How the award-winning journalist and author bypassed the gatekeepers and let his community carry him to the top of the New York Times list.
Before “Burn Down Master’s House” hit shelves, Clay Cane did what every author does — he geared up for press. He anticipated interviews, excerpts, and the usual expectations of a book launch. What he got instead was silence.
“I mean, when I say nothing, within the month of the book coming out, nothing,” Cane recalled.
This was not a debut author learning hard lessons. This was a two-time New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist and SiriusXM host with decades of community-building experience behind him. And still, legacy media looked the other way.
The result? “Burn Down Master’s House” debuted at number five on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list — above John Grisham.
The gatekeepers, it turns out, never had the power they thought they did.
The road to that number five spot was longer than most readers might imagine. Cane began writing “Burn Down Master’s House” over 20 years ago while still in college. The premise — a historical fiction novel rooted in the real stories of enslaved people who fought back — was deeply personal. But the publishing world wasn’t ready.
“Nobody would publish it,” he said. “You have an idea, nobody wants it, but I always held onto it.”
It wasn’t until the success of his nonfiction book “The Grift,” which debuted at number seven on the New York Times’ Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list, that Cane found the platform and credibility to revisit the story. Even then, the pivot from nonfiction to fiction raised eyebrows.
“Folks said it was a risk, and you can’t go from nonfiction to fiction. You can’t do that,” he said. “But it just made sense.”
Despite the naysayers, Cane remained determined to follow his own path. “There’s a quote that I live by from James Baldwin,” he said. “He said, ‘You have to go the way your blood beats. And I sometimes say you have to go where your blood boils.’”
It wasn’t just a saying; it was personal. Kanye West had declared slavery a choice. Florida’s Governor, Ron DeSantis, had signed a curriculum suggesting there were personal benefits to slavery. The former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, struggled to acknowledge that the Civil War was about slavery. For Cane, the inaccuracies about slavery and the erasure of enslaved people who resisted prompted him to take action.
“I said, I got to burn down misinformation. I got to burn down disinformation. I got to burn down lies about our history,” he said. “And that’s my hope and my intention with ‘Burn Down Master’s House.’”
At its core, “Burn Down Master’s House” is a story about resistance. All of its main characters — Josephine, Charity, Luke, Henry and even a Black enslaver named Nathaniel — are based on real people. Cane spent years digging through court records and old newspaper articles dating back to 1857.
“I was just stunned at the gems that I was finding,” he said.
But the book’s roots go even deeper than historical research. Secondary characters are named after Cane’s own ancestors from Goshen, Virginia, where his grandfather was born before joining the Great Migration north to Philadelphia. Names such as Solomon and Larkin appear throughout the book. They were real people whose specific stories may be lost to history, but whose memory Cane refused to let fade.
“I don’t know their stories, but I wanted to find a way to celebrate them,” he said.
The book makes significant strides in portraying enslaved women and LGBTQ characters, who are often absent in historical fiction about American chattel slavery.
“We rarely ever hear about women fighting back in American chattel slavery, but there had to have to been Black women fighting back, you know, for years.”
In a deliberate narrative choice, Cane largely avoids the word “slaves” altogether. Instead, he uses a single, powerful word.
“I say souls,” he explained. “Souls working, souls fighting, souls burning it down — because they are souls. I wanted to take them beyond the narrative of being property.”
Behind the political urgency and historical uncovering of “Burn Down Master’s House” lies a story of profound friendship and loss.
As Cane was writing and revising the book, his best friend of over 20 years, Alexa Muñoz, was dying of lupus. Despite facing her own struggles, she remained a loyal friend and assisted Cane with his book.
“She was editing this book in her hospital bed,” Cane said. “She read this book repeatedly and would give me feedback. And this is the last few months of her life.”
Muñoz, an Afro-Latina, was an English lit major who Cane described as “a brilliant writer, but didn’t wanna write — like the person who can sing behind all, but doesn’t wanna sing.” She passed away on May 25, 2025. The book is dedicated to her.
“She was my tribe,” Cane said, adding that she “pushed [him] to write” and that “there’s a little bit of Alexa Muñoz in this book.”
With that support behind him, Cane moved with intention. When legacy media went silent, Cane didn’t beg or wait. He turned to what he had spent years quietly building — a community.
“I leaned into my people,” he said.
That meant his Sirius XM show. It meant independent media outlets and trusted voices like Don Lemon, Karen Hunter, and Reecie Colbert. It meant years of touring, sold-out shows, and relationships built conversation by conversation. It meant social media supporters who got early copies and spread the word organically.
“It once again proves that black communities do buy books. I mean, actually the data is there. We buy books at higher numbers than other communities,” Cane said.
For Cane, landing at number five on the New York Times hardcover fiction list above Grisham was validation not just for himself, but for every Black author and creator who has been told that their work was not a good fit.
“It just shows you the gatekeepers can’t tell you what you want,” he said, quoting Colbert.
And for authors or anyone on the sidelines wondering whether they need approval from major institutions to succeed, Cane’s message was direct.
“At the end of the day, for real, for real — they need us more than we need them. They need the creators. They need people to come on their platform,” he said.
Ultimately, “Burn Down Master’s House” is not just a history lesson. It is an invitation.
Cane encourages readers to take the book’s themes inward and start looking at areas of their own lives that need burning down or chains broken to escape what no longer serves them.
“My book is a beautiful domino effect. It’s a domino; how can we go and move people in a particular kind of way? So that’s my hope: that it imprints people to give them hope, to give the hope that we can reimagine where we are right now to be different,” he explained.
Cane had one piece of advice: “Don’t let them take what they can’t touch,” he said. “Full stop.”
The Grio Book Club is powered by the BLK Bestsellers List in partnership with the African American Literature Book Club (AALBC), the oldest and largest platform dedicated to books by and about Black people. List data is sourced from Circana BookScan, which tracks U.S. print sales across thousands of retailers nationwide. New lists publish monthly. Browse the full list, discover your next read, and submit a book pitch at thegrio.com/topics/book-club/.
More About:Books Lifestyle
Weekly New Episodes
Stream Now
source
