Word: charleye
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...
...Zanuck, deeply moved by a chance to aid fallen humanity (at regular admission prices), announced that Hollywood would do the unbelievable--make a picture of "Tobacco Road," worthy of the book, as great as the play, equal to the "Grapes of Wrath." John Ford was selected for director. Charley Grapewin, one of the finest character actors in films, was given the role of Jeeter Lester. Gene Tierney was selected for the sluttish Lester daughter after a far-flung talent search. The best photographers in Hollywood, superb make-up artists, perfectly realistic sets were assembled. Hollywood held its breath and Darryl...