At the beginning of “The Rejected American,” Fred Beauford presents his bona fides and his resentments. “I have started a new career,” he declared, “I am now a novelist.
No one else can take credit for my work. And there is no such thing as an ‘ex-novelist.’” He goes on to state in this book he describes as “a motley collection of rejected essays, unanswered love letters, ignored job applications, spurned offers of friendship and unpublished letters to the editor,” and he ends this rant later with a bold decision to publish his own work. “I have the last laugh,” he wrote, “and I give a righteous finger to those who tried to contain my genius.
A portion of his early years can be found in “The Rejected American,” and one of his first rejections occurred as a child coming of age in various foster homes with his brothers. “My two brothers and I lived with Mrs. Thompson for almost seven years. I was six years old when we moved into her large house in the Coldsprings section of Buffalo,” he recalled in a chapter entitled “Personal History.” “Mrs. Thompson was a cruel taskmaster, who cleverly used terror tactics to keep us in line.
This stage of his life is interrupted in the book, and then comes the flood of rejections he forecast at the beginning of the collection. Here and there are bits and pieces of his venture to become a writer, the influence of John Oliver Killens, attendance to workshops at Columbia University, but his story continues most significantly in his memoir that appeared in the Neworld Review, the online publication and final and most successful venture into the world of journalism.
Almost 20 years before I met Fred in person in the late ’80s, I picked up a copy of his first magazine Black Creation, and found it extremely insightful and relished each copy, though it didn’t last that long. Fred and I discussed this moment after he hired me to write for him during his eight years as editor of The Crisis magazine, the house organ for the NAACP.
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