During the Jim Crow years, during the depression, during the war years, Bessie Stringfield, a Black woman born in Jamaica in 1911 (or North Carolina in 1912, depending on your source), made repeated solo motorcycle trips across the continental United States.
She was a wanderer, a traveler for whom the destination was not the destination. According to lore, she chose her itinerary by laying out a map and tossing a penny onto the paper, where the penny landed was where she rode. As a Black woman, she often couldn’t rent motel rooms and slept on the motorcycle, her riding jacket rolled up and laid across the handlebars for a pillow. When she was lucky, she was invited to stay in the homes of Black Americans.
Bessie supported herself performing motorcycle stunts in carnivals and racing flat track, a particularly physical and dangerous form of motorcycle racing. She raced disguised as a man and at times was denied the winner’s purse when organizers discovered she was a woman. That she won speaks volumes about her athleticism and riding ability.
She was married and divorced six times having lost three babies with her first husband (Stringfield is the name of her third husband who asked her to keep it because he was convinced she would be famous). Over the years, she owned 27 Harley Davidson motorcycles, worked as a motorcycle courier for the Army during the Second World War and ended up in Florida where she was dubbed “The Motorcycle Queen of Miami.”
Bessie died in 1993 having never quit riding.
Us guys who ride motorcycles, especially us white guys, like to imagine ourselves as tough, we’ve got the tattoos and the leather and the foamy beer stories. But let’s be honest, as generally pursued, motorcycling is not a difficult task; clutch, gears, throttle, brakes, all very straightforward and easy to master and generally as unworthy of approbation as walking or driving a car. And modern bikes and modern gear and modern roads and being white and male further insulate us from the demands of character. Tough, not story tough, real tough, the tough that reveals character, was a 5′ 2″ tall Black woman in her twenties riding alone on an unreliable motorcycle on bad roads through a country ripped asunder by economic strife, a country built on social and legal misogyny, a country where slavery and the Civil War were living memories, a country where, according to Wikipedia, there were “…4,467 total (Black) victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941,”
Bessie Stringfield was the first Black woman to be inducted into the American Motorcyclist Association Hall of Fame and the Harley Davidson Hall of Fame.
Monday, Jane fell and broke her right patella and right arm and I’m home in Minneapolis (for those who don’t know me personally, Jane’s my wonderful wife of 29 years). She’s doing fine, maybe surgery, maybe not. She’s using a walker, both breaks on the same side so no crutches. Her nurse is clumsy and inefficient but he means well.
For the motorcyclists, true love is riding eleven hundred miles in twenty hours, the last four through Wisconsin, dead of night, dense fog and temperatures in the fifties, you know what I’m talking about (shout out to Aerostich riding suits…).
I’ll be back to wandering when she’s back on her foot. In the meantime remember, literally and metaphorically, always pack your rain gear….
John walked up to me in the Best Western parking lot to tell me that he liked the Revival. Small talk, he traded his Ford pickup for an Indian motorcycle, he liked state government but not the federal government and he shouldn’t have to pay federal taxes, soon we’re going to send troops to Ukraine and their deaths will depopulate the United States.
A year ago his wife found him unconscious on the bathroom floor covered with blood and feces, she turned him over and gave him CPR until the ambulance crew got there. He talked about his three daughters under six and his wife at home, about the intermittent pain, overwhelming and unpredictable, about not wanting to die. He’s 30 and delivers medical oxygen tanks for a job. He didn’t tell me his diagnosis.
I chanced upon the Everwild Music Festival at Legend Valley, an outdoor venue of rolling grassy hills surrounding a little valley, stages at the bottom facing an open area for audience and dancing and further back a crescent of food trucks and vendors hawking beer, swag and grease. The Grateful Dead (and pretty much everybody else from the seventies and eighties) played there. The hair, the tie dye, the dirt and dust, the incense and pot smoke, the tents and sleeping bags, the costumes and clothes (and lack of clothes), the music, the energy, the raw sensuality; it was 1973 and I was just seventeen.
The lineup included a dozen or so bands I’d never heard of; Madison Pruitt rocked the hell out of her guitar all by herself in an off-stage tent, wonderful, gravely voice and missing the high notes (she needs to lay off them and celebrate the grit). Gabe Reed fronting for Mooky rocked the main stage with a hip-hop alt-rock theme with no regard for costumery, making the crowd shimmy and stomp in baggy shorts and painfully north European skin tones. Artikal Sound System was a well oiled machine presented under a dazzling light show led by fuck-bomb spraying frontwoman and vocalist Logan Rex. I kept thinking that it would suck to have to follow her onto the stage….
Yesterday I rode past the Shawnee Mission Church, there were cars in the gravel lot. I yanked on the doors at the top of the steps, they wouldn’t open and I turned to leave and someone unlatched them from the inside. Helmet hair, riding jacket, jeans and boots, I walked in at the front of the congregation. The Reverend Clifford Burgess stopped his sermon, shook my hand and welcomed me. Before I could sit, I had to shake the hands of all ten parishioners.
After the sermon, Reverend Burgess and I chatted. He’s married and has a daughter, “the loud one in front,” he trained to be a car mechanic, worked as a carpenter and then spent four years in ministry school. For a while he owned a Gold Wing motorcycle (Honda’s big touring bike). He had the closest shave and best-trimmed mustache I’ve ever seen (except maybe in the movies). He described his religion as non-denominational, an intersection of Baptist and Nazarene. The church building before it was a church was a soda pop bottling factory, the handicap ramp is where the loading dock used to be.
I rode on wet roads all day and didn’t get rained on. Pays to go to church.
