Antwone Quenton Fisher 1959–

Screenwriter

An abused foster child who was sent to reform school and then became homeless, Antwone Fisher had nothing but his own artistic sensitivity and intelligence to help him build a productive adult life. Despite almost overwhelming anger that stemmed from his cruel upbringing, Fisher was able, with the help of a navy psychiatrist, to confront his emotional problems and eventually establish himself as a successful screenwriter, husband, and father. The film version of his life, The Antwone Fisher Story, earned acclaim and focused mainstream attention on the abuses of the foster care system.

Abused as Foster Child

Fisher was born on August 3, 1959, to a 17-year-old prison inmate, Eva Mae Fisher. His father, Eddie Elkins, had already died, shot by the 19-year-old mother of his two young daughters. Antwone was immediately placed in foster care. At age two he left his first foster home, which had been a loving one, and was placed in the Cleveland, Ohio, household of the Rev. Ulysses Pickett and his wife, Isabella. This couple, who had adult children and young grandchildren of their own, subjected their foster children to severe emotional and physical violence.

In his autobiography, Finding Fish: A Memoir, Fisher recalled how painful and confusing it was to think of the Picketts as his family. “At first,” he wrote, “I wasn’t told anything about being an orphan or a foster child. Even though everyone in the household had a different last name, which was confusing, to the best of my understanding, the Picketts were my parents and the other children of varying ages were my brothers and sisters. But for all that I didn’t know and wasn’t told about who I was, a feeling of being unwanted and not belonging had been planted in me from a time that came before my memory. And it wasn’t long before I came to the absolute conclusion that I was an uninvited guest.”

Young Antwone endured harsh punishments and frequent episodes of shaming in the Pickett home. From the age of three, he also suffered sexual abuse from a babysitter, an experience that terrified him and subjected him to ongoing nightmares. “It wasn’t really the fear of her punishing me that kept me from telling anyone all those years,” he wrote in his memoir. “It was the unspeakable shame I felt about what went on with her … and my unspeakable shame that maybe it was my fault.”

When he was very young, Antwone found refuge from this painful life in his own imagination. He delighted in visual sensations: the patterns made by sunlight in his room, the way that the trees on his street arched over to touch each other, the ornamental details on buildings in his neighborhood. He also loved music, listening to forbidden Motown records at home and imagining that his real father could be just like singer Marvin Gaye. He loved to draw, and excelled in art classes in school. Yet as he got older, the pressures of his home life became almost unbearable. He would cry himself to sleep, he wrote, “asking God why—why I had to live with the Picketts, why I couldn’t know my parents, why it was taking so long for the good part to come.”

At a Glance…

B orn on August 3, 1959, in Ohio; son of Edward Elkins and Eva Mae Fisher; married; two daughters. Military Service: U.S. Navy.

Career: Screenwriter and author. Served 11 years in U.S, Navy; Terminal Island Federal Prison, San Pedro, CA, guard; Sony Pictures Entertainment, Los Angeles, security guard; author of several screenplays including The Antwone Fisher Story, 2001; co-author of memoir, Finding Fish: A Memoir, 2002; author of poetry volume, Who Will Cry for the Little Boy?: Poems, 2003.

Address: Agent —c/o Author Mail, William Morrow, Inc., 10 East 53rd St, 7th floor, New York, NY 10022.

From Sailor to Poet

At age 17, Fisher was unexpectedly expelled from his foster home. One morning his foster mother tossed busfare at him and told him to go back to the social services agency responsible for his care. Since it was impossible to find another foster home for Fisher at his age, the agency placed him in a reform school in rural Pennsylvania. Although Antwone had not committed a crime, he didn’t resent this placement; the school provided welcome structure and support. But he would turn 18 before the end of his senior year, and funding for the placement would then cease. Determined to get his high school diploma before having to leave the school, Antwone studied intensively, passed every required course, and earned the right to graduate a year early.

Fisher returned to Cleveland at age 18, living briefly at a YMCA. His plan was to get work and save up enough money to enroll in art school. But he soon encountered sexual predators at the YMCA. For protection, he ended up working for a drug dealer and pimp, a situation that he hated. When he discovered that the pimp was trafficking in children, Fisher risked the man’s wrath and ran away. He lived on the streets, sleeping in a storefront and begging for spare change during the day.

With Christmas just around the corner and nowhere to go, Fisher remembered that a social worker had once suggested the military. Intrigued by the U.S. Navy poster slogan, “Join the Navy, See the World,” he signed up. Thriving in a climate that demanded excellence of him, Fisher stayed in the navy for 11 years and acquired a distinguished career record as a barber, orderly, and manager of ships’ services.

