“Folks,” Paul shouted above the din, “this is Bud. He has the most perfect body in New York. I’m gonna let you see it soon.”
“Bravo.”
“Go to it.”
“Now?”
Paul and his protégé were surrounded by an avid mob.
Raymond sauntered back into the kitchen. Stephen was still standing in his isolated corner, a full glass progressing toward his lips. His face was flushed. His eyes half closed. Raymond started toward him.
“Hi, Ray.” Someone jerked the tail of his coat. It was Bull. Beside him was Lucille.
“Hen’s fruit.” Bull deposited a sack full of eggs on top of the refrigerator. “Eve’s delight.” A bag of apples was thrust into Raymond’s hand by some unknown person.
“An’ my sweet patootie has the bacon,” Bull continued, jerking an oblong package from beneath Lucille’s arm. Raymond put the apples beside Bull’s eggs.
“Hello, ’Cile. Thanks, Bull.”
“Oh, Ray.” It was Barbara. She was followed and surrounded by a group of detached, anemic white men and women, all in evening dress, all carrying packages of various sizes and shapes.
“This is Ray, folks,” Barbara announced to her companions. They all smiled dutifully and began relieving themselves of their bundles.
Barbara appropriated Raymond’s hand and placed something in his palm.
“For Negro art,” she whispered, then, slipping quickly away, corralled her friends and ushered them toward the punch bowl. Raymond opened his palm and gasped at the sight of a twenty-dollar bill.
“Good God, what a mob.” Lucille was beside him. He pocketed the money Barbara had given him and regarded Lucille coolly.
“Still hep on your man?”
“Why, Ray,” she began, then quickly regaining control of herself, riposted merrily, “and how.” She then started to move away.
Raymond forestalled her by firmly clenching her wrist in his hand. “How long you gonna play this game?” he asked sternly.
“What ol’ black game?”
“You know damn well…”
“Here’s a drink, baby.” Bull handed Lucille a glass of punch. Raymond released her wrist, glared at the two of them, walked to the table, pushed his way through the crowd, seized a glass, and handed it to Euphoria, now guardian of the punch bowl, to fill.
After having had several drinks, he threaded his way back into Eustace’s studio. It was more crowded and noisy than before. Someone was playing the piano, and in a small clearing the ex-wife of a noted American playwright was doing the Black Bottom with a famed Negro singer of spirituals.
“Ain’t I good?” she demanded of her audience. “An’ you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
With which she insinuated her scrawny white body close to that of her stalwart black partner and began performing the torrid abdominal movements of the “mess-a-round.”
“How d’y’do, Ray.”
Raymond turned to see who had spoken. On the davenette against the wall was a well known sophisticated author and explorer of the esoteric. He was surrounded by four bewildered-looking, corn-fed individuals. He introduced them to Raymond as relatives and friends from his native middle west. It was their first trip to Harlem, and their first experience of a white–black gathering.
Raymond sat down beside them, talking at random, and helping himself to the bottles of liquor which the cautious author had recruited from his own private stock.
Soon there was a commotion at the door. It cleared of all standees, and in it was framed the weird Amazonian figure of Amy Douglas, whose mother had made a fortune devising and marketing hair preparations for kinky-haired blackamoors. Amy, despite her bulk and size—she was almost six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds—affected flimsy frocks and burdened her person with weighty brilliants. A six months stay in Europe had provided her with a series of foreign phrases with which to interlard her southern dialect. Being very black, she went in for skin whiteners which had been more effective in certain spots than in others. As a result, her face was speckled, uncertain of its shade. Amy was also generous in the use of her mother’s hair preparations, and because someone had once told her she resembled a Nubian queen, she wore a diamond tiara, precariously perched on the top of her slickened naps.
Majestically she strode into the room, attended as usual by an attractive escort of high yaller ladies in waiting, and a chattering group of effeminate courtiers.
