I often think of the Harlem Renaissance as the belle époque for black queer artists—a troubled beauty, for sure, but beautiful nonetheless. The roster bears out my case: Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, Claude McKay, Bessie Smith, Countee Cullen, Gladys Bentley, Wallace Thurman, Ethel Waters, Richmond Barthé, Ma Rainey, Alain Locke, among countless others. But in my reflections on that era, no name rings more resonant than that of Richard Bruce Nugent. His legendary “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” a modernist masterpiece first published in the lone issue of FIRE!! in 1926, is considered the first recorded fictional account of explicit same-sex desire written by a Black American. In it, we follow a young man named Alex who is suddenly caught in a love triangle with Melva, the woman he loves, and Adrian, the man who sparks a desire that confuses him. Although this alone makes the text historically important, Nugent delivers this work of queer desire through a unique attempt at queer storytelling. 

One understands the piece’s unique form from a simple glance at the text itself. Rather than using sentences with varying punctuation and intricate syntax, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” is composed of “short disconnected thoughts,” sensations, and desires all flowing in and out of one another through loose association drawn together by ellipses. And although the piece gives the impression of fictional prose, it possesses very little plot, most of which consists of Alex, the protagonist, ambling along Harlem streets and lazing across his bed—smoking, drifting, dreaming. As Alex fantasizes about beautiful people and things, he repeats and riffs on a number of phrases, especially “blowing blue smoke through an ivory holder inlaid with red jade and green,” reminiscent of what one might expect in blues poetry rather than a short story. This elliptical “stream-of-perception,” to borrow from Shane Vogel, renders the piece as an intermediary between prose and verse, narrative and lyric—making it hybrid yet utterly singular.

This departure from literary conventions mirrors the ways the piece’s intrepid and uncondemning account of same-sex desire stood in direct opposition to the moral principles of its day. The haze of ellipses parallels the main character’s many altered states-of-mind (dreaming, drinking, and drugs), suggesting that both much of the narrative and much of Alex’s psycho-emotional interiority is left unsaid. It’s as if beneath the words offered on the page lies an alternate story or condition that is unspeakable, perhaps even unknown and unknowable to Alex himself. This indeterminacy expands and extends to the supposed end, culminating with the phrase “…To Be Continued…” Since there’s no known sequel to “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” Nugent either planned and failed to compose one or used “…To Be Continued…” as a device with which to leave open the work’s ending. This latter alternative functions as an invocation to imagine what could come next by reconsidering all that came before, all that was left unsaid. With no closure in sight, readers join Alex in his pursuit of the unspeakable, hovering in an endless silence thick as blue smoke.

Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” has often been drawn upon as reference by contemporary artists in their attempts to fill in the deliberate silences about queer life during the Harlem Renaissance. Take for instance “Blues” by John Keene from his book Counternarratives (2015) in which he employs Nugent’s signature elliptical style to narrate an erotic encounter between poets Langston Hughes and Xavier Villaurrutia. Nugent’s legacy is also keenly felt in film. Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989) is a landmark production that dramatizes significant portions of “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” to meditate on queer Black and interracial intimacies of the Harlem Renaissance while mourning the AIDS epidemic. Also, Rodney Evans’ Brother to Brother (2004) follows a young Black gay artist named Perry (played by Anthony Mackie) in early aughts New York City who befriends an elderly and unhoused Nugent (played by Roger Robinson). Through flashbacks, Nugent shows Perry just how queer the Harlem Renaissance really was, and, like “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” the film explores the twinned struggles of becoming an artist and learning to love through grief. It is in these dual pursuits that “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” remains relevant today; in the midst of loss and sorrow, beauty – however troubled and troubling – becomes a promise of both life and love.

“Smoke, Lilies and Jade” opens with Alex, a 19-year-old burgeoning artist, recalling a scene of emotional repression from his adolescence: when his father died, his mother stopped his crying, reminding him that “you have to be a little man now.” Unable to express and process his grief, Alex is hurled into adulthood—and into his father’s place. And although his father was a singer (“it had been a lush voice…a promise…”), Alex “wasn’t like his father…he couldn’t sing…he didn’t want to sing…” Even at the funeral, Alex “couldn’t cry for sorrow although he had loved his father more than…than…” As if that weren’t enough, we see in the excerpt below that Alex’s image of his father is mediated through the artificiality of the restorative arts implemented on his dead body:

when they had taken his father from the vault three weeks later…he had grown beautiful…his nose had become perfect and clear…his hair had turned jet black and glossy and silky…and his skin was a transparent green…like the sea only not so deep…and where it was drawn over the cheek bones a pale beautiful red appeared…like a blush…why hadn’t his father looked like that always…but no…to have sung would have broken the wondrous repose of his lips and maybe that was his beauty…maybe it was wrong to think thoughts like these…but they were nice and pleasant and comfortable…when one was smoking a cigarette through an ivory holder…inlaid with red jade and green………..

