Wrath White: Like Porno for Psychos

Even then she’d somehow known that she was using his name in vain. Chango was the god of vengeance and wrath. He blessed his followers with the power to avenge injustice. It was up to them to survive it on their own.

Shana could remember looking in the mirror after she’d gotten home that day, looking at her smeared lipstick and torn clothes, the mascara running down her cheeks like black tears. Now she looked exactly like the whore her father had accused her of being when she first started wearing makeup. She knew then that no man would ever marry her now and her parents would blame it all on her. They’d always said that she’d become too wild and undisciplined, corrupted by the decadent American girls she played with. Funny that none of them had been punished as severely as she had. And all she’d done was put on lipstick and wake up too late to catch the school bus.

Storm clouds darkened the sky everyday after that. Sometimes a flash flood would pound the earth with a deluge of rain, washing away all the garbage from the streets and thunder would roar in the skies like the lion of Judah. Lightning bolts would strike the earth making it look like a battlefield, and Shana’s parents would lock themselves in their rooms until it was over. Sometimes she would hear them whisper Chango’s name in hushed reverent tones as the skies unleashed their fury and they cowered from his wrath. Other times they would whisper the name of “Obaluaiye” the god of pestilence, disease, and retribution. On those days, Shana would go out into the backyard and let the hard rain pound down over her. Hoping it would cleanse her of the memory of the assault, wash away his filth, which she could still feel on her skin like an oily film. Once the rain had continued for hours and the water level had risen to above her kneecaps. Still, she’d stood there adding her own tears to the rising torrent, as bolts of lightning scorched and churned the earth all around her.

Her parents had begun to look at her as if she had disgraced them, as if the rape had been her fault. Her father would threaten to emasculate the man with a dull knife when he finally caught up with the one responsible for violating his daughter’s innocence and then in the very next breath accuse her of having none. Her mother and father would argue all the time about what to do with their “corrupted daughter” now that she’d been “ruined.” Soon they seemed to lose all interest in finding the man who’d assaulted her. It had all been her fault.

They said she dressed too sexy and that’s why she had been raped. So she stopped wearing skirts and shorts and only wore long pants and dresses and shirts that covered her arms so that none of her skin showed from her neck down. She stopped wearing makeup and cut her hair short. They said she was too friendly with boys. So she shunned them. They said her friends were a bad influence so she got rid of them too. They said her body developed too fast so she starved herself until her breasts and hips disappeared and her body looked like that of an adolescent boy. She listened to their arguments and would burst into tears when she heard her father call her a slut and accuse her of lying about the rape to cover up her promiscuity. Sometimes her mother would defend her and sometimes she wouldn’t.

Every day that passed following the rape, her parents seemed to grow more agitated. There was a nervousness, a cautiousness, in the way they tip-toed around her. Despite the arguments they had with each other about her predicament, they hardly ever spoke to her about it. They hardly spoke to her at all anymore. She could sense them not wanting to be alone in the same room with her. They never looked her in the eyes or touched her anymore. It took a while for Shana to recognize their apprehension and hostility for what it was—fear. When her belly had begun to swell with pregnancy, their trepidation had turned to panic.

An endless procession of Yuruba priests and witchdoctor’s began to attend to her almost daily. They prayed, meditated, and chanted over her and gave her herbs and medicines to drink. They gave her oils and ointments to rub over her belly. None of them would touch her. The rains would come almost immediately when they arrived and last for days after they left. The sky would rage, roaring out its pyrotechnic wrath and hurling a barrage of lightening bolts in every direction. Shana could see the terror on the faces of the priests increase as the dark clouds smothered the sky and the bolts of electricity struck closer and closer to her house. It was not uncommon for one to suddenly get up and flee the room. It was almost expected that the priests would fall ill soon after visiting her, and not even surprising when news of their deaths came back to the house. Shana had become a pariah, the shadow of death.

She never got to see her baby. She gave birth in her bedroom surrounded by Yuruba priests and priestesses, candles, incense, and chalises to catch the blood of the offerings chained to her bedposts.

“We cannot just sacrifice a goat for this. Chango will want a greater offering.” One wizened old priest said.

Her father lowered his head and pointed at Shana’s belly.

“He shall have the child. That’s what he wants.”

“You can’t! You can’t do this!” her mother shrieked.

“We’ve tried everything else. There’s nothing we can do!”

The earth shook as lightning scorched the earth all around their home. Smoke and car alarms went off all down the block. The louder Shana screamed with the throes of labor the more frequent and the closer the lightning struck. The priests and priestess began to slaughter the goats and chickens, slitting their throats and spraying their blood around the room. They danced and chanted and prayed. Then they began to shriek as the child came screaming from its mother’s womb in a flood of blood of rage and the lightning smashed through the window knocking them to the floor and striking the bed.

Shana couldn’t remember what happened after the room exploded with light and her head had filled with a sound like the earth itself cracking open. When she awoke, she was in the hospital and the baby was gone. No one ever told her what happened to it and she was forbidden to ask. The storms went away after that. However, her father’s anger was even worse then before.

Just a few years later, mere days after Shana graduated from high school, her father kicked her out of the house. He refused to pay for her to go to college. He told her simply to “Pay her way the way the other whores did.” So she’d started stripping. Her “exotic looks” had made her a favorite and soon she was being offered money to do more than take off her clothes on stage. Soon she began to take it. Eddie had stolen all her pride and shame in that alley and her parents had made sure that she would never get it back. So what did it matter if she suffered another indignity or a hundred more? She was a slut now whether she took the money or not. So she’d begun to take their money, fucking without pleasure on sweaty motel mattresses and the cramped backseats of cars.

“Let me cum in your face, whore!”

“Take it up the ass, slut!”

“Come on and toss my salad for another hundred.”

Shana had suffered every debasement imaginable. She’d sucked off two bikers in back of the club while another fucked her in the ass with a cock lubed only with saliva and another fisted her swollen vagina. They’d cheered when she began to cry and took turns jacking off in her open mouth before tossing her a measly hundred dollars, a fourth of what they’d promised her. She’d let a fat dyke who looked like Rosie O’Donnell with a mohawk savage her with a dildo the length and girth of a man’s forearm while going down on the woman’s morbidly obese life-partner who was easily twice as large, smothering beneath a mountain of gelatinous adipose tissue for a mere two-hundred dollars. Still, no matter how many times she shamed herself, no matter how much degradation and humiliation she put herself through, nothing erased the shame of that first time when she’d been innocent. Nothing erased the look in her father’s eyes when she told him she’d been raped.