Photographers Unknown, And the Echo of Their Steps Mingled
…Alex walked and the click of his heels sounded…and had an echo…sound being tossed back and forth…back and forth…someone was approaching…and their echoes mingled…and gave the sound of castanets…Alex like the sound of the approaching man’s footsteps…he walked music also…he knew the beauty of the narrow blue…Alex knew that by the way their echoes mingled…he wished he would speak… but strangers don’t speak at four o’clock in the morning…at least if they did he couldn’t imagine what would be said…maybe pardon me but are you walking toward the stars…yes, sir, and if you walk long enough…then may I walk with you I want to reach the stars too…perdone me señor tiene usted fósforo…Alex was glad he had been addressed in Spanish…to have been asked for a match in English…or to have been addressed in English at all…would have been blasphemy just then…Alex handed him a match…he glanced at his companion apprehensively in the match glow…he was afraid that his appearance would shatter the blur thoughts…and stars…ah…his face was a perfect compliment to his voice…and the echo of their steps mingled…they walked in silence…the castanets of their heels clicking accompaniment… the strangler inhaled deeply and with a nod of content and a smile…blew a cloud of smoke…Alex felt like singing…the stranger knew the magic of blue smoke also…they continued in silence…the castanets of their heels clicking rhythmically…Alex turned in his doorway…up the stairs and the stranger waited for him to light the room…no need for words…they had always known each other……
Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”, Excerpt, November 1926, Originally published in “Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists”, Editor-in-Chief: Wallace Thurman
Born in Washington, D.C. in July of 1906, Richard Bruce Nugent was a prominent Black American modernist poet, writer, and painter of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural 
and intellectual movement of African-American arts, politics, and literature that was centered in the Harlem area of New York City through the 1920s and 1930s.
One of two sons born into the influential family of Richard Henry Nugent, Jr. and Pauline Minerva Bruce, Richard Bruce Nugent was exposed to a rich cultural environment that included theater performances by the Lafayette Players and his father’s extensive library. His early friendship with the young Angelina Weld Grimké, later the celebrated Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright, encouraged his development as a writer.
Bruce Nugent relocated at the age of thirteen with his mother and brother Gary to New York City after his father’s death from tuberculosis in 1920. Interested in the avant-garde culture of Greenwich Village, he started taking art classes. In the hope that he would find reliable employment, Nugent’s mother sent him to live with his maternal grandmother in Washington D.C. He worked at several common jobs, often using the name Ricardo 
Nugen di Dosocta to earn higher wages. It was during this time that he became friends with writers Langston Hughes and Georgia Douglas Johnson, with whom he often collaborated on literary works.
Intrigued in 1925 by the growing Harlem Renaissance movement, Richard Bruce Nugent followed Langston Hughes back to New York City. His first works as a writer, the poem “Shadow” and short story “Sahdji” were published in that year. An African morality tale that condemned murder, the short story was rewritten by Nugent as the theatrical “Sahdji: An African Ballet” and later produced in the summer of 1932 at Rochester, New York’s Eastman School of Music. During the short period between 1926 and 1928 in which he lived with Thurman, Nugent published “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” in the 1926 literary magazine “Fire!!”. The short story was written in a modernist stream-of-consciousness style and dealt with bisexuality and interracial male desire.
Bruce Nugent’s illustrations were featured in “Fire” and other publications of the period; four of his paintings were included in the 1931 William E. Harmon Foundation’s exhibition of Afro-American and Afro-diasporic artists. Between 1928 and 1933, Nugent wrote “Gentleman Jigger”, a semi-autobiographical 
satirical novel about a defiantly queer Black artist who moved to Harlem and then Greenwich Village. This novel was published posthumously by Da Capo Press in 2008.
Richard Bruce Nugent worked in the 1930s depression era as a writer of biographical sketches for the Federal Writers’ Project of the New Deal program’s Works Progress Administration. In 1945, he published “Beyond Where the Stars Stood Still”. This unique rare-edition work, fully illustrated by Nugent, centered on interracial male desire, bisexuality, queer identity, and homoerotic expression. “Beyond Where the Stars Stood Still” is now considered a foundational work of early Black queer literature as it pushed the boundaries of the deeply coded or hidden homosexual themes of the time.
In 1964, Bruce Nugent attended Columbia University’s Community Planning Conference, a collaboration with the Manhattan’s Community Planning Board 10. This workshop led to Nugent and other members to form the Harlem Cultural Council to promote Harlem artists and seek funds for both the arts and the construction of the Schomburg 
Center for Research in Black Culture. In addition to his position as the counsel’s co-chairman, Nugent served as chair of the Program Committee and worked as artist, commentator and performer.
A man known for his writing and illustrations, Richard Bruce Nugent also spent many years as a dancer. In the 1930s, he appeared in many shows including American composer and arranger of African-American spiritual music Francis Hall Johnson’s folk opera “Run, Little Chillun”. It was one of the most successful musical dramas of the Harlem Renaissance and the first Broadway show directed by an African-American. Nugent toured for two years in a production of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s “Porgy: A Play in Four Acts” and danced with several companies including noted dancer Hemsley Winfield’s New Negro Art Theater Dance Group.
As the author of over twenty published works and one of the last survivors of the Harlem Renaissance, Bruce Nugent was consulted by numerous writers and biographers on both Black and gay history. He was interviewed for the 1984 “Before Stonewall” documentary and his work was featured in British filmmaker and Professor of the Arts Sir Isaac Julien’s
1989 documentary “Looking for Langston”. One of the few Harlem artists in the Harlem Renaissance that were publicly out as gay, Richard Bruce Nugent passed away at the age of eighty on the twenty-seventh of May in 1987 of congestive heart failure in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Notes: Established in 1926, the historic Harlem Renaissance literary magazine, “Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists”, was independently published and entirely self-funded by its own editors. It did not have an established institutional or commercial publisher. Originally conceived as a quarterly journal, only one issue was ever published due to poor sales and an apartment fire that destroyed what remained of their inventory of five hundred copies.
“Fire!!” was produced by a collective of young African American artists and writers. Novelist Wallace Thurman served as the editor-in-chief, while the principal founding board and primary financial backers included Langston Hughes, John P. Davis, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Gwendolyn Bennett.
The complete work of Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” can be found at Amardeep Singh’s ”African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology” located at: https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/bruce-nugent-smoke-lilies-and-jade-1926?path=richard-bruce-nugent-1906-1987-author-page
The Center for New Performances (CNP) has an article on the theatrical version of “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” at: https://centerfornewperformance.org/projects/smoke-lillies-and-jade/
The Modernist Review has a 2020 article by writer and performer Dylan Brown entitled “Cruising the Harlem Renaissance with Richard Bruce Nugent” at: https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2020/11/09/cruising-the-harlem-renaissance-with-richard-bruce-nugent/
Top Insert Image: Carl Vam Vechten, “Richard Bruce Nugent”, February 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, National Portrait Gallery
Second Insert Image: Richard Bruce Nugent, “Drawing for Mulattoes, Number 2”, 1927, Illustration for “Ebony and Topaz-A Collectanea”, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
Third Insert Image: Carl Vam Vechten, “Richard Bruce Nugent”, February 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, National Portrait Gallery
Fourth Insert Image: Richard Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”, 1925, Mixed Media on Paper, Howard University Gallery of Art
Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Richard Bruce Nugent”, 1982, Gelatin Silver Print