Antwone Fisher

Born in 1959 in the most inauspicious of circumstances, Antwone Quenton Fisher was placed in foster care within the first few weeks of his life.  After two years in a loving foster home, the state foolishly took Antwone away, claiming that the attachment between Antwone and his foster mother could be problematic.  He was soon placed in the home of Reverend and Mrs. Pickett, a middle-aged couple with grown children of their own.  It was in the Pickett's loveless household that the nightmare of his childhood began.  Describing the everyday misery of his life with astounding eloquence and grace, Fisher offers a window into his very soul, its depths of pain and fear, and its strength and resolve.  

Fisher was physically and emotionally abused through his fourteen years with the Picketts.  On one occasion, when he innocently poked at the flames beneath a simmering pot on the stove with a broom straw, Mizz Pickett reacted by beating him with a flaming newspaper.  He was routinely tied to a support beam in a pitch-black, damp basement for hours on end.  He was unceasingly maligned and ridiculed by several members of the Pickett family and totally ignored by others, including Mr. Pickett, who after ten years of having Antwone in his home didn't even know his name.  From about the age of three, he was sexually abused by a neighbor and family friend.  The unspeakable shame he felt during the years of his victimization kept him from ever telling a soul about this woman's terrible betrayal.  Mizz Pickett never gave Fisher so much as a nickel to buy a candy bar despite the fact that the state provided a weekly allowance for his personal use.  Mizz Pickett even pocketed the money Fisher earned shoveling snow and raking leaves for neighbors.  

After one of Fisher and Mizz Pickett's fights, she followed through on her threat to "send him back."  Fisher packed his meager belongings into a grocery bag, and braved the long bus ride to the Child Welfare social services office alone.  

Fisher survived fourteen long years with the Picketts, and when he walked out the door, he didn't get so much as a good-bye.  His next stop was the George Junior Republic school for boys, a place for troubled youngsters that afforded him the opportunity to become a parent - to himself.  Incredibly self-disciplined, Fisher vowed he'd never smoke cigarettes, take drugs, or do anything to get arrested.  At George Junior Republic, he met social worker Bill Ward, "a man God Himself must have chosen" to deliver a special message to Fisher: "Don't feel sorry for yourself.  It doesn't do any good."  George Junior Republic was a form of refuge for Fisher, a place where he could rest and recuperate unmolested.  It was his last home before homelessness.  

The day after Fisher graduated high school, Bill Ward drove him to a YMCA men's shelter in Cleveland where he would begin life as an emancipated minor.  He was two months away from his eighteenth birthday, but his first few days at the shelter revealed that he would be forced into the adult world much sooner.  In desperate need of protection from the derelicts and sexual predators that roamed the halls of the YMCA, Fisher fell in with a criminal named Butch who gave him a job as a runner picking up cash from hookers.  His experiences with Butch were devastating and he soon fled the criminal underworld despite the fact that he had absolutely nowhere to go.  After sleeping on park benches and in alleys, he made the critical decision to join the United States Navy.  

Graduating as an official recruit of the U.S. Navy, Fisher experienced a purity of feeling he'd never felt before - pride.  "My life was beginning," he wrote,  "Not another chapter in my sad history, but another book, another life entirely, with every possibility of every good fortune ahead of me."  In the course of his eleven years with the navy, every ship and every station provided him with essential lessons.  He learned how to walk with his head high, literally.  He learned to trust others and came to understand that others could rely on him.  He also befriended a navy psychiatrist, Commander Williams, who listened to Fisher's story and helped him see that his life had not begun as a foster child.  Fisher began to accept that he came from somewhere and he decided that someday he would unravel the mystery of where that was.  

In 1992, just after starting a new job as a security guard at Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fisher decided to find his family.  He conducted some research and eventually contacted an Annette Elkins in Cleveland who turned out to be his aunt.  She immediately told her long lost nephew that if any of the Elkins' had known about his existence, they'd have "found him and brought him home to be raised by his true family."  Within months, Fisher met all of his kin - including his mother Eva Mae:  

"The door opened into a long, narrow kitchen area.   My heart was beating rapidly.  I had prepared a script in my mind for what I needed to say to my mother that had been painfully written over a lifetime.  I would ask her:  Why didn't you ever come to get me?  I would ask her, Didn't you wonder about me?  What I was doing?  What I had become, or even if I was still alive?  She would have to hear me say, I dreamed about you every day, my mother, what you looked like, your voice, even your scent.  For thirty-three years, I've dreamed of you.  Didn't you miss me at all?  I would let her know that I'd taken care of myself all my life, that I'd never been in trouble with the law, that I'd never fathered children, and never done drugs or smoked a cigarette in my life.  I've educated myself, I'd say, I've read hundreds of books.  I've traveled throughout the world.  I speak two languages.  I've served in the U.S. Navy and been awarded medals and ribbons of honor.  I've been trusted with people's lives.  I paint and write poetry.  I have friends who would help me if I needed help.  I made my way through terrible times and I never complained.  I've become a good man and a good person."  

But Fisher quickly discovered that his mother's road had been even longer and harder than his own had.  Eva Mae gave birth to four other children after him, all whom grew up as wards of the state.  Over the years, she had been hospitalized, incarcerated, and on probation.  She had been beaten down by life.   She looked much older than her years and seemed very fragile.  "In the place inside me where the hurt of abandonment had been, now only compassion lived," wrote Fisher of their reunion.  

Finding Fish is the story of a boy who made it in the world with the help of a few good souls, and by believing in himself.  "My mind travels back momentarily to some of the visions I made up for myself - that I would become a family man, a good provider, a strong, loving husband and father, in a secure, love-filled home," he writes.  "And here I am, living that vision, with good neighbors and good friends."  Fisher never saw Mizz Pickett again, but he can't say that the past doesn't hurt him still.  He thinks about how he'll explain his life to his daughter, and hopes that she understands that he was made of the "same strong stuff of which she is made."  His greatest hope is that she sees his fortune as the result of the true goodness of people who exist in the world.  

In a twist right out of a fairytale, the story of Fisher's life made the rounds of the Sony lot and Hollywood executives lined up to buy it.  Fisher wisely decided not to sell himself short, however, and turned down their offers.  Instead, he wrote the screenplay himself and after forty-one drafts, he sold it to 20th Century Fox.  A tumultuous and triumphant tale of self-discovery, Finding Fish is an unforgettable tale.