The Blue Sword

The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley

Once again, I am on my bullshit: reviewing books out of order, long after I read them. Today’s edition: The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley. A re-read, of course; I’ve probably read this book a dozen times. It might even be my most-read book, ever, although at this point there’s no way of knowing for sure. I’ve been reading it since I was little, since I first found it in the kids’ chapter books section of our little old rural library, a book with a girl who didn't look like a girl and a horse and a sword on the cover. Everything my weird queer heart desired.

This time, I started my re-read in late March, reading it aloud to my friend Nora while she dozed restlessly, waking off and on. Her liver was failing. Colon cancer, metastatic, terminal. I read from the glass of orange juice to the arrival of the mage king at the embassy doors, Harry’s head aching from the bright sun, and then I put the book down so Nora could rest. She died about a week after that, before I could finish reading the book to her.

Nora loved The Blue Sword, but I didn’t meet her in bookish circles the way I’ve met most of my friends. We met in a conference room at the office of Denny Heck, who was at the time both my and Nora’s Member of Congress. Heck himself wasn’t there, but we delivered our list of demands to his staffers as representatives of our local Indivisible group. It was 2017, and I was a queer anarchist and Nora was a conservative Christian, and we were, somehow, on the same side of immigration issues and homelessness issues and even environmental issues.

Nora was, at the time, on a journey of radicalization that had started before I met her. She and her husband had adopted a child from China and decided that being good parents meant they needed to learn about race in America, so she was, even then, doing the work. She’d attended the Women’s March with her sister-in-law, and thought Trump was one of the worst things to ever happen to the American church. But I was, I’m pretty sure, one of the first openly and unapologetically queer people she ever became friends with.

In typical Nora fashion (she was such a tryhard), in between Indivisible-type candidate forums and meetings with the beleaguered staff of our elected representatives, she and I and a third friend organized a series of panels we called Meet Your Trans Neighbor, where we went into local churches and gave a presentation with some facts about trans people and the process of transition, and testimony about our own lives and experiences. Our mutual friend is transmasculine, I’m a queer nonbinary weirdo, and Nora was our token church lady, there to prophesy to other Christians that they ought to fix their hearts or die.

I think it was probably then that we started talking about books. We wanted to offer a list of media that people could check out to continue learning about trans people, and I of course love to talk about books. I think it must have been around then that I learned that Nora was also a huge fan of Robin McKinley, that THE BLUE SWORD was one of her very favorites too, because it’s around then that I started to consider her a friend.

When the pandemic hit, Nora started scheduling lunch with me over zoom, once a week, and honestly I don’t know how alive I would be right now if it wasn’t for her matter-of-fact willingness to just send me a zoom link at noon on Fridays without checking ahead of time. It was a lonely time for me, but with Nora’s company I managed to write a novel (as yet unpublished, but full of queer, poor, marginalized people who start a revolution). If it ever sees print, there will be a dedication to Nora in the front of it. She beta read it for me, and helped me make the scenes of organizing meetings truly authentic.

Nora wrote a book, too, in between transforming her new church (which she picked because it was decent on both race and queer rights and she refused to sacrifice one for the other) into a community hub for liberation, yelling at her kids’ school about race, gender and inclusion, and yelling at our city council about support for homeless people. Not a fantasy novel; she loved to read fantasy but she wrote non-fiction. Her book is both memoir and manual, a map for other people raised in the evangelical church in rural, conservative white America, who want to fix their hearts but don’t know how. It hasn’t been published, either, and I suppose now it might never be. It’s difficult to publish work by a dead person, the contracts get all wibbly-wobbly.

Since we were swapping book recs and writing updates, and Nora was reading my novel-in-progress, I offered to read her manuscript and offer feedback on it, which she let me do. After she died, I was panicking at the thought of speaking at her memorial service, so I re-read it. My copy is a first draft, and I won’t quote from it because I know Nora was working on revising it before sending it out into the world, but I will tell you that the title of the first chapter is ‘So Many Mistakes.’

By the second sentence, Nora was explaining about how when she first started learning about racism to prepare to adopt a non-white child, she unknowingly said and did some racist things, oblivious. ‘Unknowingly’ and ‘oblivious’ are my own additions there, because Nora’s own description of her mistakes was always unflinching. She was exceptionally able to clearly describe her own sins, without excuses, and accept the righteously just cost of them.

I don’t know if it’s even correct to call that courage, although I think Nora did possess an exceptional, once in a generation, kind of courage. It was also the stubborn, merciless pursuit of justice—of accuracy—that wouldn’t let her accept unfairness even when it benefitted her.

This led to situations like the time she told me about how she’d announced to everyone in a religious study group that she was racist—meaning, that she was aware of her own indoctrination into white supremacy and although she was fully engaged in eradicating it, she was still finding pieces of it deeply ingrained in both her personal history and the structure of her beliefs and culture. Shedding racism was difficult work she hadn’t yet completed—which understanding, by my lights, put her far ahead of almost every other white person I know in the work of not being racist, but it was Nora. Nora told the truth without flinching. So she told everyone, yes, I know that I’m racist.

Several people in the group misunderstood, and thought that she was saying that she was holding onto her racism rather than digging it out like a splinter, so then she had to figure out who was avoiding her because they thought she was proudly proclaiming that she was an asshole, and convince them that that’s not what she’d meant. She told me this story kind of bewildered and annoyed that people weren’t doing the work themselves enough to at least understand her, but I think people just didn’t expect a person like her. People don’t expect to stumble across some round little white church lady who is brave and strong and as pure of heart as any of the heroes in Nora’s favorite fantasy novels.

Re-reading The Blue Sword,  I find I’m not at all surprised that Nora loved this book. It is, after all, a book about being from a place you’ve never been to and loving it more than you love the people you grew up among, a book about disregarding everything you come from and everyone you love now in order to do what you think is the wise thing to do, a book about being willing to die—about expecting to die—and not wavering, even once, from the path in front of your feet.

That was Nora. When I would joke about being sent to a concentration camp, she’d laugh, of course, because she was my friend and she thought I was funny. But then she’d set her jaw and start doing everything she could to get sent to the camps right along with me. She was the closest I’ve ever seen to a real life prophet, and it was an honor to know her. I miss her, so much.