In the navy, Fisher learned that others liked and accepted him and wanted him to succeed. At the same time, however, he began to show signs of deep anger. Normally easygoing, he would flare up quickly if insulted and end up in serious fights. Finally he was sent to see a navy psychiatrist. According to Los Angeles Times writer Gayle Pollard-Terry, in 2003 Fisher told a group of inmates at a juvenile hall in Los Angeles, “In the beginning when I talked about my life, I couldn’t sit in the chair facing him. I sat on the floor in front of his desk. He couldn’t see me. … Eventually I could talk to him face to face. He was the first person I ever told my story to.”

Williams also diagnosed Fisher as dyslexic, and suddenly the young sailor began to see his former school difficulties in a new light. He began reading extensively, learning about African-American history and absorbing the works of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. His reading gave him tremendous new insights. He wrote in Finding Fish, “Through a more educated background on slavery, I gained a different perspective on the Picketts and how the oppression they had suffered had perhaps turned them into oppressors.” Realizing the crime that had been perpetrated upon slaves because they were forbidden to speak their native languages, he began to study “the complexities and quirks of language.” Fisher discovered that he loved “the power and magic of words,” and soon he was writing his own love poems. His friends admired the poetry so much that they paid Fisher three dollars a poem to write verses for their girlfriends and wives. “Words,” he explained in his memoir, “were my paints, thoughts my palette, paper my canvas, and the world itself my ever-changing subject.”

Reunited with Biological Family

After 11 years in the navy, observed Fisher in his memoir, “I was proud of the man I had become and of my accomplishments.” But it was time for Fisher to make a life in the civilian world. He left the military and worked at a series of jobs, first as a prison guard and then as a security guard at Sony Pictures Entertainment. In Los Angeles, Fisher began to consider doing something that his psychiatrist had encouraged him to undertake: to seek out his real family. After conducting some initial research, Fisher was able to locate and telephone his father’s sister in Cleveland. His reunion with his real family had begun.

The Elkins clan had not known that Eddie had fathered a son, and they were eager to meet their newly-discovered family member. They sent Fisher a ticket to Cleveland for Thanksgiving. There he discovered a large, warm, welcoming family whose members were creative and respected individuals. They shared their various memories of Eddie, Fisher’s gifted but temperamental father, and Fisher also met his mother, Eva Mae, a troubled woman who had given birth to four more children after Antwone, though she had been unable to raise any of them. “I liked her,” he wrote in his memoir. “I’m sure she liked me too. But we were still strangers and soon my spark of curiosity extinguished. And that was that.”

Returning to Los Angeles, Fisher discovered that his boss at Sony had told several movie producers about his story, and they approached him about basing a movie on his experiences. Thrilled, he tried to get them to agree to let him write the script. But they would not be persuaded. Undeterred, Fisher decided to go ahead and write it on his own. “I jotted things down on paper towels in the Sony restroom and started attending a free screenwriting course at South-Central AME church,” he told Los Angeles Times writer Elaine Dutka. When he showed his finished draft to producer Todd Black, Black told him that the script wasn’t usable but that he would pay Fisher to continue working on it. After Fisher had completed 41 drafts, Black was able to sell the project to Twentieth-Century Fox.

Told His Story on Big Screen

After acclaimed actor Denzel Washington expressed an interest in directing the film, The Antwone Fisher Story was guaranteed significant publicity. The movie script changed a few details about Fisher’s life, but presented the essential facts, and the project earned highly favorable reviews. Houston Chronicle critic Eric Harrison declared that the film was “surprisingly effective and well-crafted,” and full of emotional power. In the New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that the movie is “so profoundly in touch with its own feelings that it transcends its formulaic tics” and “induces the sort of catharsis that leaves you feeling released, enlightened and in deeper touch with humanity.”

After completing the script, Fisher wrote his memoir, Finding Fish. The book, published shortly before the film was released, impressed critics with its sensitivity and lyricism, and became a best seller. “Fisher is a phenomenal writer,” noted Library Journal reviewer Danna Bell-Russel. Praising the memoir as a “stunning” work, a critic for Publishers Weekly concluded that “if a major feature of survival memoirs is their ability to impress readers with the subject’s long, steady climb to redemption and excellence, then this engrossing book is a classic.”

Fisher has continued to build his Hollywood career, working as a producer and a screenwriter. He wrote the screenplays for Double “O” Soul, Trigger Happy, and Jelly Beans. He has also published a volume of poems, Who Will Cry for the Little Boy?: Poems. At the end of his memoir, Fisher observed, “I wish I could say that the past doesn’t hurt me still. But the truth is that delving into the past can be very painful, that I have scars, and that I will always have scars. On the other hand, when I think of [my foster siblings] Dwight and Flo and Keith, I know that I am among the most fortunate. When [my daughter] Indigo knows my story, I hope she sees that and understands I was made of the same strong stuff of which she is made. I hope she sees my fortune as the result of the true goodness of people who exist in the world.”