Sins of the Seventh Sister

(A Novel Based on a True Story of the Gothic South)
by Huston Curtiss
A Book Review
by Barry D. Gilfry © 2003

Wild Child Publishing.com © 2003

Billy-Pearl was the seventh of ten blonde and beautiful daughters and, if she were indeed a sinner, this book is her indictment. Reading these pages, one is left with no doubt whatsoever that Billy-Pearl was in charge of every aspect, arranged and controlled in minutest detail every facet of her life--including the time and method of her own death.

We are introduced to Billy-Pearl through her picture that graces the cover of this memoir. She stands tall and proud, and at the beginning of the book we read:

In 1929 the Curtisses were still rich. Well, relatively rich anyway, compared to most of the other people who lived in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia.

My mother was a crack shot with a rifle or a pistol; she had learned [in order] to please my grandfather. But it was not just to please her father that she went to every shooting match she could and won. She liked excelling. One cynic had said, presenting her the cup, "You're the best man here."

Billy-Pearl Curtiss is a strong and fascinating woman who will live in the annals of American literature as one of the great heroes of the twentieth century. However, this book is populated by many memorable characters, so entertaining and outrageous that one reviewer dubbed this novel "Mayberry on steroids".

The town is Elkins, West Virginia, and the year is 1929. Huston Curtiss, or "Hughie" as he is known, is our seven-year-old tour guide. It is a time when the Ku Klux Klan still holds meetings openly, and where they dispense their drunken "justice" against black people with very little restraint. This is a town where a father chops the finger off one of his twin sons so that he can tell the two apart; where a father, after contracting syphilis from the town whore, passes it on to his eight-year-old daughter; where the "town whore" is a fifteen-year-old girl.

Billy-Pearl, however, dispenses her own justice, theorizing that if the KKK can get away with making people "disappear", so can she, and more than one hood-wearing, cross-burning Klan member ends up, unmissed, decomposing at the bottom of her cesspool.

Huston Curtiss wastes no time getting into his story. On page two in "A Note Before We Begin", the author meets with his old friend Stanley, who has grown up to become "Stella...the patron saint of the privileged class."

Stella says to Hughie, "You can't tell our story without admitting what a little shit you were."

Mr. Curtiss does, indeed, admit what a little shit he was... Nowhere in this book does he pull punches. It comes across in his writing that little Hughie is quite often jealous, feeling that his mother makes time for everyone in the world but him. He often laments that she never gives him a hug. She takes in strays, protects the downtrodden, sets up a school, hires the unemployed, provides food and clothing for the needy. Her home becomes an island sanctuary in a sea of troubles.

Hughie says, "I once thought all of her efforts were just for me, but I wasn't so sure anymore; she seemed to have embraced the world."

Hughie relates that he loved to spend time with his Grandfather Fancler (who did have time to hug him) and who liked to share his vast knowledge and opinions:

He told me how most of the Confederates had never owned a slave, and most of the Union forces didn't care about slavery. The war had all been planned by old men in paneled offices, as wars always were... My grandfather was fourteen when the War Between the States ended, and he wanted to teach me what he understood about it.

Sins of the Seventh Sister is rich with history. In addition, Mr. Curtiss treats us to the luxury of great detail: a 1925 Jewett automobile, the number of bee hives a farm can support (sixty), the recipes for maple-sugar bunnies and apple butter, the items in the tack shed and type of horses his mother bred, the contest of the 800 pound pumpkins, and so much more.

Mr. Curtiss has very skillfully laid out his book from cover to cover, and though we move among three dozen or more characters, the reader is never confused.

My only complaint about the book? It could have been longer.