Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American
Writers in France, 1840–1980. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1991.
Wilfred D. Samuels
“Smoke, Lilies and Jade”
Bruce Nugent (1926)
Included in the short-lived, single-issue literary
magazine FIRE!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists,
RICHARD BRUCE NUGENT’s story “Smoke, Lilies and
Jade” explores the complexities of the life of an art-
ist. Less about what happens than how narrative
details are presented, the story embodies a mod-
ernist consciousness of psychological interiority
and emotional ambivalence and ambiguity. As the
central character, Alex, looks at his life, both past
and present, Nugent challenges common assump-
tions about the relationship between society and
the artist and about the relationship between art
and the artist. In a consumerist Western culture
that uses capitalist gain and materialism as mea-
sures of self-worth and social value, the story ex-
amines the extent to which the artist is socially and
self-defined by product or by process. It equally
questions the extent to which social conformity
and blind submission to an ideal about produc-
tion lead ultimately to spiritual and social death.
Such issues are couched within complicated racial,
gender, and sexual identity politics.
Nugent’s attention to the centrality of thought,
thinking, and creative process is evident in the for-
mat of “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” Considered a prose
poem by some, the story uses ellipses throughout
to punctuate and re-create Alex’s seemingly frag-
mented and often spiraling ideas about his father’s
death, his family’s response to his father’s death,
his past and present male (Beauty) and female
(Melva) love interests, his focus on himself, and
his strained relationships with his mother and fa-
ther. Unwilling to restrict his desires to social con-
structions of heterosexuality and homosexuality,
Alex accepts at the story’s end the power of his un-
boundaried attractions, boldly declaring, “one can
love two at the same time” (39). This admission
in both thought and action represents the artist as
one whose ultimate responsibility and challenge is
to be true to himself. In the face of social suspi-
cion and the perception of the artist as “lazy and
shiftless” (Nugent, 34), Alex basks in his own self-
acknowledged decadence: “He wanted to do some-
thing... to write or draw... or something... but
it was so comfortable just to lay there on the bed... his shoes off... and think... think of every-
thing.. .” (Nugent, 33).
Within the context of FIRE!!, whose editors
included LANGSTON HUGHES and WALLACE THUR-
MAN, as a literary experiment expressly created
to disrupt the aesthetic and social sensibilities of
conservative African-American middle-class intel-
lectuals who fit ALAIN LOCKE’s model of “The New
Negro” (Huggins, 47–56), “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”
was the first published story to acknowledge and
celebrate publicly African-American homosexual-
ity and to announce that presence without shame
or apology. Other participants in the FIRE!! proj-
ect included ZORA NEALE HURSTON, whose short
play “Colorstruck” considers the tragic results of
skin color discrimination among African Ameri-
cans; Wallace Thurman, who contributed a story
suggestive of prostitution, and Langston Hughes,
who offered the volume’s lead poem about “flam-
ing, burning, searing, and penetrating far beneath
the superficial items of the flesh to boil the slug-
gish blood” (foreword to FIRE!!). Blurring lines
between the sacred and the sexual, Hughes simul-
taneously teases, flaunts, dares, and warns. Indeed,
the slender 48-page volume represented a diversity
of voices and experiences even among those artists
and writers expected to limit their public celebra-
tions solely to racial identity politics.
While Alex’s story resembles Nugent’s own per-
sonal life—some details are outlined in Charles
Michael Smith’s “Bruce Nugent: Bohemian of
the Harlem Renaissance”—the story’s multiple
symbolisms foreground its complexity. Cigarette
smoke and smoking, the ornate cigarette holder,
lilies, color imagery, and names underscore themes
of memory and what TONI MORRISON calls re-
memory, death and dying literally and figuratively,
definitions of beauty, black and white interracial
intimacies, conflicts between spiritualism and ma-
terialism, contradictions, the definition of the art-
470 “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”