is today. And so I think that having to live in it made me realize I can’t take my own sensibilities from today and just look back and want to apply them without grappling with how easy it would be to make the same decisions that these people made.

One thing I was really interested in was just how easy it was to just be wrapped up, just thinking about the industry of enslavement, how easy it is to just benefit from that in America and the antebellum South and really everywhere. And so the one way to look back on it is to say slavers, bad and abolition is good. Let’s move on. But even people who are benefiting from enslavement in these passive ways weren’t probably thinking about it. They were just feeding their kids and trying to get through their days, but they’re still doing that on the backs of people who have been enslaved.

And we can look back on that and learn from that. But if the temptation is to just say they were good or bad that doesn’t really help us know about the systems that we’re benefiting from today that we’re not wrestling with at all either, so that’s kind of a long winded answer to say that I think that our myths that we’re building have to be messy and if they’re not, then we’re not looking in the right places for where we come from.

Cory:  I love that we need we need messy myths. One of the things that I enjoyed about the book was the way you grapple with these larger issues of privilege and how people benefited from enslavement even if they weren’t directly enslaving people. And one of the ways you talk about this is by bringing the discussion back to the land. You have this really wonderful rich connection to the Prestwood land and you talk about the rhododendrons and all the houses and things, but you also talk about the Trail of Tears and Cherokee Removal. Could you talk a bit about the complexity there? How did people come to live on this land? How does, you know, sort of owning property, right, especially in the South kind of set people apart?

Jones: Yeah, I don’t know that a lot of my family is thinking about that. But it doesn’t take a lot of picking around in your family’s history to start having to think about these questions that push you towards those questions.

Just this weekend, I was talking to one of my cousins who lives on our family land as well. He and I are probably as different as you could be politically. And so in some ways I was a little surprised that he was asking some family history questions because he knew that I had been digging into this stuff and he wanted to know if our great-grandfather who moved onto the land where we live, where we were born, had been pretty well off to have bought 124 acres in 1906.

And really, he didn’t need to be. He got this land and it was easy, and so my cousin just thinking through all this, said, “You know, we’re really…” I don’t know what word he used, maybe lucky, to still have this land, which has so much value and all we really did was just stay put. We didn’t do anything to get it. And I was like “Yeah, you’re like one step away from opening up all these bigger questions about what land ownership means and if it’s a real thing and also thinking about enslavement and how we benefit from it even though so much time has passed.” It’s not hard to trace back our ownership of this land to the Southern industry of enslavement.

So anyway, I’m not sure that it’s a question we’re thinking about a lot, but I don’t think it takes a lot of pushing and prodding to get there. I think one thing that I’ve been thinking about after Helene is just how fleeting our relationship to land can be too. I mean so much changed and washed away and a lot of what we think of as “ours” changed with it, but the land is still there and it’s gonna outlast us.

Cory: Well since you mentioned Helene and I know you were doing some work on your family property after Helene, did you find any more secret things and during those renovations?

Jones: No. We live in a house that—we didn’t know at the time—was built by an ancestor—my sixth great uncle. And this is a different family from the diarist’s. They merge through marriage in about 1920 or so, but that house was flooded and so to save it or to try to save it, we had to rip everything out of the first floor. I was expecting to find something behind the walls at least while ripping things out, but no secrets there.

What’s happened since is that because we can’t live in that house, we’re now living in my grandma’s house, which is back on this family land that I’m talking about and that I’ve been writing about. And no secrets there really, but it’s been interesting just being back in it. My uncle, my dad’s oldest brother, who has kind of become the keeper of some of these stories now that my grandma has passed, called me out of the blue a couple weeks ago to tell me about my great-grandfather Albert, who lived on this family land also, about how many people he had taken in. There was this ethic of just anybody who was in need, he would bring them in. And so my uncle started listing off all these people who had lived in the house or lived in this little cabin they had behind the house. And that was interesting, that we had been taken in too. I mean, in this moment, we are the people who need a space to live. And so I felt really grateful to have my grandmother’s house to move into, but also it made me step back and think about that tradition and how I could carry it on.

