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A Conversation with Antwone Quenton Fisher
In Finding Fish, you describe your upbringing as a foster child in fairly
stark terms. Do you think the foster care system is inherently flawed?
I would hate to sound pessimistic, but I think there are problems that
can't be avoided like young people becoming social workers and deciding after a
few months or a few years that they are going to do something different with
their lives. That creates a situation where a kid has to get to know someone
else all over again. Children arrive at a place where they don't trust the
jurisdiction they are under and feel as though they are alone in their
circumstance and that the social workers are only strangers passing through.
Another area of concern would be lack of resources for programs that could
improve lives of children in foster care and educate the public to the need of
good foster parents and adoptive parents and many other areas in this matter. I
think that it's not a great enough priority to the powers that be to provide
better lives for children in these unfortunate situations.
There are a lot of problems that would be solved if only the community would
become more involved and volunteer to be mentors and extended family to foster
children. I think that a child who is in foster care for two and three years,
with no real feeling of permanence in a family will feel unwanted in the world.
Adoption should be an option for those children.
What was it like for you to read the reports of social workers and
psychologists charting your experience in foster care? Why did you decide to
include those third-person accounts in your memoir?
It was enlightening to read what my social workers had described in my
childhood records. Reading their details was confirmation; it was proof that I
hadn't dreamt the whole thing. That foster family actually existed.
I used the records in my memoir to validate my memory to others.
Did reuniting with the Elkins and Fisher families change the way that you
think about your place in the world?
Meeting the Fishers and Elkins made me more confident in my being.
Finally, I had living proof that I came from somewhere. Yes, it makes me know
that I have a place in the world and that I belong to something.
Would you characterize yourself as a survivor? To what do you attribute
your will to persevere in the face of the many obstacles of your childhood?
I suppose I would consider myself a survivor. We are all survivors in
life; even people who have had better childhoods. You survive. I don't like the
idea of saying survivor because it makes me feel handicapped. Feeling
handicapped makes me feel that I am not as capable of succeeding as others. I've
come to realize the power of words and I would rather not use that word in
reference to myself. Call it pretending, but it works for me.
I was able to persevere because I wanted to be normal like I felt everyone else
was. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to live. I never wanted the negative things
my foster mother said about me to be true. I wanted to show others and myself
that I am worthwhile.
Did you ever learn what became of your first foster mother, Mrs. Strange?
Did the publication of your memoir enable encounters with any other
"lost" figures from your past?
While filming the movie, Antwone Fisher, in Cleveland, someone who knew
Mrs. Strange had read the book and brought me her picture and told me that she
had died some years ago.
I think I have met and reconnected with everyone that I felt I had lost.
Everyone who was meaningful to me in someway. Even some members of my foster
family showed up at book signings in Cleveland and in Florida. That was really
bizarre. The most interesting encounters were reacquainting with my childhood
friends such as Michael Shields, Sonya, Fat Kenny, and Freda. One of the saddest
discoveries was that my foster sister, Flo, died in the spring of 1999, lonely
and unfulfilled, of a brain aneurism. It broke my heart.
The story of your life is not only the subject of this memoir, but also of
a major motion picture. What aspects of your newfound fame have you found
especially rewarding or challenging?
The most rewarding aspect of having a memoir and film about my life is
that opportunity to write more, I would think. Having a voice, after growing up
voiceless is a real accomplishment and I feel good about where I am. There
haven't been very many challenges simply because people don't know what I look
like, but I am still basically shy, so having to speak in front of people is
challenging.
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