Cracking the Family Codes

Jeremy B. Jones| Longreads | July 31, 2025 | 3,080 words (11 minutes)

We were on the coast when my son first asked about sex. He was seven and impossibly precocious. I was thirty-seven with my pants around my ankles, changing out of a wet swimsuit in a rented house in South Carolina. In truth, he wasn’t asking about sex; he was asking about anatomy. In truth, he was pointing at my balls and saying, “Why are you bigger down there?” 

Sarah, my wife and this boy’s mother, was in the bathroom, watching this unfold in the mirror like one might watch a particularly clumsy cat scale a wall. Hoping for the best. 

“Oh, here?” I asked, pointing, too. One of the cat’s paws slipped. 

Not long after having Abe, Sarah and I’d agreed to use anatomical terms with our kids. No “wee wees” or “tee tees” here. We’re a people of penises and vaginas. So when he nodded, I gave it to him. Testicles. 

He liked the sound of that, tried it out a few times—the word like a roller coaster, hanging on that first syllable for a beat before rushing down. But then he regained focus: “What does it do?”

When Sarah was pregnant, I told her I didn’t fear dirty diapers or runny noses. I feared teenage hormones. I feared messing up so much that my son climbed on a Harley at age thirteen, crossed out his Dad tattoo, and roared off for good. I’d like to think this is why I started backing into the corner while trying to pull up my pants. It wasn’t that I was a coward but that I was aware of my power. Aware of all that could go wrong. I was being selfless, really. Humble.

I looked to Sarah, hoping to pass the baton just before I shrank into nothingness, but I knew everything I needed from the flash of her eyes in the mirror. Your turn.   

Yesterday, after finding his aunt’s pads in her room, Abe had laced Sarah with questions, starting with, “Why does she wear a diaper?” Then he’d learned it all: the bleeding, the shedding of the uterus’s lining, the monthly wherewithal stashed in the bathroom. “Does Grandma still bleed?” he wanted to know. And then: “So she can’t have babies?” This was the precise moment when we learned he is smarter than we are.

So, yes, it was my turn. I stood up straight and we set off: the sperm and the egg. The Great Mystery. 

It wasn’t so bad, really. He knew about the egg already. He’d witnessed his little brother change from a bump in Sarah to a little person singing “Pop Goes the Weasel” on the bed while we talked about conception. I was feeling better already as I rounded the homestretch: we make sperm, women make eggs. Two become one. 

“But . . .” he said, and I sensed more than knew what was coming, like a bird before a storm. “But how does the doctor put the sperm with the egg?”

“Oh, a doctor doesn’t do it.” I pulled up my shorts. “We’ll talk about that part later.”

“Then how does it get in there?” 

I buttoned my fly as fast as I could. “We can talk about it later.” I was a heartbeat away from bribing him with candy.

“Does the boy, like . . . pee it in the girl’s vagina?”

Then I gave up. I handed him the keys to the car and the account number to my 401K and poured a drink. 

When I admitted, “Yeah, that’s kind of right,” he lifted off the ground, literally jumping in his excitement. I was taken aback by this. He was ecstatic. But then, suddenly, I saw it all as if for the first time, too, and it did feel worthy of leaping: the act, the result. How could any of this be real?

Later, because I’m a sadist, I brought it back up. I was compelled by his enthusiasm, by the newness with which I could see all of it by explaining it to the child who would, one day, put me in a retirement home: 

“It’s kind of weird but also cool to think that you used to be inside me but also inside Mom, right?”

He was in the back seat of the car. We were all there, our family of four that used to be two on our way to dinner. He nodded and said, “And that Mommy used to be in Grandma.” 

That night, the generational work of it all settled over him, and he wanted to know which parts of him were from my family and which were from Sarah’s. He drew a line with his finger, bisecting his body: “Is this side yours, and that side Mom’s?” 

