Charley and the Grandson

In a big flat sandbox floored with fine, clean sand, on the third floor of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, squatted two full-blooded Navajo medicine men. The elder, Charley Turquoise, sported a bushy black mustache that belied his 73 years. The younger one was Dinay Chilli Bitsoey, which means "Short Man's Grandson." They were practicing one of the oldest and most mysterious arts in the U. S.

While museum visitors watched, Charley Turquoise and his helper squatted in the sand, crosslegged, smoothed it carefully with a long paddle, began carefully covering it with colored pictures of angular, oblong-bodied gods and animals. Their pigment, which they lifted in handfuls from five different bowls beside them, was powdered rock and charcoal--white, blue, yellow, black and red. Trickling each handful in a fine stream between thumb and forefinger, they drew lines and wedge-shaped patches as accurately as draughtsmen, pinched off a dot or a spot of color here & there as featly as if they were salting the tail of a bird. It was beautiful. It was also impressive.

Charley Turquoise and the Short Man's Grandson were making the ritualistic sand painting that forms the climax of the five-day Navajo Thunder Chant. The painting should have been made in a hogan, or House of Song, built of cedar logs and mud, with its entrance facing east. The Museum of Modern Art couldn't supply a hogan, but Charley and the Short Man's Grandson were always careful to enter their sand painting from the east. Because the Thunder Chant's sand-painting medicine was strong medicine, and any pictures of it might make its power dangerously permanent, Modern Museum visitors were searched last week for smuggled cameras.

(At certain stages of the painting, before its medicine was too strong to be dangerous, official pictures were allowed.) For three days the sand painters worked at their picture--a great circle of square-shouldered spirits interspersed with bright-hued corn, tobacco, squash and bean plants, a dragon fly and a bat.

When they had finished, Charley systematically destroyed the sand painting, for it would have been bad medicine to leave it as it was. The destruction took 40 minutes. With the help of Mary Peshlakai, a Navajo squaw who had come with them from Window Rock, Ariz, to weave blankets for the Museum's Indian exhibit, Charley and the Short Man's Grandson muttered, groaned, sprinkled corn pollen over the figures they had painted. Then they stood to one side and chanted. It was not funny. It was moving. Still chanting, Charley carefully shuffled over the design, destroying it section by section. When the sand painting was obliterated, Charley Turquoise pronounced a solemn blessing on all those present, prayed that he and the other Navajos would get safely home again. The crowd of onlookers did not understand Charley Turquoise's medicine, but they felt it. When the chants and the shuffling and the invocations were finished, some of them had tears in their eyes. But Charley merely shrugged his shoulders with relief, and grinned.

Charley and his assistant planned to go on sand painting every day but Monday until late this month. While in Manhattan, Charley and the other Navajos live in rooms at Manhattan's Wellington Hotel. Carefully informed how to use the toilet and sleep in the beds instead of on the floor, they held a long ceremony, chanting invocations of blessing on the hotel, then settled down to metropolitan life without batting an eye. Because they could not read the bill of fare in the hotel dining room, they took to eating at a nearby cafeteria, where they could see what they were getting. They started with a generous assortment of desserts, proceeded to meat. Taken on a sightseeing trip, they like the Bronx Zoo. But they demurred at climbing up the Statue of Liberty. Murmured Charley Turquoise, looking at it from a safe distance: "You know, the Navajos will never believe me when I tell them about this."

WPA's Historical Records Survey announced plans last week to survey the U. S. for appropriate basements, vaults, old breweries, etc., to serve as wartime repositories for U. S. art.

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