If I Should Die Tonight

About the Book

At age twelve, Lucinda is the mother of a one-year-old half white/black baby after being brutally raped. After Ray Shawn is born; he constantly hears and sees sights and sounds of racism, hatred and insults directed at him and his mother.

When their lives are threatened and all hell breaks loose because three “good ole boys” are about to stand trial for attacking Lucinda; baby girls only option is to take little Ray, and jet from the warm conditions of their small hometown to avoid the murderous claws of a mob made up of a few of Alabama’s most racists.

She must also avoid the blood dripping branches of Jim Crow’s “hang a nigger” tree. Ten years later in a housing project near Boston, Lucinda is murdered and little Ray becomes a hustler at age fifteen at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

As he watches his boys being taken out by the disease, he realizes that he’s about to become a statistic also, but he develops a desire while in prison to eventually tell their stories. After becoming a follower of Louis Farrakhan while doing an eight year stretch, he no longer carries within him the hate and revenge that had overtaken his mind, body and soul for whites. And his desire to take out white men and continue to hustled white women as revenge for his mother’s death had all but vanished by the time he’s released

He’s now on a mission to clean up his community and save his young brothers and sisters, and to keep them from following in his path as a street hustler whose only mission was to degrade women and destroy their integrity.

About the Author

Johnny R Bodley, aka Eyes JB, hasn’t always been the man he is today. He was once an outlaw, and a street hustler. As an HIV/AIDS Prevention Specialist, Outreach Worker, and former Department of Youth Service Worker, and ex-lawbreaker who received a full pardon in 2007 for his wrong doings he has seen more bad situations than most people. He was educated in the Alabama school system. After attending night classes while incarcerated in a St Augustine Florida jail at age eighteen years later he would graduate with honors from the John Robert Powers School of Modeling and Fashion Design in Boston, Massachusetts. During the thirty one year’s that he’s been in the field of trying to save America’s youth after turning his own life around, he has earned quite a few certificates of merit and numerous awards for his outstanding work in various communities across the United States. After constantly seeing the toll HIV, AIDS, and street violence takes on people, especially people of color, as well as the youth of the world, and being a survivor of the streets himself, he believes that this qualifies him to write such a story about AIDS, death, sex, revenge, and hustling as a deterrent to the many young people who are at risk of becoming a statistic. He currently lives in Selma, Alabama, but calls Boston, Massachusetts (Columbia Point Project) home.