To My Long-Lost Cipher
We’ve never met. But I know you—I know you more than I know nearly anyone. I know Mary Norwood broke your heart. I know you liked to set out on horseback after fighting with your father. I know you fled the sheriff coming out of South Carolina in 1816. I know you had a toothache on this very day, 213 years ago.
Sometimes I like to imagine you at a table in the dark: You’ve tied the fodder and lit the lamp. Sure that your mom is asleep, you pull out the small notebook you’ve sewn together, fetch the quill. What are the considerations running through your mind as you sift through your day to lift out what’s worthy of scratching onto paper? What do you let fade away forever, and what do you snatch to put into print? It’s 1818, you’re 30 years old, and you roll the day into a cipher you’ve invented, scrambling the events into symbols: “Went after cow” becomes “Χ478 5Γ84L ϟ2Χ” in your hand.
Do you know that Celia, the woman who pinched your nose last week, the woman who went singing with you tonight, will change your life? You must suspect she’s more than just one of the dozens of flings you’ve had over the past few years. Like for those women, you’ve fashioned a symbol to represent her in your little notebook—
—but it’s been months now and that triangle and those dots show up on your pages day after day. This is different. Surely you know.
“I know you never expected, never wanted, anyone to read these entries. Why else would you have tucked them away in this code?”
What you don’t know, of course, is that whatever you decide to preserve on your pages tonight—Χ478 ς37ζ37ζ—will arrive to me two centuries later. Went singing. Celia, this woman who pinched your nose and whom you’ll make cry tomorrow and whose dress you’ll lift after the cotton picking, is my great-great-great-great grandmother. You, dear William, are my great-great-great-great grandfather.
I know you never expected, never wanted, anyone to read these entries. Why else would you have tucked them away in this code? But given that you passed bits of yourself on to me—your body broken into the body of Fabius, then Asbury and Albert and Betty and David before becoming me—I wonder if I have some right to know you. To read your secret pages, to feel the span of their fifty years. To watch your courtship with my great-great-great-great grandmother unfold in all its bawdy detail (Celia felt my prick).
In my defense, I should say that I’m not responsible for cracking your code. Someone found 27 of your notebooks in an abandoned house, and before long, a professional codebreaker took interest in them. After thirty minutes with a magnifying glass and your pages, he’d worked out the key to unlock your life, revealing you to me—and to the world.
Since discovering your deciphered life, I’ve become a father. I’ve moved back into the mountains where you died. As I write this, I’m just up the hill from your grandson’s house, the hayfield outside my window stretching in the direction of your unmarked headstone in the former settlement of Tucker’s Barn. I often wonder why you came here to the North Carolina mountains in 1813, leaving behind your family and the wide reaches of plantation wealth in South Carolina. War? The “hell fusses” with your father? Not even your recorded pages can explain to me why you tore out to live the rest of your days in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, teaching and reading instead of planning crop rotations and growing rich in the lowlands.
Whyever you packed your bags, that decision placed me here. These worn-down mountains you escaped into have held our people for two centuries now. We dug in. It’s true I left the first chance I got, searching for a larger world in my twenties. I landed on the tops of trains in South America, in twin-prop planes touching down on islands in the Caribbean, in small towns tucked in different corners of America. But eventually I tore out, too: returning to this piece of land and these old mountains. As I did, I thought of you, of course, but I thought, too, of all the other people who’ve abided here, come what may. I wanted to be counted among them, to lay down roots upon so many others, and so here I sit, your pages in my lap.
I read your recorded life because I want to know how to better live. I want to know what your life—surrounded by all the terror and beauty of our new country—might reveal to me about mine—surrounded by all the terror and beauty of that country still failing to live up to ideals set in ink just before you were born. What does the place you inhabit—on its way to civil war, soon to round up Indigenous people for a death march west—presage for mine? What might it show me about how to raise children on this quiet patch of former farmland, with fires of all kinds burning around us?
You write often about eclipses. Did you know they were coming when you looked overhead from the field and watched the moon swallow the sun? I thought of you while my kid and I watched one recently: I wondered if you, too, might’ve felt surprise at the chill in the air when the world turned black. And geese! Sowed oats for geese, you wrote, and as I pondered what you meant while doing the dishes one night, I heard them calling overhead. Night geese. I’d never considered those big birds migrating in pitch black, looking down on our lit-up, boxed-in lives. It was revelatory to me, alone in my kitchen, a rag over my shoulder. Would I have noticed them at all had I not been thinking about you? Your days of mathematical equations and bird migration charts and endless symbols have opened up my life so that I’m seeing now what I might have once missed.
“Your days of mathematical equations and bird migration charts and endless symbols have opened up my life so that I’m seeing now what I might have once missed.”
And so it is tonight. I’m worn down by so many things. Sick children. Missed deadlines. Soldiers in the streets. But I’m thinking about you on this day over two hundred years ago, age 30, the thrill of courtship with a woman who will one day be your wife and my ancestor. Amid all the turnip-sowing and trips to the mill and days of rain, your hand brings that triangle and its two matching dots to the page over and over. “Celia” becomes something like a mark of punctuation to your days, rising above everything else to remain chiseled there for centuries. I can almost feel your giddiness across all that time as you pen her symbol, and I’m happy for you. A decade before, you’d been heartbroken by Mary Norwood, unsure of what to do with your life. You’d been riding the roads to warn of British invasion and worrying at every “terrible noise,” sure you’d soon be fighting for your life. And yet here you are, living a simple life in the mountains, teaching young children and setting up a still. Falling in love.
Never mind that you’ll later cheat on her. That you’ll lose a child. That you’ll grow so distant that a gold mine will feel more like home than your house. None of that matters at a table in 1818, when the nights are still warm and you know Celia will be waiting outside of singing school tomorrow, her little crooked smile sprouting something in your chest that you’ll want to grow. The whole world is waiting, and your young love will carry across two hundred years of wars and economic collapses and thousand-year floods to arrive here. The heat of your bodies drawing ever closer, the sounds of your voices joining in song will create something ever unspooling, generations of men and women trying to find a way to live a life worthy of the splendor of this strange world of pinprick stars and spinning, celestial bodies. Of night geese.
Your lives will arrive to me, middle-aged and beat down on a couch, the woman I love on the other end, and because of your scribbled symbols, I'll remember our early courting days—winding drives to nowhere and Patty Griffin blasting from the speakers and eyes locked dangerously long. Tonight, I'll feel all of it again, scoot a little closer. I’ll see, if only for a flash, that these heavy days are but a blink. There is so much life to come, so much weight to be lifted. Your war ended; your heart mended. This, too, shall pass. What there is tonight is tonight—this house in the woods, full of sleeping children and my wife under my arm—and it’s because of you that I can see it. And for that, William, I am gratefully your son.
About the Author
Jeremy B. Jones is the author of the memoirs Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries and Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland. His essays have been published in Oxford American, Garden and Gun, The Bitter Southerner, and Brevity, among others. Jones earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and is a professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, in his native North Carolina.
Read Jeremy'’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure
Header photo by Jongsun Lee.
