Title: Papa Legba
Location: New Orleans, United States
Available Sizes: 4”x6”, 5”x7”, 8”x10”, 8”x12”,
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The deceased have a year and a day of peace. Walled up in their mud-brick and plaster crypts, the bodies of the deceased baked and crumbled under the ensorcelling Southern sun. This is not the clean, heavenly transubstantiation of bread to flesh at Sunday service. This is a messy affair, a “transubstantiation” of flesh to dust that involves the earthly process of decay, but then again, the city of New Orleans has never prided itself on being a sanitized version of anything. Legends said that at night, the wails of the dead in the St. Louis Cemetery reverberated in the necropolis, but now science tells us that the poltergeists were merely the high-pressured gasses of the decaying corpses erupting from the tightly sealed crypts, an explanation that somehow doesn't make the phenomenon any less disturbing. After a year and a day, when the threat of disease from the corpses had gone, the caretakers opened up the crypts again and stuffed into them the newly dead. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Who would have guessed the residents of New Orleans were the first environmentalists?