Raymond excused himself from the people with whom he had been sitting and started once more for the kitchen. While trying to pierce through the crowd, he was halted by Dr. Parkes, a professor of literature in a northern Negro college, who, also, as Paul so aptly declared, played mother hen to a brood of chicks, he having appointed himself guardian angel to the current set of younger Negro artists.
“I’ve been trying to find you for the past hour.”
“Sorry, Dr. Parkes…but in this mob…”
“I know. Perhaps I should await a more propitious moment, but I wanted to ask you about Pelham.”
“Pelham?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, he’s still in jail. That’s all I know. His trial isn’t far off. I’ve forgotten the exact date.”
“What effect do you think this will have on you?”
“On me? I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t you think this scandal when publicized will hurt all of you who lived here with Pelham?”
Raymond laughed.
“I hadn’t thought of that. This might be Paul’s opportunity to get his name in the paper.”
“Who’s taking my name in vain?” Paul appeared, still leading his dark shadow by the hand. “Oh, Dr. Parkes,” he continued excitedly, “meet Bud. He’s got…”
Raymond escaped and worked his way over to the piano. He stopped to chat with Aline and Janet, who had staggered in some time before with a group of conspicuously and self-consciously drunk college boys.
“Hi, Ray.”
“What say, keeds?”
“Where’s Steve?” they asked in unison.
“Find the gin,” he replied and moved away.
Meanwhile four Negro actors from a current Broadway dramatic hit harmonized a popular love song. Conversation was temporarily hushed, laughter subsided, and only the intermittent tinkle of ice in an upturned glass could be heard as the plangent voices of the singers filled the room.
There was a burst of applause as they finished, followed by boisterous calls for an encore. After a moment’s conference, the singers obligingly crooned another mellifluous tune.
Raymond retraced his steps, greeting people, whispering answers to questions buzzed into his ear. Finally he was once more in the kitchen. It was one-thirty. The twenty dollar bill had been given to Eustace, who had sent for another dozen bottles of gin. A deposed Russian countess was perched atop the gas range talking animatedly in broken English to Paul’s Spartan bootblack. The famed American playwright’s ex-wife had developed a crying jag. No one could soothe her but the stalwart singer of Negro spirituals. Near them hovered his wife, jealous, bored, suspicious, irritated rather than flattered by the honeyed, Oxonian witticisms being cooed into her ear by a drunken English actor.
The noise was deafening. Empty gin bottles on the floor tripped those with unsteady legs. Bull’s bag of eggs had been knocked to the floor. Its contents were broken and oozed stickily over the linoleum. Someone else had dropped a bag of sugar. The linoleum was gritty. Shuffling feet made rasping sounds.
Two-thirty. Raymond began to feel the effects of the liquor he had consumed. He decided to stop drinking for a while. There was too much to see to risk missing it by getting drunk.
In the hallway between the kitchen and Eustace’s studio, Euphoria sought to set a group of Negro school teachers at ease. The crowd confused them as it did most of the Harlem intellectuals who had strayed in and who all felt decidedly out of place. Raymond noticed how they all clung together, how timid they were, and how const
rained they were in conversation and manner. He sought Stephen. He wanted to share his amusement at their discomfiture and self-consciousness. It gave him pleasure that he should have such a pertinent example of their lack of social savoir, their race conscious awareness. Unable to recover from being so intimately surrounded by whites, they, the school teachers, the college boys, the lawyers, the dentists, the social service workers, despite their strident appeals for social equality when among their own kind, either communed with one another, standing apart, or else made themselves obnoxious striving to make themselves agreeable. Only the bootblack, the actors, the musicians and Raymond’s own group of friends comprised the compatible Negroid elements.
This suggested a formal train of thought to Raymond’s mind. Ignoring all those who called to him, he sought for Stephen. But Stephen was nowhere to be found, either in the kitchen, or in the studio where some unidentified russet brown girl was doing a cooch dance to a weird piano accompaniment.
