Hangout

Keeping in touch with old friends and the best fried fish in Tacoma

Antonio Edwards Jr. greets a familiar face at Fish House Café; photos by Mark Thomas Deming.

Antonio Edwards Jr. is late.  Or is he?  Hard to say.  Waiting in the Fish House Café, I’ve lost track of the decade, not to mention the minute.

The tiny Hilltop restaurant is hot.  Deep South hot.  Internal-clock-scrambling hot.  Sitting, sweating, I’m completely unmotivated to move.  Time must also be moving differently in here, I muse.  It’s as though for every minute that passes outside, only half of one passes in here.  By my math, it’s roughly 1984.

Coincidentally (or not) that’s the year Edwards, the 2009 Tacoma Poet Laureate, arrived in Tacoma. Fresh out of the Navy, he knew he couldn’t return to any of his former hometowns: Brooklyn, Queens, Compton. He was lucky to have made it out of them alive. So he landed here, in Hilltop, where one of his five sisters lived. And he’s been here ever since.

It shows. When he walks into the Fish House, faces light up with recognition. He hardly has time to shake my hand before someone is calling him over. And someone else. And someone else. Conversations ensue — the kind you’d expect in some small midwestern town, not in the hardboiled center of Tacoma. Old times are remembered. Old friends are discussed. Pledges are made to keep in touch.

“WELCOME HOME,” reads a banner behind the counter, words not lost on Edwards.

“I always moved as a kid. Now I get to do what other people do. I’ve been here long enough that I have that sense of community,” he says, pulling up a chair.

Community is a central theme in Edwards’ poetry, and one I want to explore further.  But first we need to eat.

“What’s good?” I ask.

Edwards, dressed for his job as a shift manager at Tacoma Rescue Mission, shrugs.  “Fish, chicken. Number five’s good. I just look at the pictures.”

We consult the blown-up photos overhead, finally settling on soul: fish with southern cornmeal breading, wings, hush puppies, fried okra, fries.

For Edwards, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants, poetry is a public, communal enterprise — something to be shared, even shouted. Beginning at a young age, he honed his craft on the streets, rhyming head-to-head with rappers in New York and LA in the early days of hip-hop. There, poetry was combat. Today, Edwards, an Evergreen State College alum, converts that combativeness into activism. His work speaks for, and to, his neighbors. 

As steaming baskets arrive at our table, I ask him about public reaction to his selection as Poet Laureate. Has he heard the complaints that his style is too unrefined?

“I was waiting on that,” he says, adding that he’s being knocked from the other side too — guys from the ’hood calling him a sellout. While he clearly doesn’t enjoy either criticism, he accepts them as part of the poet’s job.

“At the places I’ve been invited to go, I feel like a fish out of water,” he tells me. Reading his work to predominantly white audiences makes him, and some in attendance, uncomfortable. And that’s a good thing.

“That’s the beauty of poetry. That’s what bridges us.”

The Fish House Café has a similar effect, he notes, pointing out several different cultures represented among diners. “We might not be willing to share each other’s company, but we’ll share each other’s food.”

It’s food worth sharing. The fried fish is the best I’ve had in Tacoma, though the crinkle-cut fries can’t match the Spar’s homemade “Spar chips.” The cornmeal breading is crisp and salty, but not oily, with hints of black and cayenne pepper. Two meals, two sides, two sodas — total price: $18.30.

After eating, we step outside for some well-earned air. Several men, some waiting for food, some not, hang around talking shop, talking trash. Edwards knows them all. He sees them eyeing me — a stranger with a camera — and explains I’m there to interview him.

“Why?”

“Because I was chosen Poet Laureate.”

“Poet Laureate?”

“The number-one poet in Tacoma,” explains Edwards.

“For real?”

I thank Edwards, say goodbye and return inside to take pictures. Ten minutes later, he’s still on the sidewalk, a crowd gathered around him. He’s performing his poem “Hilltopia” — an ode to this beautiful old embattled neighborhood, and a call for residents to resist gentrification. The language sways from evocative to righteous to inflammatory, from Langston Hughes to MLK to Flavor Flav. Edwards sways with it.

“Damn,” someone says when he finishes, in what is once again 2009. “You wrote that?”

The Fish House Café

1814 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Tacoma, 253.383.7144
To call ahead for takeout is to miss the point entirely.
Enjoy the molasses-like creep of time at this classic throwback shack. Go with what you can’t get anywhere else: southern.