No Dark Valley by Jamie Langston Turner

At least I’ve seen what the world outside the state of Georgia looks like. At least I know something about real life and art and culture . Still, a disturbing thought nibbled at the edge of her mind. As far as happiness went, she knew that was probably one area in which she hadn’t really surpassed her grandmother. Money, yes. Education, yes. Experience, at least of a certain kind, without a doubt. Even a moderate measure of success. But happiness? Not by a country mile, as her relatives were fond of saying.
    Not that Grandmother had seemed all that happy on the outside. “Doesn’t she ever smile?” Celia’s friend Ansell had often said when he came to pick her up in his car. Or, “There she is, the old woman with the contagious laugh.” But something spoke very clearly to Celia right this very minute as she watched the men gently place her grandmother’s casket on a stand in front of the pulpit: She was contented with her lot in life . She couldn’t have liked much of what had come her way, but she accepted it and went on living.
    Grandmother had lived in the same little white frame house next to the railroad track for sixty-some years, had raised three children of her own in it, had planted a garden every spring and kept chickens in the backyard. Celia had seen her snatch up many a chicken with her bare hands and wring its neck for supper that night. Then she’d chop off its head with a little hatchet she kept in the shed. She’d fling the head out into the tall weeds behind the garage for the stray cats to fight over.
    For all those years she had washed clothes and hung them on the line outside, sewed and mended and ironed, mowed the grass, scrubbed the floors, cooked meals. Not fancy meals and usually not even very good ones. She fixed the same things over and over, as Celia remembered it, and she didn’t hold much to the principle of seasoning, believing that Americans used far too much salt. She also thought Americans ate their meat too rare, so she went to the other extreme. Though Celia had never taken the trouble to actually keep a tally, she knew that at least two out of every three meats her grandmother put on the table were seriously overcooked, usually downright burned.
    A funny thing about human adaptability, though, was that you could get used to almost anything. Celia recalled the way her grandmother would fix fried potatoes—dice them up, then fry them in hot oil until they were dark brown. Very dark brown. Later, living in her first apartment, sharing her bed with a grad student named Benjie, Celia had made fried potatoes one night to go with the hamburgers Benjie had grilled on her hibachi. When she put them on the table, Benjie had laughed and said, “Whoa, what have we got here—potato pellets?” He took only a couple of bites, and Celia ate all the rest. He couldn’t believe she actually liked them fixed that way, that she had been watching them carefully the whole time they cooked, deliberately waiting until they were almost black to transfer them from the skillet onto a paper towel.
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    One of the men stood behind the pulpit now and introduced himself as the pastor of “our dear sister, Mrs. Burnes.” As far as looks went, he fit the bill for a backwater southern preacher. Tall and thin, with an apologetic stoop to his posture, everything about him bland and nondescript. He told about visiting Mrs. Burnes daily during her last week when “she knew she was soon to depart to Glory.” And he read from what he claimed was her favorite passage of Scripture: Joshua 1:5–9.
    The words were familiar to Celia. She could have recited them from memory. When the pastor came to the words “observe to do according to all the law” and “turn not from it to the right hand or to the left,” Celia felt the old bitterness rise up within her. There was that same old rigid code of behavior being held up as the