Principal Book Characters:

Bernadette Lefthand, a part Jicarilla Apache and part Taos Pueblo Indian, a beautiful dancer, wife, and mother.

Gracie Lefthand, Bernadette’s admiring younger sister, narrator of most of the book’s action

Anderson George, Bernadette’s husband, a Navajo rodeo bronco buster.

Tom George, Anderson’s quiet brother.

Emmett Take Horse, a disabled Navajo, a onetime suitor of Bernadette.

The Death of Bernadette Lefthand (1993) is Querry’s most renowned novel. The action in this contemporary mystery occurs on Apache and Navaho reservations in a region of intersecting hills that crisscross Arizona and New Mexico. The title character’s murder elicits from the community accusations of witchcraft and prejudice. Told through various voices, native and white, a primary theme of the work is vision, sensory and inner, individual and communal. The author’s finesse with language—his words have a haunting quality—and his exploration of tribal spirituality earned positive reviews. In Querry’s next novel, Bad Medicine (1999), the Hanta virus epidemic in the Southwest becomes the catalyst to examine the rift between traditional healing practices and modern medicine.

Biography

Ronald Burns Querry was born in Washington, DC on March 22, 1943, the son of Woodrow Burns and Beverly Burns Querry. His family’s relocation to Oklahoma was the wellspring of Querry’s lifelong devotion to the Southwest, its landscape, customs, and horse country. As a mixed-blood descendent of the Choctaw Nation, he was drawn to the region’s rich Native American heritage, the material for his later novels. From 1960 through 1963, Querry served in the U.S. Marine Corps. Returning to civilian life, he found employment variously as a horse trainer, wrangler, rancher, teacher, editor, and writer. Querry attended Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma, completing his B.A. in 1969. He earned his M.A. from New Mexico Highlands University in 1970 and his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 1975.

While writing his doctoral dissertation, Querry supported himself as a local ranch hand. In the mid-1970’s, he taught college courses to inmates at New Mexico State Penitentiary. At Lake Erie College in Painsville, Ohio, Querry was an associate professor of American studies from 1978 through 1979 and directed the equestrian program. He was a member of the English faculty at the University of Oklahoma in Norman from 1979 through 1983.

His first marriage, to Isabel Lindsay, ended in divorce but produced a daughter, Isabel Kathleen. On May 14, 1984, Querry married photographer Elaine Stribling. Together, they ranched nine square miles of land in the high plains country of New Mexico.

Querry has been successful in writing both fiction and nonfiction, publishing essays and articles in numerous magazines and journals and editing a quarter horse racing publication. In 1983, he edited Growing Old at Willie Nelson’s Picnic, and Other Sketches of Life in the Southwest, a collection of essays about life’s quirks in that region. His memoir, I See by My Get-Up was published in 1987. Querry has received two regional honors, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award and the Border Regional Library Association Southwest Book Award. Noteworthy among Native American writers in the Southwest, Querry explores the intersections and divisions between human spirituality, geographic place, and contemporary life. His authentic portrayals of native peoples and his engaging storytelling techniques have earned critical praise and attracted a devoted readership.

Analysis

The Death of Bernadette Lefthand is an important addition to the growing literature by and about Native Americans. The recent flood of such fiction began in 1969 with N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn. Querry, whose background is Choctaw, has chosen to place the action of his novel among Jicarilla Apache, Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo Indians (he has also, it should be noted, chosen to use the term “Indian” throughout The Death of Bernadette Lefthand). He takes pains to include explanations of the ceremonies and customs of his characters. At some points, this material is not closely integrated into the action of the novel, perhaps because it is not part of Querry’s own background.

The Death of Bernadette Lefthand takes the form of a conventional mystery novel, in which almost everything is known from the beginning except the identity of the murderer. In combining a murder mystery with Indian witchcraft, Querry works in a genre also explored by Louis Owens in The Sharpest Sight (1992). Although he deals at length with witchcraft among the Navajo, Querry seems less interested than many other Native American writers in other aspects of Indian mysticism. Leslie Marmon Silko, Owens, and Momaday, in particular, include characters who see and know more than ordinary people. These authors also write about events that are not open to easy rational explanation. Querry, on the other hand, uses the mystery and menace of the old witch to create an atmosphere of dread, but he does not clearly accept the supernatural as real.

The Death of Bernadette Lefthand

Bernadette Lefthand’s death is the first incident reported by her shocked and grieving sister, Gracie. The girls’ father and Gracie at first assume that Bernadette’s death had come as the result of an automobile accident, a common cause of death among young Indians. It turns out, however, that she has been brutally murdered and that the police are looking for Bernadette’s husband, Anderson George.

The heart of the novel is the story of Bernadette’s life on the Jicarilla Apache reservation, centered around Dulce, in northern New Mexico. She has always been a beautiful and popular girl, and as a teenager she emerged as a champion dancer at powwows held throughout the Southwest. As a student at the Indian school in Santa Fe, she fell in love with a handsome young Navajo named Anderson George. After graduation, the two married, and Bernadette gave birth to a baby boy.

Gracie Lefthand’s account of her sister’s life focuses on many of the trips the two girls took with Anderson and his brother Tom. They visited their late mother’s sister in the Taos pueblo and enjoyed a strong sense of family warmth with their aunt and her family. With the George brothers, they went to rodeos on the Navajo reservation, and after one such adventure had a memorable stay at an old but newly refurbished hotel in Gallup. The four young people also visited a friend of Bernadette on the Hopi reservation, where during a festival they were again made to feel part of a family despite the age-old enmity between the Hopi and the Navajo.

