Nancy Marshall and I are visiting photographer P. H. Polk in Tuskegee, Alabama. His house is large, but broken up into studio, rental room and his own space. His house is on Washington Road, named after Booker T. Washington. That’s fitting since Mr. Polk was the official photographer at the university for many years. Nexus Press is going to publish a collection of his work and I will be writing the essay at the front of the book. Nancy is the editor. I’ve seen some of his photographs, but I’ve never met Mr. Polk. He greets us at the door and ushers us into his crowded house. He has two big fish tanks with collages on the back of the glass. The pictures are from old magazines and not his own work. In one of the tanks are a pair of small plastic skeletons that constantly sit up and lie back down when jets of water jiggle them. It was really hot in his house. He is at least eighty years old and was really pleased to see us. He drives us around the campus and he’s driving real slow, like Poppy used to drive. He actually smashed right into another car’s bumper as we were leaving the parking lot, but he didn’t even notice it. He told me he liked my hair. I think he thought I was white, but he saw my afro and then when I said I had gone to Howard and lived on Chestnut Street in Atlanta, I think he knew I was black. When we got back to the house, he offered us a drink and we accepted. He walked over to the dishwasher and pulled it out and in the rack where the dishes would go, he had a full bar. Bottles of liquor, cocktail glasses, etc. You could tell he thought that was pretty cool. Me, too. I am really looking forward to writing about him. He has a million pictures and a million stories. He came across a really beautiful one of his ex-wife and he said, “She tried to put me in the ground, but she didn’t.” Sounded like a blues song.