The photograph is about the size of a playing card, and one corner is torn away. A man in a dark coat stands near the top of a wooden ladder, one arm raised toward a gas lamp, his face turned from the camera. Someone has written a street name and a year on the back in faded pencil. Jonah Adebayo-Reyes found it in a mislabeled city archive box in 2021, while looking for something else entirely. He has not stopped thinking about the man since.
That man became Augustus Bell, the last lamplighter on Kettle Street in 1924 Harlem and the hero of Nine Lamps Over Kettle Street, a novel in which Bell keeps a ledger of the secrets he sees after dark. Adebayo-Reyes taught high school history in the Bronx for fourteen years before he stepped away to finish the book, which is now on the 2026 RedSquibble Debut Shortlist. We spoke by phone as he walked his dog along the Harlem River.
The Photograph on the Ladder
What were you actually looking for when you found it?
Water main records, if you can believe it. I was helping a former student research a building that flooded in the 1920s. The box was labeled wrong. Under the maps there was an envelope of street photographs, and the lamplighter was the third one. I held it for maybe ten minutes without moving. The archivist came over and asked if I was all right.
Why that image, out of all of them?
Because he's turned away. Every other person in that envelope is looking at the camera. He's working. He had a job to finish before the light went, and he wasn't going to stop for a photographer. I thought, here is a man with a whole life nobody wrote down.
Where did the ledger come from?
A lamplighter goes out at dusk and comes home at dawn. He's the one man on the block who is awake and moving during the hours when people think nobody is watching. So I started asking what he would see. Whose door opens at two in the morning. Who comes home with a split lip. Then I asked what a careful man would do with all of that. He'd write it down. And then he'd have to decide what the writing was for.
Four Years in the Stacks
Four years is a long time. What did the research look like day to day?
Mostly boredom, with small explosions in it. I went in on Saturdays and all summer, and later full time. I read city payroll books, gas company letters, church bulletins, rent rolls. I found what a lamplighter was paid in 1924, down to the cent. I found complaints residents filed about lamps that went dark. One woman wrote three letters about the same lamp in a single month. She's in the book under a different name, and she's still furious.
Did the archives ever let you down?
Constantly. The records are good on money and bad on people. They'll tell you what the city paid for a ton of coal and how many lamps stood on a block. They almost never tell you what anybody felt. For Black Harlem in particular, whole lives are simply missing. That silence became the real subject of the novel. Augustus keeps a record because nobody else is keeping one.
"The records are good on money and bad on people. They almost never tell you what anybody felt."
From the Classroom to the Page
How did fourteen years of teaching in the Bronx shape the book?
Teenagers are the toughest audience there is. If a lesson was only dates, I lost the room in five minutes. If I brought in a letter somebody wrote, or a photograph, the room changed. I learned that people care about the past when it has a face. I tried to write the novel the way I tried to teach, one person at a time.
Have any of your former students read it?
A few came to my launch at a branch library in the Bronx. One of them, a young woman who's in nursing school now, stood up during the questions and said, "You made us read primary sources for a whole year, and now you wrote one." I had to sit down for a minute after that.
Do you know who the man in the photograph really was?
No. I looked for two years. The payroll lists give me four possible names for that route in that year, and I can't narrow it further. I've made my peace with it. A copy of the photograph hangs over my desk, and some mornings I tell him I did my best.
Adebayo-Reyes is back in the reading rooms three days a week now, working on a second novel he won't describe. He will say only that it also begins with a box somebody labeled wrong.
Nine Lamps Over Kettle Street by Jonah Adebayo-Reyes (Lantern House, 412 pages, $28.99) is out now.
Senior writer. Julian profiles debut novelists and the lives they write around. He spent a decade as a features reporter at newspapers across New England.
