ankles, a leather pouch more or less covering his crotch and, atop his head, a bead-draped skull cap with ebony cow horns. He lacked only a tail to be the worst nightmare of everyone present.
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''Hi y'all," he said, throwing candies and gum, bumping and grinding his way through the literally open-mouthed, figuratively pole-axed crowd like a Chip 'N Dale stripper the size of an NBA forward. I nearly did a spit take with my Sunkist. But Elegba kept it up, mooning anyone in proximity, laughing and catcalling for sixty-year-old women in sun bonnets to "get off your booty" and join him. It really was unbearable to watch. Then, like some ancient levee giving way, whispering led to titters to open laughter and then a couple of the men started shaking their butts back at Elegba, others egged him on. An impossibly proper matron in floral print dress and white gloves said to her friend, "You can see his ding-a-ling," and they still may not have cared for Oyotunji but they were no longer afraid of it.
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Perhaps on cue, perhaps just seizing the moment, a curvy, dark-complected Trinidadian known as Iya Ghandi ("Iya" means mother; Ghandi was the name of her youngest son, which she took for reasons I never understood) suddenly strode into the quadrangle and, waving her arms with exaggerated theatricality, shooed the satyr off, mocking him as a "bad boy who needs to grow up."
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When they had settled again, she briefed them. The festival for Yemonja was in progress, she explained, and it had been Elegba's duty to greet the new arrivals, and the thing about Elegba was that you never knew what he'd do and you couldn't control him if you did. It was his nature. Now, though, it was time for the egungun, a ritual for the spirits of the dead. Soon, a procession of villagers dressed as various of the orisha, like the one who had just welcomed them, but "nicer," would dance and sing their way through the village grounds, stopping at each of the altars to pay homage. They would see worship just as carried
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