The Death of Bernadette Lefthand by Ronald B. Querry

First published: 1993

Type of plot: Detective and mystery

Time of work: 1990’s

Locale: New Mexico and Arizona

Principal 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 crippled Navajo, a onetime suitor of Bernadette
• Starr Stubbs, a friend and employer of Bernadette, narrator of some of the book’s action

The Novel

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 had 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.

The Characters

Bernadette Lefthand is the only fully drawn character. In one sense, despite its title, the novel is more about her life than her death. She is seen, by her sister and by Starr Stubbs, as almost faultless, a gifted and beautiful young woman who succeeds as a mother as well as she had succeeded as a dancer at powwows. She is kind to her sister and a welcome companion to Starr, providing the white woman with important insights into Indian life and customs. She seems to show that even in depressed economic conditions, considerable joy and satisfaction are possible for at least some young Indians.

Anderson George is a more complex character. As a teenager, he has stood out from others in his group; he is handsome and almost as talented at rodeo riding as Bernadette is as a dancer. As a young adult, however, Anderson is less satisfied with his life than is his wife. Despite having won the beautiful Bernadette, he follows what the book presents as a typical Indian pattern in relying more and more on alcohol to soften the hard edges of his life. Partly as a result of his increasingly frequent drunkenness, he becomes less and less successful in the rodeos and comes more and more under the baleful influence of Emmett Take Horse. In the end, he is too far gone in drunkenness to realize that, despite appearances, he has not murdered his wife.

The most interesting character is Emmett Take Horse. He makes a deliberate choice of evil in seeking out the old witch who teaches him the ways of witchcraft, but he seems to lose faith in the power of his magic. He decides finally not to rely on the spell he has cast on Anderson George to accomplish Bernadette’s death; instead he kills her himself and arranges for the blame to fall on Anderson.

Of the other characters, Starr Stubbs receives the most attention, although her character is not developed at length. Instead, she is used to represent whites who have goodwill toward Indians but who, despite book knowledge and the best of intentions, cannot truly understand the ways and the hardships of Indian life. Tom George is a sober foil to his more glamorous brother; Gracie, similarly, is the younger sister so admiring of Bernadette that she has little personality of her own.

Critical Context

Ron Querry’s first novel is an important addition to the growing literature by and about Native Americans. The recent flood of such fiction was begun 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, as if Gracie were speaking to non-Indians during her narratives. 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). In dealing with life among young Indians by focusing on female characters, he is in the territory pioneered by Momaday in The Ancient Child (1989).

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. Silko, Owens, and Momaday, in particular, include characters who see and know more than ordinary people and 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. Emmett Take Horse’s decision to perform the murder of Bernadette himself seems to result from a lack of confidence in magic—an attitude that may reflect a similar hesitancy on the part of the author.

Bibliography

Davis, Robert Murray. Review of The Death of Bernadette Lefthand, by Ronald B. Querry. World Literature Today 68 (Spring, 1994): 408. Brief but favorable review of Querry’s novel. Murray names Querry as “a successor to Tony Hillerman” but emphasizes the fact that Querry writes from his own Native American experience. Hails the book as “a very fine novel.”

Larson, Charles R. American Indian Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. Provides a sound introduction to the history of fiction by and about American Indians.

Library Journal. CXVIII, July, 1993, p.122. A review of The Death of Bernadette Lefthand.

Mergen, Bernard. Reviews of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie; Eye Killers, by A. A. Carr; and The Death of Bernadette Lefthand, by Ron Querry. American Studies International 33 (October, 1995): 94-96. Mergen reviews books by a new generation of American Indian writers and finds that these contemporary novels are becoming popular with mainstream American readers. Mergen calls Querry “a skillful writer who tells his story through dialogue which perfectly captures the styles and cadences of the characters, Indian and white. . . . ”

The New York Times Book Review. XCVIII, November 28, 1993, p.31. A review of The Death of Bernadette Lefthand.

Publishers Weekly. Review of The Death of Bernadette Lefthand, by Ronald B. Querry. 240 (June 28, 1993): 68. A brief but enthusiastic review. Gives special attention to Querry’s skill in developing the narrative and to his sympathy for his characters.

Publishers Weekly. CCXL, June 28, 1993, p.68. A review of The Death of Bernadette Lefthand.

Simson, Maria. “Native American Fiction, Memoirs Blossom into Print.” Publishers Weekly 238 (June 7, 1991): 22-24. Deals with the emergence of books by American Indian writers on the marketplace of American publishing. Simson notes that academic publishers remain important in the publication of works by Indian writers but that trade publishers have become increasingly interested in Native American works.

Star Tribune. November 14, 1993, p. F17. A review of The Death of Bernadette Lefthand.