Cory: That’s a really cool tradition though to carry on. And in the book and from what you were just talking about, it sounds like some of these houses are kind of left empty after people pass. So how do you or your family members connect to your ancestors through these houses or through inanimate objects? I mean, I’m sure living in your grandmother’s house now brings back a lot of memories.

Jones: Yeah, I spent a lot of time in that house as a kid and now I’m back in that house with my kids. I have been reading Crystal Wilkinson’s Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts and reading it really put a fine point on that kind of haunting because every Saturday I make biscuits for my kids, and it didn’t take long after reading her book and then standing in that kitchen to realize, “Oh this is where my grandma made biscuits so many mornings while I was standing here.” I mean, I’m not going to say she’s got her hand on my shoulder and is speaking to me, but it does feel like a rich haunting to be able to be in that same space and doing that same work.

And yeah, there are lots of inanimate objects. We’ve been doing a lot of cleanup of trees that are down on the property, and so I was trying to get a bunch of brush out last weekend and my parents came down to help me. They brought a pitchfork for me to use and I just set it down and almost stepped on it and my mom was like “Don’t step on that, I think that was Albert’s,” who was my great-grandfather. I had no idea that this pitchfork they just kind of tossed to me was an important thing. Scott Russell Sanders has this really great essay called “The Inheritance of Tools” that thinks about how tools are passed down and what you can learn from holding them and feeling the grips where other hands have been worn in. So I was definitely thinking about that with the pitchfork while we were trying to clear out some brush.

So they’re everywhere right now, all these inanimate objects, but I feel like they’re little portals into the past. It doesn’t feel sad; it feels like I have a little piece of the people who came before me when I’m able to put them to work. It’s not like that Alice Walker story [“Everyday Use”]. It’s not like we’re just putting the pitchfork on the wall and looking at it; it’s still being used but it’s still like got the sweat and blood of people before in the grain, so that feels that feels pretty remarkable.

Cory: That’s fascinating. And it’s a way of communing with ancestors, right? And it doesn’t just show up when you’re making biscuits, this way of communing also shows up in the book. In Cipher, you write, “I’ve started writing letters to William. It makes no sense; I know this. I tell him about my days, about life two hundred years later. I work out questions about his life two hundred years ago” (32). How did working on Cipher call into question your ideas of linearity of time? Did writing it challenge your ideas of time or create an almost spiritual way of communing with your ancestors?

Jones: Yeah, it feels like Matthew McConaughey’s “time is a flat circle” should be the epigraph for the book from the True Detective line, whatever that is.

I just read the novel The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, which I really, really loved—and maybe unsurprisingly, when I mention the setup for the plot. It’s essentially a contemporary story in which a woman living in England’s job is to be what they call a “bridge” for this man they’ve pulled from the past. So there’s this 19^th-century explorer who has been pulled into present day England, and her job is to live with him and acclimate him to the present day. Obviously, a lot of that acclimation is them talking about race and gender and war and all these sort of things that would happen if you just compress time into a couple hundred years. So I really love that book and I felt like I’ve been doing that for a little while, you know. I’ve got this 19^th-century man who I’m just carrying around with me all the time and trying to make sense of the world through him or with him.

Bradley’s novel has intrigue and time travel and lots of other fun things. I did not have that, but I think that there is a way in which spending so much time in these diaries has made me feel like it’s not just this lens to see the world, but there is a person who I can piece together and imagine what it would be like to engage with or talk to.