The great bundle of it suddenly felt too much for me to comprehend, much less to explain. I avoided DNA. I searched for some metaphor: A stew? A puzzle? 

“You’re you,” I said finally, hoping I sounded like a wise monk stepping from a cave. 

And then: “But you’re also all the people who come before you.” 

I tried again: “You’re you because of all these people who come before you.” 

But also: “There’s no one like you.” 

Eventually, he was satisfied enough to go back to reading The Boxcar Children, and I was left standing alone in the kitchen, thinking about all the lives in our skin.

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The cryptanalyst Nathaniel C. Browder was eighty years old once he’d finished transcribing William Thomas Prestwood’s life, one symbol at a time. Browder had moved in with his daughter in Raleigh by then, leaving the mountains behind after Blanche passed. It was a useful arrangement—his daughter camped out in archives and historical societies for him, looking for records and reporting back with her findings while he chiseled away at the code. In 1984, once he’d written an introduction and rounded out William’s life with genealogical research, he printed and bound seventy-five copies of his work, sent them to regional libraries, and died. 

I found a copy on Amazon not long after leaving Grandma’s house in the dark and doing my own genealogical research—decades after Browder’s death. Someone with the handle pfortnash advertised a used copy of The Enciphered Diaries of William Thomas Prestwood for $79.99 plus tax. I laid down my money and waited for my great-great-great-great-grandfather to show up in the mail.

When the package arrived on my stoop in Charleston, South Carolina, many weeks later, I didn’t know Sarah was pregnant with Abe. She didn’t know she was pregnant. We wouldn’t know for another month, once she’d taken the bar exam and we’d packed our bags for a trip to Panama, that we’d created a tiny human bug, our first. A baby who would one day grow into a boy asking me about anatomy in a shared bedroom at the beach.

I entered into those diaries looking only for sex. From the newspaper article, I knew William had been promiscuous and thorough, so I skipped right past mentions of mockingbird migrations and gold mining and state executions in search of lewd acts in closets and barn lofts. I’m not ashamed of this.

A few weeks later, I drove to North Carolina for July 4th. As I had done until I moved away from the mountains of home a decade before, I took a sleeping bag down to Clear Creek, just below the Prestwood homeplace and the Fruitland Cemetery, holding the Maxwells and Prestwoods who had come before me. My people, and other families from Fruitland, came out of the woodwork, throwing up dust from Townsend Road and filling the empty bottomland to set up tents and cover long wooden tables with potato salad and pound cake. 

I hadn’t been a regular attendee for years. We had been in the faraway place my people called off—Honduras, Ecuador, Iowa—but the drive from Charleston was easy enough on a summer weekend, so I’d come this year, William’s diaries in hand, to sleep on the ground with a handful of families I’d known all of my life alongside a creek that had grounded my people for two hundred years. 

Like a mischievous schoolboy, I showed my cousin Isaac the dirty words in the nineteenth-century diary at the edge of the trees above the creek, out of earshot of our parents and grandma and Sunday school teachers who prepared the food. Before long, our childhood friends Adam and Andrew noticed and wondered what we were looking at. We were a group of thirty-year-old men chuckling at the sex life of a man who’d been dead for 150 years. Real-life grown-ups. Eventually, my uncles caught wind; we opened up the circle. Then Grandma beckoned us over with a single word, the one she always called out like the sharp but perfect high lonesome sound of a Bluegrass singer: Boys. 

We came.

In my boyhood, Grandma had been circling the table, sticking spoons in casseroles, cooking potatoes on the camping stove, wagging a finger at kids blurring too fast through the makeshift kitchen. Granddaddy would’ve already set up the horseshoe stakes and would be tossing with the other men, all of them in long pants and short-sleeved, button-up shirts, though they’d now have undone the top button or two in the July heat: the lot of them sporting wide baseball caps advertising plumbers or seed companies. 