Here, Alex is essentially presented with a work of art, one that he apparently prefers during his intoxicated musings to an encounter with his ‘real’ father. This beautification of his father, recast by death and cosmetics, becomes a reservoir from which Alex’s desires and aesthetic appreciation will flow. For instance, Alex’s cigarette holder is red like the rouge on his father’s cheeks and sea green like his decaying skin. Red also shows up most prominently in Alex’s dream sequences when he continually encounters red calla lilies, often associated with passionate love. Additionally, with regards to blackness, like his father’s dyed hair, the other central botanic symbol in the dream sequences is the black poppy, long associated with grief. What is more, the only time Nugent describes the night as black rather than blue is near the end when Alex is left alone after walking his beloved Melva to her house, after she asked about Adrian, muddling his thoughts, and after “the sea dinned” in the background—the first time in “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” when we are met with noise instead of music. By the end, the beauty of red, green, and black also come to resonate with passion, confusion, and heartache. It’s as if Alex’s repression—his silencing—induces a kind of affective seepage that emanates with unpredictable, if not unruly, trajectories.

Beyond the silence of sorrow, another silence circulates around the question of race. While we know the racial identities of historical figures mentioned throughout the story, such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Oscar Wilde, and Sigmund Freud, none of the fictional characters, especially the three main characters (Alex, Melva, and Adrian) who make up the central love triangle, are racially determinate. For instance, we learn only through a dreamscape that Melva and Adrian have racially indeterminate features such as “olive-ivory” skin and black hair. To present Melva and Adrian within a dreamscape confounds our apprehension of them: we as readers ‘see’ them primarily as illusions, not as embodied persons Alex encounters during his waking hours. And with references to poppies, the dream suggests that Alex’s cigarettes might be laced with opium, making his account of perception (beyond the dream) that much more suspect. It is worth repeating that the skin of Alex’s dead father had turned green—the loss of a racial signifier after death, underscoring the haunting absence of race in “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade.” For a piece that revels in rich description, this avoidance of racial specificity announces itself as something that matters. In addition to perhaps intimating the prevalence of interracial romance during the Harlem Renaissance, I suspect that Nugent, writing during an era shaded by both the ‘race problem’ and a preoccupation with shaping a new Black identity, was attempting to imagine a romantic life set loose from any strict racial or sexual formations.

It is in this way that “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” exemplifies what Shane Vogel calls the “sensuous Harlem Renaissance,” an interpretive methodology that emphasizes sensuality over sexuality so as not to “approach same-sex intimacy as evidence of proto-gay/lesbian identity or assume its eventual sedimentation into a hetero/homo binary.” I extend this sensuality to questions of race in addition to those of sexuality, for this turn to the sensuous “more broadly (re)imagines the desiring black subject in the New Negro movement and remains faithful to the queer Harlem Renaissance’s resistance to fixed and fixing racial-sexual norms.” By tracing a number of the unsettled and perhaps even unsettling dimensions that animate the piece’s investment in racial and sexual nebulousness, I hope to demonstrate the ways this corresponds not only with the story’s troubling of genre but also with Alex’s troubled heart. The silence of race and the silence of grief, drowned out by capacious beauty, each produces uneasy pleasures that destabilize convictions of selfhood. This insistent yet playful ambivalence saturates the horizon of erotic intimacy.