Raymond made a tour of the house, surprised many amorous couples in the darkened rooms upstairs by turning on the light, disturbed the fanciful aggregation of Greenwich Village uranians Paul had gathered in Raymond’s studio to admire his bootblack’s touted body, and irritated and annoyed two snarling women who had closeted themselves in the bathroom, but still Stephen was not to be found.
Disconsolately, Raymond discontinued his search and returned to the main scene of the party. All were convivial and excited. Various persons sang and danced. Highballs were quickly disposed of. A jazz pianist starred at the piano. There was a rush to dance. Everyone seemed to be hilariously drunk. Shouts of joy merged into one persistent noisy blare. Couples staggered from the kitchen to the studio and back again. Others leaned despairingly, sillily against the walls, or else sank helplessly into chairs or window sills. Fresh crowds continued to come in. The Donation Party was successful beyond all hopes.
Raymond felt a tug on his arm. It was Samuel. His face was flushed. His eyes were angry. Raymond tried to elude him.
“I’ve got to talk to you, Ray.” He held tightly to Raymond’s arm.
“Wait till tomorrow. Who in the hell can talk with all this noise?”
“But you don’t know what’s happened!”
“And I don’t give a good…”
“Listen, Ray, for God’s sake,” Samuel interrupted. “Find Steve and get him out of here. He’s terribly drunk and in an awful mess.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“He, Aline and Janet just had a scrap.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know, Ray. No one can find him. He was standing in the door there…to Eustace’s place. All at once there was a great confusion. I pushed through the crowd just in time to hear Steve shout: ‘You goddamn sluts.’ And before I could grab him, he had hit Janet in the face, took a punch at Aline and rushed away.”
“Oh, Jesus. Which way did he go?”
“Out the front door.”
The two of them forged their way through the crowd and went out into the street. Without a word they raced to the end of the block, peeped into the speakeasy, then glanced down the intersecting thoroughfare. Stephen was nowhere in sight.
“See what you’ve done,” Samuel shouted. “You’ve got a decent boy into a sordid mess. I told him not to live with niggers. I knew what’d happen.”
But Raymond heard not one word of his tirade, for he had rushed away from Samuel, and run back to the house alone.
The party had reached new heights. The lights in the basement had been dimmed, and the reveling dancers cast grotesque shadows on
the heavily tapestried walls. Color lines had been completely eradicated. Whites and blacks clung passionately together as if trying to effect a permanent merger. Liquor, jazz music, and close physical contact had achieved what decades of propaganda had advocated with little success.
Here, Raymond thought, as he continued his search for Stephen, is social equality. Tomorrow all of them will have an emotional hangover. They will fear for their sanity, for at last they have had a chance to do openly what they only dared to do clandestinely before. This, he kept repeating to himself, is the Negro renaissance, and this is about all the whole damn thing is going to amount to.
Stephen was nowhere to be found. Nor were Aline or Janet or anyone else who might tell him what had happened. Raymond felt nauseated. The music, the noise, the indiscriminate love-making, the drunken revelry began to sicken him. The insanity of the party, the insanity of its implications, threatened his own sanity. It is going to be necessary, he thought, to have another emancipation to deliver the emancipated Negro from a new kind of slavery.
He made his way to the kitchen, rejoined the crowd around the punch bowl, and, for the next hour or more, drank incontinently. He grew drunker by the moment. He had a faint idea that Euphoria was dragging him aside and telling him that the noise must be toned down, and that there must be no more brawls, or bawdy parties in the bedrooms. The next thing he remembered was snatching Lucille away from some unidentified man, and dragging her viciously into the pantry.
“Y’ want a cave man, eh?” he shouted. All else was vague and jumbled. Five minutes later he passed quietly out on the pantry floor.