But now Granddaddy had been dead for fourteen years, and most of the men wore shorts and tennis shoes and threw cornhole instead of horseshoes. Grandma stayed planted in the folding chair while the other women fluttered about. Even sedentary and old, she called us all to immediate attention with the same word and voice she’d used all of our lives, every time we’d brought blood or broken a window or pulled blooms from her bushes. Boys. I carried the big green book over, left it on her lap like a time bomb, and we scattered.

My copy of the diaries stretches for 231 pages, the text filling two columns per page, and it’s not as if William was playing the field every day, dropping prick and bubbies and fuck every line. To find the good stuff, you have to dig, to know just what you’re looking for. I expected Grandma would get bored with the monotony of hauling logs and hoeing corn while I took up a cornhole game. 

When I later retrieved the closed book from her lap, I suspected she’d found nothing racy and given up. 

“Pretty interesting, isn’t it?” I asked when I sat back down. 

“Oh, it’s about as I reckoned it would be,” she said, smirking at me. The glimmer in her eye told me everything I needed to know: She’d found William’s private life. 

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The Kamasutra lists sixty-four arts that an attractive woman should master. Fixing colored glass tiles on the floor. Tying turbans. Storing water in reservoirs. Mastering tongue twisters. Teaching parrots or starlings to talk. Knowledge of gambling. 

Number 44 demands an understanding of code languages. 

Vatsyayana, likely writing in the third century, offers women a system for using these code languages, a way to create a cipher by pairing and then substituting letters. Change, for example, all As into Qs. 

Julius Caesar relied on a similar method when sending messages to Cicero during the Gallic Wars in the first century BCE. He simply replaced Roman letters with Greek letters and snuck the messages in plain view. Later, Caesar developed a system that shifted a cipher alphabet three places ahead of the plaintext, making an A a D, a B an E, and so on. The Caesar Shift, cryptanalysts later called it.

OLNH WKLV.     

Without a key—without knowledge of the shift or the method behind the madness—these substitution ciphers locked up messages soundly in the ancient world. They were unbreakable.

William’s diaries would have been similarly sealed tight. No one could have discovered that ς|ϟξ37ζ 27 Λ|ΛΛƪς meant “sucking on bubbys.” He could have scattered his smattering of numbers, Greek characters, and shapes across Persian war zones and backstabbing Roman political circles and kept his life hidden. 

But a scholar in ninth-century Baghdad could have known William’s secrets. By then Islamic scientists had woven together enough mathematical, statistical, and linguistic knowledge to begin jimmying the lock of substitution ciphers. 

In a ninth-century manuscript, a scholar named Abu Yusuf Ya’qub ibn as-Sabbah ibn ’omran ibn Ismail al-Kindi describes a method of breaking these ciphers, a method that later became known as frequency analysis—a method Browder surely used to crack William’s code, that Nirenberg used to understand DNA. 

In al-Kindi’s description, a codebreaker takes a page of ciphered text and a roughly equal amount of plaintext. Then he counts the occurrences of letters in the plaintext—in Arabic, the letters A and L will naturally show up a lot (because of the article al), so it’s easy to assume the letters occurring most frequently in the cipher text will match. Then the codebreaker performs the same task on the cipher text and begins making some assumptions, filling in the pieces as he can. 

This is the invention of cryptanalysis: WDNH WKDW, FDHVDU.

By the time Nathaniel Browder received copies of William’s symbols in 1978, wars had been won and lost, assassinations carried out and thwarted because of cryptanalysis. 

Cryptology had become an industry in the eighteenth century—a hundred years before William’s life. Countries across Europe created Black Chambers, staffed with cryptanalysts who worked to find and decipher information. By the time Browder received those xeroxed pages, Nazis had enciphered and shrunk messages onto microdots. The American marines had taken on Navajo words to encrypt communication. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had fashioned Sherlock as a cryptography expert, Edgar Allan Poe had written “The Gold Bug,” and Chaucer had encrypted passages in his Treatise on the Astrolabe. Babbage had cracked Vigenère, Turing had smashed Enigma. Handfuls of unbreakable codes had been created. And broken. 

