Read the First Chapter of Nine Lamps Over Kettle Street

Jonah Adebayo-Reyes spent four years in city reading rooms rebuilding a single Harlem block as it stood in 1924. His debut, now on the 2026 RedSquibble Debut Shortlist, follows Augustus Bell through the hours when everyone believes no one is watching. We chose this opening because it gives you the man, the street and the ledger in the space of one night's work.

Chapter One

Every lamp on Kettle Street had a name, and Augustus knew all nine of them the way other men knew the names of their children. Old Mary stood by the Mount Olive steps and leaned a little toward the church. The Deacon was across from her, tall and stiff and slow to take a flame. Then came Lucky, who never once failed him, and the Twins outside the Garland rooming house. Miss Hattie had a cracked pane he had been asking the company to replace since Easter. Crooked Tom had been struck by a coal wagon in 1919 and never stood straight again.

The ninth lamp stood outside number 114, and Augustus had never said its name out loud.

He came up the block at a quarter past six with the ladder on his left shoulder and the lighting pole in his right hand, the way he had come up it for eleven years. The sky over the rooftops had gone the color of weak tea. Somewhere a phonograph was playing the same four bars of a song, again and again.

"You're late, Mr. Bell," said Mrs. Pearline Odom from her stoop.

"I'm exactly on time, Mrs. Odom."

"The Deacon was dark all Tuesday night. I wrote to the company."

"I know you did," he said. "They wrote to me."

She folded her arms, satisfied, and he set the ladder against Old Mary and climbed. Five rungs. The glass door swung open with its small familiar complaint. He turned the cock, lifted the pole, and the mantle caught with a soft cough and bloomed white.

This was the part of the work he never told anyone about. Not the climbing or the cold or the pay, which was eighty-one cents an evening and the same again at dawn. It was the moment the light arrived and the street became a street again. It still did something to the inside of his chest that he could not have explained to a priest.

He lit the Deacon, who took three tries and a word Augustus would not have used in front of Mrs. Odom. He lit Lucky on the first try. He lit the Twins and stood a moment between them, warm on both sides, while the Garland boarders came home from the docks. He lit Miss Hattie, and Pharaoh, and Crooked Tom with the ladder set at an angle that would have frightened a younger man.

Then he stood at the foot of 114 for longer than he needed to.

The shades were drawn on every floor. They were always drawn now. He climbed, lit the lamp, and came down without looking at the windows, a rule he had made two winters ago and broken only twice.

He went home to his room on Lenox and slept in his clothes until one, the way he always did, and at half past one he was back on Kettle Street in his coat, walking the block with his hands in his pockets. The company did not know. He told himself he was checking the mantles, and some nights that was even true.

Kettle Street after midnight was a different street wearing the same bricks. The phonograph was quiet. A cat went along the top of a fence with great seriousness. At 2:10 by the clock in the window of Fenner's pharmacy, a long black automobile turned in from the avenue with its headlamps off and stopped in front of 114.

Augustus stepped back into the doorway of the shuttered tailor's shop and made himself small.

After a minute the rear door opened and a young man climbed out, holding a handkerchief to his mouth. He was no older than twenty. His collar was torn. In the white light of the ninth lamp, Augustus could see that the handkerchief had been white once, too. The young man went up the steps of 114 and knocked twice, then once, and the door opened before the third knock had finished sounding. The automobile pulled away, still dark, and turned north.

The door of 114 closed. The shade on the second floor moved, just slightly, and was still.

At dawn he put out all nine lamps in reverse order, Crooked Tom to Old Mary, and at seven he was at the table in his room with a cup of chicory and the book.

It was an account book, the plain green kind the company clerks used, bought on 125th Street in the spring of 1921 for forty cents. The first page said only KETTLE STREET in his careful block capitals. The pages after it were ruled into columns he had drawn himself. Date. Hour. Lamp. What was seen.

He had never been able to say what the book was for. His mother had kept the family births in the front of a Bible, and it had seemed to him, as a boy, that a thing was not true until someone wrote it in ink. Most of what he wrote was small. A husband singing to himself on the way home. A girl crying on the Garland steps and a stranger giving her his hat. He had filled more than half the book.

He dipped the pen and wrote the date, and then 2:10, and then 114.

He sat a long time with the pen above the column marked What was seen. At last he wrote, Young man, torn collar, blood. Car with no lights. Two knocks and one. He closed the book and held his palm flat on the cover, the way you might hold a hand on a door to feel whether there is fire behind it.

Under the book, where he had put it on Monday so he would not have to look at it, was the letter from the gas company's district office. Kettle Street was to be wired for electric light by the first of April. His services would no longer be required.

Nine lamps, he thought. One winter.

Nine Lamps Over Kettle Street by Jonah Adebayo-Reyes (Lantern House, 412 pages, $28.99) is out now.