Sherry Chandler

In her second book Bellocq’s Ophelia (Greywolf, 2002), Natasha Trethewey considers the life of a white-skinned black whore in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. She takes as her inspiration a remarkable series of photographs taken by E. J. Bellocq about 1912. The glass negatives of the photographs were discovered, printed, and published by Lee Friedlander in Storyville Portraits (Little, Brown, 1970).

Although the photos all seem to be of different women, for Tretheway’s purpose they are all the same woman and though her poems refer to several of the photographs, they are all in the same voice, that of the fictional Ophelia.

The name Ophelia , of course, takes us to the doomed object of Hamlet’s affection, this same Ophelia with whom he, having caught her spying for her father, has this exchange in Act III, the center of the play. Note that “honest” in the Shakespearean context and used of a woman can mean “chaste” or “virtuous”:

HAMLET: Ha, ha! are you honest?

OPHELIA: My lord?

HAMLET: Are you fair?

OPHELIA: What means your lordship?

HAMLET: That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.

OPHELIA: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?

HAMLET: Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.

OPHELIA: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

HAMLET: You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you not.

OPHELIA: I was the more deceived.

HAMLET: Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where’s your father?

A question that might also be asked of Tretheway’s Ophelia, whose father is, apparently, a white overlord who does acknowledge her but only indifferently. Her mother seems to work in the cotton fields, but Ophelia herself has managed to become educated and holds herself a bit above the other women in Countess P___’s protection.

The connection from Bellocq’s portraits to Shakespeare’s Ophelia runs through John Everett Millais’ 1852 painting Ophelia, which is echoed by the cover photograph of Storyville Portraits. The title poem explains:

In Millais’s painting, Ophelia dies faceup,
eyes and mouth open as if caught in the gasp
of her last word or breath, …

I think of her when I see Bellocq’s photograph—
a woman posed on a wicker divan, her hair
spilling over. …
— from “Bellocq’s Ophelia”

The movement in this verse biography is from object to subject to artist. In the beginning, Bellocq’s Ophelia is required to strike a tableau vivant for customers — Building Me a Home calls this living with an “assigned identity,” which is of course what we tend to give all prostitutes. When Bellocq enters the scene, Ophelia begins to collaborate in creating a character and holding a pose for the photographer. By the end of this short collection, she has become the photographer.

Bellocq talks to me about light, shows me
how to use shadow, how to fill the frame
with objects—their intricate positions.
I thrill to the magic of it…
— from “Photography”

I’ve learned the camera well —the danger
of it, the half-truths it can tell, but also
the way it fastens us to our pasts, makes grand
the unadorned moment…
— from “December 1911″

On the crowded street I want to stop
time, hold it captive in my dark chamber…
— from “(Self) Portrait”

I found these poems very evocative in the way they play with image and perception, the question of identity, black and white. The voice is quiet but heartbreaking, like the expression on the woman in the cover photo.

Picture her face now as she realizes
that it must have been harder every year,
that the contortionist, too, must have ached
each night in his tent. This is how
Bellocq takes her, her brow furrowed
as she looks out to the left, past all of them.
—from “Vignette”

Bellocq’s Ophelia was selected as a “2003 Notable Book” by the American Library Association. Natasha Trethewey will be a featured poet at the 2008 Kentucky Women Writers Conference here in Lexington, September 11 - 13.

Morgan Chandler (left) with driver Billy Teegarden in 1973 at Northern Kentucky Speedway. Photo by Mike Roland.

This Saturday, at the Florence Speedway in Union, Kentucky, my brother Morgan Chandler will be officially inducted into the National Dirt Late Model Hall Of Fame. Here’s Bill Holder’s write-up from Stock Car Racing:

Morgan Chandler’s was a shining career that lasted through two decades (1965-1985) as a car owner and showed a total of 189 victories with an impressive collection of 20 talented drivers, half of them already in the Hall of Fame.

This was not a full-time deal for Chandler, though, as he also had a regular job.

“Didn’t get much sleep during many of those years, sometimes getting home in time to go to work,” he says.

It was a time, says Chandler, when the driver was a lot more important than the car, quite different from today.

“There is a lot more technology today, but there are still similarities,” he says. “Heck, I used to have the left-front tire up just like today.”

Chandler laughs when he recalls that he once built a 539-cubic-inch engine derived from a 427 truck engine. “It made about 750 hp, something that small block engines can make today,” he says.

Through most of his career, he converted street cars to build his racecars. His built his first car from the ground up in 1978.

Chandler says that he ran with NASCAR in 1968 at Clay City Speedway, Kentucky. It was a dirt track, of course, but he also competed on pavement, using his dirt cars rather than a purpose-built pavement car. “Won a big race on the paved Dayton (Ohio) Speedway,” he recalls.

His top driver was Floyd Gilbert, and they won 27 races in a row and 42 overall in 1972 and ‘73. And there was Ralph Latham, who was behind the wheel of a Chandler car for 25 wins in 1970.

More at Dirt Fans. A couple of his drivers talk about working with him, too: Billy Teegarden, Flyin’ Floyd Gilbert

There is also a nice write-up about Morgan in the local paper, but it doesn’t seem to be posted online yet. In the article, he says that the sport has been taken over by professionals now, that amateurs such as he could no longer compete.

Chandler’s 1973 Camaro, #28, in its party clothes at the 1973 Cavalcade of Customs.