Blair Underwood is stepping into the literary world, teaming up with filmmaker and author Joe McClean to create a new novel that digs deep into Black history, community and ambition.
Sins of Survivors, released on May 20, 2025, is their first installment in a gripping crime family saga set in Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood.
The story kicks off in 1908 Alabama, where a young boy named Benjamin Carter faces deadly consequences after an act of quiet defiance against Jim Crow laws. Forced to flee with his older brother, Jasper, the two join the Great Migration north. What follows is a tale of survival and reinvention as they build a dynasty from scratch in the heart of Detroit.
What is ‘Sins of Survivors’ about?
As the brothers rise through the ranks of business and crime, Sins of Survivors examines how their choices ripple through generations. The novel explores the duality of power and vulnerability within a community trying to thrive while navigating external threats and internal fractures.
According to HarperCollins, Sins of Survivors is “a scorching crime saga featuring a dynamic cast of characters—a thrilling and cinematic story about family and what it means for a Black community to not just survive, but thrive,” and it has comparisons to Harlem Shuffle and The Godfather, blending historical fiction and drama.
Blavity readers can get an exclusive read and an excerpt from the book, out now, below:
Traffic was heavy heading north toward the neon of Paradise Valley, and Ben’s deadpan face stared out the window, watching context personified. Hastings Street in Black Bottom was a different place at night. Most shops were closed, locked up tight. The sporadic pub was open, and the light that spilled from those joints became meeting places for streetwalkers, pimps, and pushers who were out to play. He’d been in Black Bottom long enough to know these people, and if he didn’t know them personally, he knew their daddy or their cousin, or sold groceries to their sister. Sure, he’d climbed himself out, but Ben had once lived poor in Black Bottom, which was why he didn’t judge these people. He’d been there. He’d been them. Thinking back on some of the things he and Jasper had done on these very streets brought him shame and, at the same time, made him proud of what they had achieved. They’d “gotten out,” but Ben would never really leave.
The unfair part was that all societies partook in these activities, but the world judged them based on how they were marketed. Ben got an opportunity to go to France for a month during college, and while in Paris, he visited the site of the famed Moulin Rouge, which had burned down the year before he arrived. He went because the fire had made international news. The world-famous club was a mecca for artists and thinkers. When he got there, he stood in the middle of the Boulevard de Clichy, mouth agape. He was in the center of a sex district. The Moulin Rouge had been a glamourous, elite, socially acceptable whorehouse, but a whorehouse nonetheless. Take away the famous posters, the extravagant costumes, make all the ladies descendants of the Middle Passage, and the press would have deemed it a slum. A ghetto. A blight on the land. And the people inside would be heathens, and scoundrels, and diseased, and troublesome. Add a little money, paint already white skin whiter, scrounge up some dancers, and show them that the intersection between art and commerce is sex, and there you have it, the Moulin Rouge. Ben wanted to scream at all the French people passing by, “C’est une maison de pute!” His French was fairly good, a byproduct of living so close to Canada, but the Parisians would never understand without knowing the intimate details of Black Bottom. The context of Black Bottom.
The world Black folks live in is a product of hypocrisy. A Black woman sells her body? Stay away! Make a law! Set up boundaries! Put her in a cage! A white woman sells her body? New opportunities must be created to give this woman a better life! She needs assistance! She’s providing a service in a free market! Thus, the Black sex worker is delegated to “streetwalker,” and the white one is a “courtesan.” And at the streetwalker level, a woman has less respect, less money, more danger, and is closer to drugs, theft, and brokenness. The same goes for Black pickpockets, con men, pimps, and gangsters. What options do they have, really? If a life vest is never thrown into the deep end, you either drown, or you learn to do business with sharks.
Ben got out, so maybe these men and women could too. He was, at the very least, proof that there was light on the other side. Or was he? Things got bad during Prohibition. Lines were crossed—Ben’s lines, Carter family lines, human lines. When Volstead was lifted, they made a conscious effort to choose the straight and narrow—Jasper because he didn’t want to lose what they had gained, and Ben because he saw how far they could get with how far they’d come—but that didn’t mean it was easy.