The sense of Bernadette as a special person is underlined in the sections of the novel narrated by Starr Stubbs. Starr is the wife of a popular country singer who has built a large home near Dulce as a place to recover from the stresses of his concert tours. Starr no longer accompanies her husband on the road, and she has hired Bernadette as a kind of housekeeper, in part to have someone to talk to. In a short time, she has come to admire Bernadette as much as Gracie does. Starr provides an important perspective, since she is well read in matters having to do with Indians and is a sympathetic commentator on their problems. Despite her good intentions, however, she is unable truly to understand her Indian friends.

During the early part of the novel, there are occasional brief third-person narratives in which an unnamed character seeks out a Navajo witch for instruction. The menacing note in these sections becomes more pronounced when it becomes clear that the apprentice witch is Emmett Take Horse. A onetime contemporary of Bernadette at the Indian school, he had been a successful jockey in the informal Navajo horse races until an accident left him disfigured and crippled. He resents the handsome Anderson George as well as Bernadette, who had rejected him as a suitor.

After a benefit powwow in Dulce at which Bernadette has been honored, she is bludgeoned to death. Emmett has tried to use witchcraft to influence the increasingly drunken Anderson George to kill Bernadette, but in the end, Emmett has killed her himself, arranging matters so that Anderson appears to be guilty. Consumed by remorse, half convinced that he had committed the murder, Anderson hangs himself in the jail cell where he is being held. Gracie is left to rear Bernadette’s infant son.

By opening the novel with the news of Bernadette Lefthand’s death, Querry forfeits one opportunity for suspense, but there are other kinds of suspense in The Death of Bernadette Lefthand. The reasons for her murder and the way in which the murderer prepared for it are not clear for a long time. Querry also shows real skill in the gradual intrusion of Emmett Take Horse into the novel as he makes himself more a part of the other characters’ lives, and the author saves until the very end the revelation of who actually committed the crime. The use of several levels of narration is occasionally somewhat awkward, but the construction of the novel is otherwise quite skillful.

Despite the importance of a brutal murder to the plot, one of the principal virtues of The Death of Bernadette Lefthand is its relatively mild description of Indian life, less gloomy than in such predecessors as Leslie Marmon Silko’s classic novel Ceremony (1977) and James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974). While Querry does not ignore or attempt to underplay the problems of alcoholism, poverty, and exploitation among American Indians, he shows that for at least some young Indians, much of day-to-day life is interesting and enjoyable.

On the one hand, Gracie Lefthand’s description of the desert-like poverty of the ironically named Navajo town of Many Farms is pungent and dispiriting. On the other hand, Gracie clearly comes from a family in which there is warmth and love. Trips to visit her mother’s sister in Taos, contacts with her paternal aunts in Dulce, and the widowed father’s care for his daughters are all factors in making her life more than tolerable and in allowing her to feel that she is loved.

A trip taken by the two George brothers and the Lefthand sisters to Second Mesa on the Hopi reservation is another manifestation of this sense of caring. Despite the tribal enmity between Hopi and Navajo, the George brothers are made to feel welcome by the family of Bernadette’s Hopi friend, Mae Lomayaktewa. There is for Gracie the fun of meeting new people, there are dances, there is the sometimes cruel mischief of the clowns, which keeps Gracie in a nervous state during the ceremonial dancing. There is also the enjoyment of preparing for the feast and the greater enjoyment Gracie takes in the feast itself.

Unfortunately, there is considerable awkwardness in Querry’s use of Gracie to impart information about Indian customs and Indian country. Tidbits of information about such things as Navajo belief in witchcraft, the Navajo attitude toward death, and the construction of the traditional hogans are planted here and there, as are descriptions of Canyon de Chelly, Window Rock, and other parts of the reservation landscape. Some of Gracie’s comments on Navajo customs seem designed not to advance the plot but to demonstrate that beliefs and what some regard as superstitions vary among Indians as much as they do among other Americans. Except for the information about witchcraft, none of this material is integral to the story; the visit to the Hopi reservation is especially noteworthy for its irrelevance to the rest of the narrative. Tony Hillerman’s Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn novels provide better models of how this kind of information can be smoothly integrated into fictional material.

There is also an ambiguity about Querry’s use of Navajo witchcraft. Emmett Take Horse is an interesting character, an outcast who thirsts for revenge on people who have done nothing to harm him but who are simply better off than he is. Emmett is terrified in the early stages of his venture into witchcraft, but he persists. The problem for the novel is that Querry seems to vacillate in his view of witchcraft, at first presenting it as a powerful active force but in the end having Emmett carry out the murder himself instead of taking revenge through his powers. The murder and the frame-up of Anderson George do not partake of anything peculiar to witchcraft. Louis Owens’ The Sharpest Sight (1992), which also deals with murder and the supernatural among Indians, is more sure-handed in its use of such material.

Despite these difficulties, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand is an impressive first novel. If Starr Stubbs is a stock character, the major Indian characters are clearly delineated: Bernadette, the beauty who is also talented and genuinely kind; Anderson George, the handsome young man who turns to alcohol when he is overwhelmed by his failure to live up to his own expectations and by the reality of adult life in a society that has no place for him; Gracie, the dumpy, homely younger sister, forever in the shadow of Bernadette but feeling no resentment of her status, always pleased to be taken along on trips and to be allowed to help rear Anthony; Emmett Take Horse, scarred brutally by another’s action, resentful of what has happened to him but fearful of his own powers. The styles in which the characters are presented are appropriate to the different narrators, and Querry has provided a wealth of information on how American Indians regard themselves, one another, and their world.

Further Reading