And I think that one thing that doing all this work and research has made me realize is that it’s not, it feels like a long time ago, or at least it did when I first started his life, but it’s not really in the sweep of things that long ago. You know, 150, 200 years. It’s just a few generations of lives, so he’s not that far off. His life was so much different, but also not that different. One of the realizations I had, that I mentioned briefly in the book, is that he was a fiddler and a lot of the banjo songs that I play were songs that were around when he was playing fiddle and I was like “Oh, it’s very strange that we could probably play the same music if we sat down together.”

So I think one thing is that I realized time is not as big as I thought it was. I remember I was in Europe a couple years ago and went to an American-style mall in Spain. And when we parked in the parking garage, there were roped off Roman ruins under the mall. And I was like, “Oh, this is just a thing that happens where they discover these ruined civilizations beneath, you know, the mall.” That’s a lot of time. Or the Cherokee artifacts they’re finding from digs on [Western Carolina University’s] campus. That’s a long time, but 200 years, not really that much.

I think that if anything positive came from that realization, it’s that living through our current political moment, which feels very unprecedented, and yet, if I look at the scope of Prestwood’s life, there was a lot of crazy stuff happening and a lot of figuring out what it means to live in this country and who gets to live in this country. I mean, a lot happened in the scheme of his life, too. So there’s some hope, I think, to realize our country feels like it’s been around forever and it’s on solid footing and it’s never really been. There’s been a lot of upheaval and that’s the way things have gone and hopefully that upheaval moves into a better version of what we purport to be.

Cory: In this book you have done, as I mentioned, a whole lot of research. You have oral histories and diaries and just so much other research. And it took, as you said, a decade to write. What kind of challenges arose during the writing of this book?

Jones: Hmm, how much time do you have? I mean, one thing that was very difficult, frankly, was getting to the writing. I think the research is sometimes more fulfilling because it’s almost like detective work and so you’ve got this thing you’re trying to find and you just go out to find it and at some point you have to write and you could really research forever.

So that was one thing—just actually doing the work because it required eventually getting to a place where you can never find the answer for sure and being comfortable with that. Knowing you’ve done enough research to maybe make some guesses or pull some things together, but you can’t know for certain and you just have to be okay with that. So that was one challenge, stopping the research and being comfortable with the not knowing.

I think in terms of the actual writing, I had a really hard time figuring out a shape for the book. Its earliest version was this extended letter, like the whole book was an epistolary kind of book and it didn’t work. It was a collection of essays for a while; it’s just changed its shape so many times and some of that was just me trying to make sense of all the questions that I had and how and what container would hold them.

I rented an office for a while. I’m pretty visual and so I had big white papers stuck to the wall where I was mapping all these things out and trying to find connections. I think as a nonfiction writer I’m generally interested in unexpected connections, and so I know sometimes by feel that these things are related and so sometimes I have to just put them up on the wall and figure out what connects them.

But I remember when COVID hit, I stopped going into that office because it was a shared office space. Eventually I had to go in to get something and there was a note from the fire marshal on the door that said they had come in to inspect it. It looked like a murder board. The walls are covered with stuff, lines connecting them, shorthand that makes sense to anybody. So I just wondered what kind of list I was on after the fire marshal went in and saw the conspiracy-theory-looking wall art and then left and locked it back up. But I think I had to work that way to start to figure out how these things connect. So some of the challenge was just finding a container and that just meant lots of trial and error and lots of redrafting.

Cory:  Thinking about writing too, a lot of the material in here is, is fairly scandalous, not necessarily something that maybe everyone in one’s family would be comfortable with. Did you run into any kind of challenges where people were like, “Why are you trying to give us a bad name?” or things like that? And what advice would you give for other people trying to publish their families’ histories that may not be quite favorable?

Jones: I think in my case, the fact that it was four generations back has made it easier. It feels like an interesting bit of trivia to everyone around me. Because nobody who knew him is still living; my family, even extended family, who knew about the book seem excited to learn about him and not scandalized by him.

