"Becky had one Negro son. Who gave it to her? Damn buck n*****, said the white folks' mouths. She wouldn't tell. Common, God forsaken, insane white shameless wench, said the white folks' mouths. Her eyes were sunken, her neck stringy, her breasts fallen, till then. Taking their words, they filled her, like a bubble rising—then she broke. Mouth setting in a twist that held her eyes, harsh, vacant, staring […] Who gave it to her? Low-down n***** with no self-respect, said the black folks' mouths. She wouldn't tell. Poor Catholic poor-white crazy woman, said the black folks' mouths. White folks and black folks built her cabin, fed her and her growing baby, prayed secretly to God who'd put his cross upon her and cast her out."

Everyone's talking about Becky. Why? She's a white girl who got knocked up by a black guy, and she won't tell anyone who the baby daddy is even though everyone (and we mean everyone) is helping to support her and her new baby. How's that for gratitude?

So why are we putting this passage down as an example of modernism in action? It's not like the scene has anything to do with any major urban centers—like London or New York City, where modernism really cut its teeth.

In fact, this passage is set in the rural South. But that's the genius of Toomer. He's writing about this small Southern community and the way they think and treat a young, white woman with two black sons. But he does it all while mixing modernist techniques with distinctly Southern images, culture, and values.

Modernism: it's not just for the city folk anymore. Thanks, Toomer.

There's "stream-of-consciousness" and then there's streams-of-consciousness. That's what Toomer's all about in this passage. He takes a modernist technique straight out of a Virginia Woolf novel and multiplies it. Suddenly, you're in the heads of not just one or two people, but a whole community.

First, we have the white folks. In answer to the general question of who got the girl pregnant, they respond with, "Damn buck n*****…She wouldn't tell. Common, God forsaken, insane white shameless wench, said the white folks' mouths." Not too nice.

But are the white people in the passage actually speaking in the moment, or is Becky re-imagining past conversations inside her head so that, "taking their words, they filled her, like a bubble rising—then she broke"?

The perspective in the passage changes from a general, third person omniscient narrator to the limited, third-person narration of the white folks, and then finally to this in-between third person narrator. Are we reading Becky's perspective on her own reaction to the white folks' nasty words? Or is this the third person omniscient narrator telling us what happened to Becky?

It's hard to say. But that perspective, whoever owns it, portrays Becky as the perfect image of bitterness, "Mouth setting in a twist that held her eyes, harsh, vacant, staring…" And maybe that's the point.

Maybe we're not supposed to know exactly who "owns" the narrative perspective because Becky's bitterness grows out of having been subjected to oppression in a racist culture.

So the perspective we hear in this narration speaks to Becky's personal experiences as much as it does to the experience of many other white women during those days. We've gotta say that we completely understand Becky's sour facial expressions.

And as the passage continues, we experience the same narrative vertigo with another stream of dialogue. Except this time, we're experiencing the local black perspective on her pregnancy. Of course, the black grapevine isn't exactly kind to her, either. "Poor Catholic poor-white crazy woman" isn't the nicest description we've heard lately.

Who wouldn't want to isolate herself after hearing all of that trash talk? We'd probably just decide to stay in and watch Vampire Diaries all day. Or, um, whatever it was people did for fun back then. (Who even knows anymore?)

But more to the point, all of this stream-of-dialogue turned stream-of-consciousness is told in a way that's specific to lower-class Southern culture and dialect. There's Southern slang, a lack of "proper" punctuation, and references to a really mean God who's just not into the born-out-of-wedlock products of interracial couplings.

So this is modernism done up in a Southern dress, to spotlight the strict social limitations of the South during that era. Nice.