RICHARD BRUCE NUGENT
[1902–1987]
PERHAPS THE MOST IDENTIFIABLY GAY WRITER OF THE Harlem Renaissance, Richard Bruce Nugent is remembered more for his Bohemian flamboyance than his slim body of work. His literary notoriety comes primarily from Fire!! (1926), the controversial but short-lived periodical he coedited with the gay African American novelist Wallace Thurman. Along with Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Fire!! was the generational landmark that signaled the end of the Harlem Renaissance as a movement concerned with “talented tenth” propaganda. After Fire!!, young African American writers began to acknowledge themes of racial and sexual transgression more openly in their work, though hardly as frequent topics for discussion.
Nugent was born to what he called a “bohemian” middle-class family in Washington, D.C. His mother played piano and his father sang, encouraging their son toward the arts. Nugent was a teenager when his father died and the family moved to New York City. During a return visit to his hometown the author met Langston Hughes, W. E. B. DuBois, and Alain Locke at the salon of the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson. In 1925, Nugent returned to Harlem. Locke, a closeted black gay mentor of young, predominantly male, Harlem Renaissance talent, continued a lifelong correspondence with Nugent, despite any risks involved in associating with Nugent’s unconcealed homosexual persona.
Along with writings by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Fire!! included Nugent’s most famous work, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade.” Believed to be the first explicitly gay story published by an African American writer, the dreamy, heavily elliptical plot concerns the
intoxicated musings of a young, bisexual artist whose late-night wanderings in Harlem lead him to a sexual encounter with a handsome male stranger known only as Beauty. That this mysterious lover was known to be a composite sketch—of Rudolph Valentino, Langston Hughes, Harold Jackman, and the author himself—adds still another layer of controversy to a story that was already scandalous by virtue of its openly transgressive themes of homosexuality and drug usage.
Smoke, Lilies, and Jade
[1925]
He wanted to do something…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 everything…short disconnected thoughts—to wonder…to remember…to think and smoke…why wasn’t he worried that he had no money…he had had five cents…but he had been hungry…he was hungry and still…all he wanted to do was…lay there comfortably smoking…think…wishing he were writing…or drawing…or something…something about the things he felt and thought…but what did he think…he remembered how his mother had awakened him one night…ages ago…six years ago…Alex…he had always wondered at the strangene
ss of it…she had seemed so…so…so just the same…Alex… I think your father is dead…and it hadn’t seemed so strange…yet…one’s mother didn’t say that…didn’t wake one at midnight every night to say…feel him…put your hand on his head…then whisper with a catch in her voice…I’m afraid…sh don’t wake Lam…yet it hadn’t seemed as it should have seemed…even when he had felt his father’s cool wet forehead… it hadn’t been tragic…the light had been turned very low…and flickered…yet it hadn’t been tragic…or weird…not at all as one should feel when one’s father died…even his reply of…yes he is dead…had been commonplace…hadn’t been dramatic…there had been no tears… no sobs…not even a sorrow…and yet he must have realized that one’s father couldn’t smile…or sing any more…after he had died…every one remembered his father’s voice…it had been a lush voice…a promise… then that dressing together…his mother and himself…in the bathroom… why was the bathroom always the warmest room in the winter…as they had put on their clothes…his mother had been telling him what he must do…and cried softly…and that had made him cry too but you mustn’t cry Alex…remember you have to be a little man now…and that was all…didn’t other wives and sons cry more for their dead than that…anyway people never cried for beautiful sunsets…or music…and those were the things that hurt…the things to sympathize with…then out into the snow and dark of the morning…first to the undertaker’s… no first to Uncle Frank’s…why did Aunt Lula have to act like that…to ask again and again…but when did he die…when did he die…I just can’t believe it…poor Minerva…then out into the snow and dark again…how had his mother expected him to know where to find the night bell at the undertaker’s…he was the most