So I think that makes easier if it’s farther back. I mean, Mary Karr has this book called The Art of Memoir and she has a chapter in there about writing about people you love and I find that really useful. It’s just her own set of rules that she lives by, but I offer those to people a lot when they’re thinking about these questions, which get really complicated when you’re writing about real people.

You know, if you’re writing about family drama a generation back, that’s a very different calculation, and I think the question unfortunately has to be at some point, there’s this kind of proportional relationship between the relationships you have in real life and the book that you want to write and do those things have to bleed into one another? Do you have to give up one to make the other work?

There’s a really great book by Justin St. Germain called Son of a Gun in which he explores the murder of his mom by her husband, his stepfather, when the writer was like twenty. And he sets out to write about that because his mom had been a single mom, she was paratrooper, she had been this really tough lady and he just couldn’t understand how she could get wrapped up in this kind of relationship of domestic abuse.

And he said at some point, I heard him say, that he had to decide if he was willing to lose all these relationships around him to answer the question that he had for that book. And he decided that he was willing. So he wrote this book that he needed to write and he burnt a lot of bridges and, sadly, I think sometimes that is the calculation. I know there are lots of writers who don’t write the book they want to write because they care too much about the people around them, so I think the one bit of advice I have is just to figure out what is the question that you’re trying to answer before you devote yourself too fully to that project because if it’s just to burn bridges or to settle grudges or if it’s kind of a tool of revenge or some sort of weapon that you’re trying to cast out of this book, then that’s not going to do anybody any good. But if you have some question that you feel like you need to answer and the only way to it is through, that’s when you have to start thinking about the people around you and what might happen.

The other quick thing I’ll say is that you can never ever predict people’s responses. You can’t not write or write because of those hypothetical concerns. You have to sort of at some point engage with them. But the Mary Karr book really delineates writing about people. For example, if she’s going to give somebody the pages to read, she stays in the same house with them so that they can talk about it afterward; she has these very specific rules that she follows.

Cory: It sounds like it. You’ve talked about the struggles or the questions in writing, and in certain genres, like memoir, and you’ve mentioned Mary Karr’s advice. Is there any really good writing advice that you’ve gotten for crafting memoir?

Jones: This isn’t actually about memoir but it’s something I think about a lot. I took a poetry class in college and I think a lot of college students had in mind that poems were riddles that were meant to be solved, so I thought that I needed to write in such a vague or complicated way that nobody could understand it unless they got it exactly right and it sort of unlocked for them. I know that this is true because I have a lot of students in my classes who seem to feel the same way. Anyway, I had written this poem and I thought it was so clever, but you had to get it to get it. My professor then, a poet named Kevin Boyle, was like “So what are you trying to say here?” and I told him and he was like “So why don’t you just say that?” and I was like “But then it’s not a poem, is it?”

So I think that there was a way in which that class and that conversation with him made me start to realize that in that case, poetry, but as I extrapolated that and thought about memoir, that there’s this way in which what we’re trying to do is take experiences and craft them in a way so that people can step into them; not to necessarily be in our shoes or to live the experience in the exact same way, but to offer a door or a point of access. I think that was a moment that changed what writing meant for me. And now I feel like what I’m saying to students a lot is that the specific leads to the universal. So memoir is a weird genre.

E.B. White has this great tongue-in-cheek essay called “The Essayist and the Essay” in which he says that people who write essays are just egoists and that all we think is that people should care what’s happening in our lives. I think there’s some truth in that. But you have to believe as a memoir writer that this experience from your life is going to offer something to other people. And it doesn’t have to be an argument or some kind of self-help message, but that there’s some value of stepping in.

It has to be a lived life that you’re putting down, but there have to be ways in; there have to be ways for people imagine the questions that they would ask themselves and kind of live them out. So the things I think about a lot are clarity and directness, but also specificity for the sake of the of the universal.

Cory: That’s excellent advice! You do such a great job with the specificity in Cipher, especially in the diaries, and you’ve really made it accessible. I can’t wait for it to come out!

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