Among the Reeds
An American Novel
A family can live in the same apartment for decades and still disappear in seven seconds.
When an automated housing system suddenly classifies Thomas Reed and his family as unauthorized occupants of the Harlem apartment they have called home for generations, what begins as a clerical problem spreads quickly. A mistaken identity contaminates a background report. An old court record refuses to die. Employment verification raises another flag. A medical file quietly merges two different people. Every institution sees one piece of the Reed family. None sees the whole.
Then Thomas’s mother, Lillian, opens a metal box she has kept for decades. Inside are leases, photographs, receipts, deeds, court papers, family records, and an old cassette containing the voice of a woman who remembers another Reed family being told there was a problem, then a process, and finally that nobody was responsible for what happened next.
From Harlem to South Carolina, the Reeds begin reconstructing a history that official records have repeatedly divided, mislabeled, transferred, and forgotten. Among the Reeds is a contemporary American family novel about memory, property, technology, bureaucracy, inheritance, identity, and the dangerous distance between a human being and the record that claims to describe them.
They never sold him. They only transferred the file.