And, too, Samuel Pepys, the seventeenth-century English diarist and navyman, had written of sex under chairs and necking on bridges by hiding the saucy accounts in other languages. Eighteenth-century explorer William Byrd II had “rogered” women from London to Virginia in a shorthand code for his secret diaries. 

In short, William Prestwood’s simple substitution cipher isn’t remarkable in the history of cryptology. His womanizing barely compares to Byrd’s sexual appetite. William is himself a cipher: a nobody in the scheme of history.

This is what intrigued Browder, what sent him across the state and planted him at a typewriter for years: William’s ground-floor view of all of the nineteenth-century happenings. His bystander status. It’s clear in Browder’s lines of research that he’s interested in whose paths William crosses. He dives into genealogy and census data to find these connections: Thomas Wolfe’s uncle buys the Prestwood family Bible, William befriends Daniel Boone’s great-nephew, William’s mother is connected to a Declaration of Independence signatory. For Browder, William is a narrator for a wider world, catching glimpses of the power players from the sidelines. 

But for me, William is the protagonist. William is the history: a key to what’s inside me, to where I’m from. My cipher.

---

We are equal parts our parents, as they were equal parts their parents. We’re each packaged with full copies of two separate lives: everything that has fleshed out our parents’ bodies is now our bodies. The obviousness of this makes it nearly unbelievable. But what it also means is that the same spun-up ladder of millions of DNA sequences that rests in a single cell of their bodies also makes the whole us. 

This is too much for me. That the information that gave me a sizable nose and thinning hair is written on a single skin cell on my dad’s arm or a stray hair from my mom’s head. Our whole genomes wait in a cell we might slough off without ever knowing, all of our secrets trailing us as dust.

I think of those microdots from World War II, when Germans stashed messages within a single period of communication, sneaking coordinates and plans past Allied forces by shrinking them down into punctuation: everything tucked away in plain sight. They might have carried on that way forever, but someone eventually noticed. A microscope in the bag of a captured German spy made an Irish codebreaker suspicious, and soon he’d unraveled all the tiny, hidden messages waiting there: thirty pages of instructions and names vanished into throw-away dots. 

For centuries our earlobes and curled tongues and eye colors made scientists and philosophers scratch their heads; they dug for answers about what—who—we’re made of, but they couldn’t see what lay hidden out in the open, right on our skin. Like that Irish codebreaker, Crick and Watson noticed something awry. They spotted a double helix on a blown-up image of a cell and knew the shape of human life—two wound-up strands. Now scientists sit in labs working away at the DNA in our skin, decrypting messages to know just who we are. Unspooling us. We’ll all be found out sooner or later. 

I do the math. I am 1.56 percent William Thomas Prestwood. Or he is 1/64 of me. That’s nothing, negligible. His DNA has been whittled away by Fabius and Elizabeth and Asbury and Clementine and Albert and Azalee and Ray and Betty and David and Joy—and many more branches that never touched William’s.

I may owe him for the pop my right elbow makes when I straighten it in the morning, but not much more. He’s long gone, barely a part of me. I contain multitudes. 

And still, I want to know. I want to know where exactly he lies in my skin, what he’s given me. I imagine myself divided, like my son had wanted, not in half but in sixty-fourths. What slice of me is he? I ought to hire a codebreaker to find him hiding out in there.

But, of course, it’s not math. A life—this long line of begets—is not a mere matter of DNA, of genetics. The way William laid his hand on young Fabius’s head might have carried through the fingers of Asbury and Albert and Betty, learned without any work at all. My daddy’s hand on my head might have been William—a gesture passed on without a gene. He could be anywhere right now. An unknowable haunting guiding my hand even now as I rest it on my boy’s wild hair just before bed.

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Jeremy B. Jones is the author of the memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland (Blair, 2014). 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.  

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald