Finding Fish: An Analysis

            What an exceptional book. I have to imagine that this book is used by psychologists, particularly by social workers, very frequently. I’m not much of a reader, I’ll be honest. I didn’t want to slag through Finding Fish at all, but I am so glad that I did. This book was more identifiable and more relatable to me than just about anything that I’ve read in my life. Antwone Fisher’s life very, very closely mirrors my own. Like Antwone, I come from very low SES, from severe domestic abuse, from foster care, and from homelessness. In fact, he and I hit almost identical points at almost identical ages more times in the book than I cared to count. I found myself reading my own thoughts and feelings in this book over and over again. There were parts where I had to put it down because I could feel myself starting to go into shock, which is something that happens if I think too hard about my history.

The only major differences between Antwone’s life and mine are that I know my parents, I was never a victim of sex abuse, although I’ve seen the ramifications up close and in person, and instead of going into the military after homelessness for eleven years, I fell to drug and alcohol abuse for the same exact time period that he was in the military. In fact, at the end of the book, Antwone is 33 years old and finally starting to self-actualize, which means finding out who he is, which means finding out where he came from. I am 32, turning 33 next year, and I am just barely starting to hit that point myself where I’ve come far enough and met enough of my own needs that I can focus on more frivolous things like repairing my relationship with my father or getting back in touch with my mother’s very extensive family. It seems to me that Antwone and myself, after a long interlude, both managed to finally meet all of our more basic needs and can now start finding out what on earth brought us to this point.

I can absolutely see why this book would be selected as a final project for a Lifespan class. The story begins before Antwone’s birth, which is an important part of any life story, but one that often gets left out. Antwone Fisher got a bad hand before anybody even dealt the cards. Seeing the circumstances of his birth, being fatherless before he was even born and being born inside of a prison institution had lifelong effects on Mr. Fisher, even outside of the effects of being in foster care and having a difficult life.

The First Two Years

The first two years of any person’s life are massively important. Antwone was accepted as a ward of the state as soon as he was born. He was placed in an orphanage for a few weeks before going into the care of Mrs. Nellie Strange. Antwone had a number of good people come and go in his life, and Mrs. Strange was the first. It is fortunate that a good person got him first, because the first two years of life are formative, to say the least.

            “Antwone crawls all over the place, stands and walks holding onto things, says hi and bye bye… He likes pancakes and mashed potatoes… He smiles a good deal and appears to be a well-cared for child.” (Fisher, 2001)

            An early caseworker report shows Antwone in good health and good spirits in those first few months with Mrs. Strange, indicating that he was not undernourished and that the home was a caring and loving one. Antwone’s standing and holding onto things, and his interaction with people indicate that he has reached at least Stage Three of Piaget’s Six Stages of Sensorimotor Intelligence, and possibly even Stage Four (Berger, 2014). Given that this is the first year of Antwone’s life, he is precisely on track.

It frequently seems that the first two years of Antwone’s life, under the care of Mrs. Strange were likely the cause of his intelligence and his resilience later in life. A stable, loving environment not only allowed little Antwone’s brain to develop normally, it likely gave him the confidence to know that he was worthy of being loved, if only subconsciously.

Unfortunately, Antwone began to show signs of insecure-resistant/ambivalent attachment, which the foster mother was not comfortable with, and he was passed along.

Mizz Pickett, Foster Care, and Abuse

            There are villains in this world that are almost likeable. The Joker, though a mass murderer and a psychopath, is still an interesting enough character that you find yourself rooting for him from time-to-time. Then there are villains who hide in the shadows and deceive and manipulate in order to prey on the weak. They hide behind fake smiles and polite public attitudes and know when to accept defeat in public, and how to take that defeat out on their wards in private. Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter series was such a character. Mizz Pickett is another. There is simply no way to redeem a villain whose m.o. is so terrible.

            Mizz Pickett was a hard character for me to read. She was about as authoritarian as it gets, but worse than that, she was arbitrary, mercurial, and capricious. Much later in the book, Mr. Fisher finds himself fitting right in in the military and he opines that it must be because of all of the practice he got obeying Mizz Pickett’s orders and doing her chores. (Fisher, 2001) I have a different theory.

If Fisher is anything like me, and I believe that he and I are very much alike, then he has probably craved institutionalization his entire life. There’s a reason for this. When you grow up in a house like Mizz Pickett’s, the same job that gets you praise one day, will get you beat the next. You never know where the consequences or the beatings are going to come from, so you’re always on edge.

Being in a predictable environment, where he was guaranteed a hot meal, a warm bed, safety, and consistent consequences, and all he had to do for that is put his head down and work, must have been like a breath of fresh air for him. After all, all he’d ever done up to that point was put his head down and work and all he ever got was abused for it. I imagine being in the Navy felt like pulling a great big blanket around himself, knowing that he finally had something that nobody could take away from him. He must have felt safe for the first time in his life.

The abuses that he, Dwight, and Flo experienced at the hands of Mizz Pickett were broadly varied. Mizz Pickett used physical abuse, verbal abuse, and a constant barrage of shaming tactics, like only ever referring to them as “nigga”, or embarrassing Flo after her menarche, or telling Dwight and Antwone that she was going to cut their penises off, to keep her foster children quiet and subservient. (Fisher, 2001)

She also referred frequently to Antwone’s parents as “no-account”, saying that she had the children just to pay her notes, causing Antwone to think “The shame of parents who didn’t have bank accounts was confusing enough, but why anybody had to pay money for notes I really didn’t understand.” (Fisher, 2001) With Fisher being around five years old at the time, this is a good example of

“…many studies have found that mistreated children regard other people as hostile and exploitative; hence these children are less friendly, more aggressive, and more isolated than other children.” (Berger, 2014)

This is something that is easy to see happening throughout the book, not necessarily to Antwone, but certainly to Dwight. As Dwight gets older he becomes less and less trusting, more and more hostile, and more ill-equipped to understand other peoples’ intentions. (Fisher, 2001) This is a place where Antwone and myself split off, because where Antwone tends to internalize his problems, Dwight and myself both began to see other people as the enemy and to lash out against them because of it. In my home, physical fights between my brother and myself were constant whenever there were no parents around. My brother was like Antwone. He mostly just wanted to be left alone, but I did not and I lashed out at him frequently. Much like Dwight, I became a bully at home and bullied at school.

Dwight went on to adult antisocial behavior. He fell into drugs and alcohol and began engaging in criminal and destructive behaviors that eventually led to his untimely demise. “Adults who were severely maltreated often abuse drugs or alcohol, enter unsupportive relationships, become victims or aggressors…” (Berger, 2014). Unfortunately, this was all too true for Dwight. Antwone said many times through the book that Dwight was smart and could have been or done anything, but that he lacked love. He just needed someone to love him. I think that’s why, in the end, Dwight came back around to that terrible home. It was a sick situation, but it was as close to love as he ever got.

On top of abuse, Antwone was a victim of severe neglect. At no point in his childhood were his needs ever fully met. Child neglect is three times more common than abuse and the results can be far more devastating. Research shows that children who were neglected often experience greater social deficits than abused ones because they are unable to relate to anyone. The best cure is a close friend, but close friendships are hard to build and even harder to maintain for victims of neglect. (Berger, 2014) This is likely why Antwone spent most of his adult life alone. Aside from it being difficult to feel worthy of a friendship, it’s also very hard to maintain one when you have no roadmap for what they look like. Much like Antwone, I have spent the majority of my adult life alone, if only because I feel awkward when people are nice to me.

There were a few parts of this book that really broke my heart. “…without friends, no longer able to daydream, I lost all interest in school.” (Fisher, 2001) Watching Antwone completely lose interest in school was one of the more devastating.

Like him, I didn’t see a point in trying, although I didn’t understand why at the time. When your life is all about survival, things like schoolwork are a luxury that your brain just does not have space for. Among the other types of abuse/neglect, Antwone was not even given winter clothes to go to school in and the clothes that he did have were shabby and falling apart. (Fisher, 2001)

This is bottom-rung Maslow we’re talking about here. This is before love can happen, it’s before even safety becomes important to a person. This is the most basic physiological stuff there is. Hierarchy level one: “Need for food, drink, and shelter.” (Berger, 2014) All-encompassing, that has to include warmth, dryness, not having to walk to school in the winter in a t-shirt.

A person like Mizz Pickett, so controlling, so uneducated, could not possibly understand that by denying him something as basic as a winter coat, she was denying him everything. Everything from safety, to self-esteem, to genuine accomplishment and even greatness was denied Antwone by her actions.

“Since no punishment loomed any worse than what I was already getting, I kept up the routine – slipping out from school in the morning and then, at lunchtime, returning to school for a little while before I’d leave again, going back just before the afternoon bell to go home.” (Fisher, 2001) The first part of that is the best example of the consequences of authoritarian parenting that I have ever seen. I’m not really sure how to cite a lecture, you’ll have to excuse me this is my first semester of college, but this was something that we talked about in class and I remember it pretty clearly. When all punishments are the same, when the only option on the other end is the nuclear option, a victim of abuse just figures “Screw it, I’m getting beat no matter what.” This is the same stuff I went through as a teen. I had no interest in school whatsoever and I got very criminal very quickly when I started realizing that I was in trouble no matter what I did.

Mrs. Profit

            Mrs. Profit was far and away my favorite character in the book. It is unfortunate that in a victim’s life it is the abusers who have staying power. Throughout Antwone’s interactions with Mrs. Profit, I felt that she was a person who was attuned to his needs.

“’Anything wrong?’ ‘No.’ ‘Is everything okay at home?’ ‘Yes.” She says, ‘Okay,’ and lets it go at that. But I know from the concern on her face that she wiser than she is in a position to tell me. When I go to the coatroom to put on my winter gear, she gives me another long look, and I try to think how to bring myself to tell her what I’m feeling. But where to begin, I don’t know, so I forge on – going to get my coat, and walking slowly down the corridor, away from the love and light of her classroom.” (Fisher, 2001)

She was empathetic without being pushy and she understood that trying to dig the truth out of young Mr. Fisher would only serve to alienate him. I made a lot of annotations about Mrs. Profit because I loved the impact that she had on Antwone’s life.

            “With constructive criticism, she encouraged rather than condemned. She found something to compliment in each of us – a neat paper, a good attitude, an eager face – and rewarded the whole class for our overall positive efforts with impromptu parties, field trips, and other celebrations.” (Fisher, 2001)

I can remember people like her passing through my life, stooping down to my level to talk directly to my face, speaking as an adult, and being understanding without being pushy. To this day I have an enormous appreciation for every one of them. Mrs. Profit was Love and Logic embodied and it seems that this time period would have been before those principles became more well-known or widely used.

She was as fair with discipline as she was with encouragement and she became the first married couple that Antwone had known to show believable affection, which is something that Antwone carried with him for the rest of his life. She also provided the first instance of positive continuity in his life by mentoring him and his classmates from fourth grade to sixth. (Fisher, 2001)

            This book and this class have been instrumental in my development. Taking an objective, birds-eye view of the consequences of things as early as the circumstances of one’s birth is more than a little cathartic. Understanding that although I am responsible for my actions, some of the things that have happened in my life were beyond my control, like how coming from low-SES indicates an enormous number of risk factors, has been fairly freeing. Reading Antwone Fisher’s story was like meeting a long lost brother for the first time. I wish that I’d had this book when I was 10 or 11. It would have helped me a lot back then. It helped me a lot now, as a matter of fact.

Bibliography

Berger, K. S. (2014). Invitation to the Lifespan. New York: Worth Publishers.

Fisher, A. (2001). Finding Fish. New York: Harper Collins.