When I say ‘uneasy pleasures,’ I am referring to the shroud of beauty that aestheticizes grief. This grief, however, isn’t of the melancholic sort. Rather than “pathological mourning,” Alex doesn’t linger on his father for long; his mourning never becomes all consuming. Instead, the beautification of the lost object suffuses Alex’s world, offering an abundance of beauty to behold: music, sunsets, nighttime, blue streets, liquor bottles, friends, lovers…but the finest of them all is Adrian, the embodiment of beauty itself—whom Alex, in fact, renames Beauty. As their footfalls synchronized with a song in his mind, Alex (who wasn’t a singer and never wanted to sing) suddenly “felt like singing,” to sing like his father, dead and gone, with a voice that had been a promise. Despite this being Alex and Beauty’s first encounter, “they had always known each other,” through sound, through rhythm, belonging to a music that both precedes and exceeds them. The beauty of his father’s embellished corpse mingles with the memory of his soulful voice, becoming the street, the night, the air, the smoke, and finally gathering onto Beauty in the flesh.

By this light, beauty functions like a mood, functioning as what Charles Altieri characterizes as an all-encompassing affective state that “pervade[s] situations.” Altieri goes on to explain that “[m]oods are synthetic and imperialistic, absorbing details rather than conforming to their specific appearances,” which is to say that moods synthesize the objects that inhabit their range while always being in excess of their sum total. Moreover, as evidenced by the synchronization of Alex and Beauty’s consciousnesses, mood can be understood as the category of affective phenomena most attuned to collective experience. The story’s mélange of quiet grief and desire, which mobilizes beauty to produce a pervasive disorienting mood harmonizes with, if not outright orchestrates, its own queering of form, genre, and, above all, the self in relation to others—the self in the throes of love.

With its celebration of beauty and love, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” might be considered an heir to Plato’s Symposium, one of our earliest philosophies of erōs. After a series of somewhat drunken speeches in praise of Love, mostly of the homoerotic and pederastic variety that delights in beautiful young men, Plato’s Symposium reaches its climax with the priestess Diotima’s speech to Socrates, a lesson that culminates with the theory that Love (erōs) leads one to Beauty (kalō̂i). Diotima even admits to Socrates that he may never reach this Beauty, which is “itself by itself with itself” and seen only by not seeing—it exists so far beyond the limits of human imagination that the lover who miraculously reaches it would be “in touch with no images,” becoming a true creator by “[giving] birth to true virtue.” To achieve this ascent to Beauty, according to Diotima, erotic love must be understood as “something in between,” between ugliness and beauty, bad and good, ignorance and wisdom, mortal and immortal—a spiritual messenger who shuttles between human and divine. This in-betweenness is also where love in “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” gathers its affective energies, hovering between grief and desire, repression and expression, sobriety and intoxication, wakefulness and dream. Love in Symposium is a state of perpetual transition, always in pursuit of Beauty for the sake of creation, the same is true of “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”: storgē, for Alex, modulates into an expanded erōs, one in which he revels in all things beautiful and longs to create beautiful art. But unlike Plato, who renders Beauty as immaterial and inhuman, Nugent humanizes Beauty, making him someone particular while simultaneously making him a mood to inhabit. Instead of making Beauty divine and inaccessible, Nugent makes Beauty a lover, object, and atmosphere that exhumes desires and emotions previously left unattended.

Nevertheless, Beauty is a troubling phenomenon: in the end, muddled and dreaming of Beauty, Alex muses “…one can love…” but the text fades away before offering a glimpse of what this love can be. It is in this way that the story adheres to Alexander Nehamas’ assertion that beauty “draws us forward without assurance of success.” Beauty “reveals neither what it is that it promises nor what will become of [us] if [we] obtain it.” But for Alex, desperately and fruitlessly searching for answers to unspecified questions, the miracle of Beauty is that it promises access to shared consciousness through the senses as well as a pathway to creating something new. Today, given our current litany of global crises, beauty seems hard to come by. Nugent, however, despite inhabiting a world in the midst of racial and sexual terror, in the wake of WWI and on the brink of the Great Depression, dared to write about the wonders of beauty in light of grief, confusion, and fear. What Nugent proposed a century ago remains just as true today: one can love.

Korey Williams is a poet, scholar, and Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. His poetry collection, Wild Indigo, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Hold Up is an opportunity to re-encounter a “classic” or “canonical” work—novel, academic monograph, film, album, art exhibit, performance—and ask, does it still hold up? A “Hold Up” feature must historicize its object: why or how is this object able to speak to a cultural or political context that it did not anticipate?

Article photo: sixteenth-century watercolor manuscript preserved at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel with unknown origins via Public Domain Review

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