sensible of them all tho…all he had said was…what…Harry Francis…too bad…tell mamma I’ll be there first thing in the morning…then down the deserted streets again…to grandmother’s…it was growing light now…it must be terrible to die in daylight…grandpa had been sweeping the snow off the yard…he had been glad of that because…well he could tell him better than grandma…grandpa…father’s dead…and he hadn’t acted strange either…books lied…he had just looked at Alex a moment then continued sweeping…all he said was…what time did he die…she’ll want to know…then passing thru the lonesome street toward home…Mrs. Mamie Grant was closing a window and spied him…hallow Alex…an’ how’s your father this mornin’…dead…get out…tch tch tch an’ I was just around there with a cup a’ custard yesterday…Alex puffed contentedly on his cigarette…he was hungry and comfortable…and he had an ivory holder inlaid with red jade and green…funny how the smoke seemed to climb up that ray of sunlight…went up the slant like just imagination…was imagination blue…or was it because he had spent his last five cents and couldn’t worry…anyway it was nice to lay there and wonder…and remember…why was he so different from other people… the only things he remembered of his father’s funeral were the crowded church and the ride in the hack…so many people there in the church… and ladies with tears in their eyes…and on their cheeks…and some men too…why did people cry…vanity that was all…yet they weren’t exactly hypocrites…but why…it had made him furious…all these people crying…it wasn’t their father…and he wasn’t crying…couldn’t cry for sorrow altho he had loved his father more than…than…it had made him so angry that tears had come to his eyes…and he had been ashamed of his mother…crying into a handkerchief…so ashamed that tears had run down his cheeks and he had frowned…and some one…a woman… had said…look at that poor little dear…Alex is just like his father… and the tears had run fast…because he wasn’t like his father… he couldn’t sing…he didn’t want to sing…he didn’t want to sing…Alex blew a cloud of smoke…blue smoke…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 thru an ivory holder…inlaid with red jade and green……….. he wondered why he couldn’t find work…a job…when he had first come to New York he had…and he had only been fourteen then was it because he was nineteen now that he felt so idle…and contented… or because he was an artist…but was he an artist…was one an artist until one became known…of course he was an artist…and strangely enough so were all his friends…he should be ashamed that he didn’t work…but…was it five years in New York…or the fact that he was an artist…when his mother said she couldn’t understand him…why did he vaguely pity her instead of being ashamed…he should be…his mother and all his relatives said so…his brother was three years younger than he and yet he had already been away from home a year…on the stage…making thirty-five dollars a week…had three suits and many clothes and was going to help mother…while he…Alex…was content to lay and smoke and meet friends at night…to argue and read Wilde… Freud…Boccaccio and Schnitzler…to attend Gurdjieff meetings and know things…Why did they scoff at him for knowing such people as Carl…Mencken…Toomer…Hughes…Cullen…Wood…Cabell…oh the whole lot of them…was it because it seemed incongruous that he…who was so little known…should call by first names people they would like to know…were they jealous…no mothers aren’t jealous of their sons…they are proud of them…why then…when these friends accepted and liked him…no matter how he dressed…why did mother ask…and you went looking like that…Langston was a fine fellow…he knew there was something in Alex…and so did Rene and Borgia…. and Zora and Clement and Miguel…and…and…and all of them…if he went to see mother she would ask…how do you feel Alex with nothing in your pockets…I don’t see how you can be satisfied…Really you’re a mystery to me…and who you take after…I’m sure I don’t know…none of my brothers were lazy and shiftless…I can never remember the time when they weren’t sending money home and when your father was your age he was supporting a family…where you get your nerve I don’t know…just because you’ve tried to write one or two little poems and stories that no one understands… you seem to think the world owes you a living…you should see by now how much is thought of them…you can’t sell anything…and you won’t do anything to make money…wake up Alex…I don’t know what will become of you……..it was hard to believe in one’s self after that…did Wilde’s parents