If I Should Die Tonight

Book excerpt: 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.