As the car rolled north, the lights shined brighter and the reflections in the window grew livelier. Ben sat up straighter in his seat. Black and white revel-makers happily pranced and strutted to their first destination of this glorious Friday night on the town. Soon jazz could be heard spilling into the street from all directions. For a brief moment, Ben even recognized his own hypocrisy. Seeing the nice duds, the sleek cars, the neon lights? Damn. It brought Ben back to Paris, and it felt good.
When Hank pulled to the curb, the window covering Ben’s face reflected the glory of Geraldine’s. The club was already going hard, easily the most popular spot on the strip this fine evening. After a day dealing with Leon Bates, Thomas Schwartz, Robert Peck, and Goddamnit, Charles, why are you sniffing around Minnie’s place, it felt nice, safe, to be in his own domain.
Hank opened his door, and Ben stepped into the party that was Paradise Valley.
“Looks like it’s gonna be a good night tonight, boss.”
“Thank the Lord.” Ben slipped Hank a buck. “You worked long enough today. Drink one for me too. I’ll drive her home myself.”
“All right, all right! He-haa!”
“Don’t party too hard! I still need you in the morning.”
As Hank slipped through the crowded doorway, Ben spotted Charles excusing himself from a patron he’d been schmoozing. He walked toward his father with a grin that seemed to extend beyond the confines of his face. The turnout tonight, no doubt due to word of mouth from Ben and Charles’s lunchtime stunt with Lady Day, was plenty to earn a smile that wide, but Ben knew there was something else that filled boys with that much glee.
Charles went in for a hug—“ Hey, Pops!”—but was met with a surprisingly hard fist check to his chest. Charles immediately surveyed the crowd to see which of his patrons may have witnessed this disrespect.
“You think I’m a twit? You think I don’t got the lowdown on you?”
“What!” Charles was fully blind to what was going down.
“This family doesn’t need your shit gumming up the works!”
Ben went for another chest jab, but Charles was ready this time and flinched back. “Pops! Stop! What’s going on? Did Danny talk to you?”
Ben was instantly irate. His smile was long gone, perhaps inside, having a drink with Hank. “Danny?! What the hell does Danny have to do with that face I know you’ve been seeing?”
There it was. Charles knew he was caught, and like center stage at amateur hour, he had also spilled intel that was supposed to have remained up his sleeve.
New thoughts, none of them good, streamed into Ben’s consciousness. “Shit, boy! Danny? Don’t you even let me catch you having dealings with Danny.”
“Your daddy’s right.” The voice of Jasper ended their hushed conversation, both father and son wondering what exactly he had heard.
Caught up in their own little world and camouflaged by the city lights and sounds, Ben and Charles hadn’t seen Jasper’s 1936 Lincoln Model K LeBaron coupe slide into its designated spot. Been there for less than thirty seconds and the car already had an audience of drooling onlookers who knew better than to touch the polished baby blue steel. Majestic chrome accents, gleaming white walls, lines like the perfect lover—there was nothing more luxuriously sophisticated as this tin can. It was also a sly way to stay neutral, because everything about this car was Ford, Edsel Ford. Jasper liked Edsel. A daddy’s boy, sure, but he wasn’t willing to follow the same blueprint. Edsel was willing to use the advantage he was born with and run for the hills, creating something altogether his own. Jasper’s ride was just enough Ford to keep Henry’s heavy-handed fixer, Harry Bennett, at bay, and just enough not Ford that if you squinted your eyes in just the right light, one could read the faint fuck-you to the man.
Jasper stood bathed in the green neon of the Geraldine’s marquee. Even with his face freshly shaven, it looked rough. He was decked in a shining white zoot suit with the thinnest widely spaced black pinstripes. On his head, a black-and-white fedora with a weaved leather band, and peeking out at his neck from under his coat was the black on black of his shirt and tie. Holding a small wooden box under his arm, he lifted the sole of one of his black-and-white leather shoes to knock the ash off the end of his Cinco cigar, then snapped it, half-finished, into a gold case that he casually dropped inside his left breast pocket. Without a doubt, Jasper was king of his wolf pack.
From Sins of Survivors: A Carter Brothers Novel by Joe McClean; presented by Blair Underwood. Copyright © 2025 by Joe McClean. Available from Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission.