or Shelley’s or Goya’s talk to them like that…but it was depressing to think in that vein…Alex stretched and yawned…Max had died… Margaret had died…so had Sonia…Cynthia…Juan-Jose and Harry…all people he had loved…loved one by one and together…and all had died…he never loved a person long before they died…in truth he was tragic…that was a lovely appellation…The Tragic Genius…think…to go thru life known as The Tragic Genius…romantic…but it was more or less true…Alex turned over and blew another cloud of smoke…was all life like that…smoke…blue smoke from an ivory holder…he wished he were in New Bedford…New Bedford was a nice place…snug little houses set complacently behind protecting lawns…half open windows showing prim interiors from behind waving cool curtains…inviting…like precise courtesans winking from behind lace fans…and trees…many trees…casting lacy patterns of shade on the sun dipped sidewalks…small stores…naively proud of their pseudo grandeur…banks…called institutions for saving…all naive…that was it…New Bedford was naive…after the sophistication of New York it would fan one like a refreshing breeze…and yet he had returned to New York…and sophistication…was he sophisticated…no because he was seldom bored…seldom bored by anything…and weren’t the sophisticated continually suffering from ennui…on the contrary…he was amused…amused by the artificiality of naivety and sophistication alike…but may be that i
n itself was the essence of sophistication or…was it cynicism…or were the two identical… blew a cloud of smoke…it was growing dark now…and the smoke no longer had a ladder to climb…but soon the moon would rise and then he would clothe the silver moon in blue smoke garments…truly smoke was like imagination……… Alex sat up…pulled on his shoes and went out…it was a beautiful night…and so large…the dusky blue hung like a curtain in an immense arched doorway…fastened with silver tacks…to wander in the night was wonderful…myriads of inquisitive lights…curiously prying into the dark…and fading unsatisfied…he passed a woman…she was not beautiful…and he was sad because she did not weep that she would never be beautiful…was it Wilde who had said…a cigarette is the most perfect pleasure because it leaves one unsatisfied…the breeze gave to him a perfume stolen from some wandering lady of the evening…it pleased him…why was it that men wouldn’t use perfumes…they should…each and every one of them liked perfumes…the man who denied that was a liar…or a coward…but if ever he were to voice that thought…express it…he would be misunderstood…a fine feeling that…to be misunderstood…it made him feel tragic and great…but may be it would be nicer to be understood…but no…no great artist is…then again neither were fools…they were strangely akin these two…Alex thought of a sketch he would make…a personality sketch of Fania… straight classic features tinted proud purple…sensuous fine lips…gilded for truth…eyes…half opened and lids colored mysterious green…hair black and straight…drawn sternly mocking back from the false puritanical forehead…maybe he would make Edith too…skin a blue…infinite like night…and eyes…slant and grey…very complacent like a cat’s… Mona Lisa lips…red and seductive as…as pomegranate juice…in truth it was fine to be young and hungry and an artist…to blow blue smoke from an ivory holder………… here was the cafeteria…it was almost as tho it had journeyed to meet him…the night was so blue…how does blue feel…or red or gold or any other color…if colors could be heard he could paint most wondrous tunes…symphonious…think…the dulcet clear tone of a blue like night…of a red like pomegranate juice…like Edith’s lips…of the fairy tones to be heard in a sunset…like rubies shaken in a crystal cup…of the symphony of Fania…and silver…and gold…he had heard the sound of gold…but they weren’t the sounds he wanted to catch…no…they must be liquid…not so staccato but flowing variations of the same caliber… there was no one in the cafe as yet…he sat and waited…that was a clever idea he had had about color music…but after all he was a monstrous clever fellow…Jurgen had said that…funny how characters in books said the things one wanted to say…he would like to know Jurgen…how does one go about getting an introduction to a fiction character…go up to the brown cover of the book and knock gently…and say hello…then timidly…is Duke Jurgen there…or…no because if one entered the book in the beginning Jurgen would only be a pawn broker…and one didn’t enter a book in the center…but what foolishness…
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