This is getting long but before I get on the motorcycle, I want to tell you about Taylor and her new husband Bonanza Marco Polo Napoleon Cummings. Married last week, they’re honeymooning in Logan Ohio. Bonanza is from Jamaica, accepted on an athletic scholarship to the University of Detroit (track and field, he’s a sprinter). He’s working on his MBA. Taylor is an architect, commercial and residential, she particularly likes the fact that their hotel is across the street from Hocking Hills Moonshine where shots are a buck apiece.
My son, Eli, works in Bethesda, MD. This morning he texted me an invoice from a towing company for $519.75 to tow a garbage truck eight miles. I know something about that.
When I was an undergraduate studying Chinese at the University of MInnesota (1978-1982), I drove a wrecker for Rice Street Towing in east St. Paul. I drove from 3:00 to 7:00 in the evening during the school year; rush hour in the winter in Minnesota. The job paid $7.50 an hour, big money in those days (tuition was $180.00 a quarter).
The company was owned by Dick and Peggy Berget. He ran the shop, maintained the trucks and drove a truck when needed; she took the calls, dispatched the drivers and took money from customers who came to pick up their cars from the lot. There were bars on the window of her office and she kept a .38 revolver in the cash drawer. At all hours, the place, was cloudy with smoke, Marlboros in the shop, Kool menthols in the office. They had a mutt, I can’t remember its name. The dog ate burgers and fries tossed on the oily shop floor by drivers cleaning out their cabs. Dick and Peggy were divorced and hated each other.
They had the Highway Patrol contract so we worked everything from jump starts to semi rollovers. It was a dangerous job; lying on my back dropping the driveshaft or backing off the brakes on a semi-tractor in sub-zero weather while rush hour traffic raced past on black ice a few feet from my face was, well, something.
Garbage trucks (we called them “packers”) break all the time and we towed them routinely. They’re heavy. One afternoon, I picked one up, the truck was full and I had to pull it to the dump to empty it before taking it to a repair shop. The driver was sitting next to me as we exited the long down grade on southbound Interstate 35W onto the exit at Black Dog Road. The exit is a sharp downhill curve and the wrecker brakes weren’t slowing us down, air brakes give you what they give you. And of course, all that weight on the rear means very little weight on the front tires of the wrecker, very unnerving when the steering wheel of a big truck goes soft in your hands and the truck isn’t turning and the weight on the back is shoving you forward and the bar ditch is getting close and you’re working the hell out of clutch, throttle and shift lever looking for a lower gear. We made it, although I’m not sure how, I must have found that gear, but I am pretty sure that poor driver is still losing sleep.
An experience like that is worth at least five hundred and twenty bucks.
Sorry about all that. What I planned to write about this morning was Cody and Justin, second marriages for both, three kids, nine, six and two, one from her previous, two together. He’s from Detroit, a history major at the University of Michigan and an Army medic in Fallujah, they met playing World of Warcraft on line. She drove to Detroit to meet him for the first time. He works second shift at the front desk at the Best Western, she works first shift at the breakfast bar. His politics are hard left and we had that conversation.
Cody and I chatted this morning. We talked about Cole Porter. Cole Porter is from Peru, apparently the town is reluctant to celebrate its most notable son because he was gay.
There’s a lot to say about Cody and Justin, and Denise who owns Club 14 where I had dinner and her waitress Katie but I need to take a shower and get on the motorcycle.
I’m in Clinton, Iowa headed for southern Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and any place else the front tire decides it wants to take me.
Interesting time to be riding into the Bible Belt. The threats and vitriol across the media are things to behold.
Yesterday, southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa were as charismatic as ever, tall corn lapping against pretty farm buildings, rolling hills and gently winding roads with little traffic, well-tended towns with kids in shorts celebrating their last days of freedom, the skies blue and the weather not too hot (Robert Preston’s America, I didn’t see even one pool hall, no doubt the school bands are great).
I chatted with Peggy, she works at the tourist center in aptly-named Preston Minnesota (trout capital of the state) where she hands out brochures and maps to fisherpeople and motorcyclists. Her parents got married, had three kids, got divorced, got remarried, had two more kids, then got divorced again. Her father was a logger, a carpenter and a farm hand. He remarried after the second divorce and she liked her stepmother. Now divorced herself, Peggy never beat her two kids although her father beat her brother badly when they were growing up and he grew up to be violent and a bully. Her politics are different than mine, you pick that up in the silences, and we didn’t talk about it. She declined when I asked to take her picture.
Bill was smoking a cigarette leaning on the hood of his pickup when I parked in front of my room at the Timbers Motel. He’s a pipe fitter from Houston and missing his lower front teeth. He works on industrial projects across the south. His truck was gone at 6:00 this morning when I walked across the parking lot to Burger King for a cup of coffee.
Yesterday I promised I was going home and that I’d leave you alone.
My apologies but before I do, I want to talk about Ursula again. (I wrote about her a few days ago, the post is still up.) A friend messaged me and asked me if I liked her. He shouldn’t have had to ask. That he did is my fault. My bad writing. I wanted readers to like her. I like her very much. More than that, I admire her.
Ursula is not a victim but she is a sympathetic character. Her father abandoned her when she was in high school, married her off when she was sixteen. The first marriage went bad and she kept trying. In her third marriage, she was physically beaten. Using nothing but wits and grit (those quintessential American values we all pride ourselves on), she’s assembled an enviable life, a life of tranquility and peace surrounded by the animals she loves and trusts in a beautiful place. Finally, she’s safe.
She’s a born-again Christian and has those insufferable beliefs. But why wouldn’t she? The Christian right has aggressively courted her. They’ve given her difficult life context, a belief system, they’ve made her important. What have we, the liberal left, done for her? We’ve been failing for decades, abortion is irrelevant to her life and we lost that one anyway. Guns, she’s a woman who lives alone in the country, she has guns. Minimum wage, we haven’t touched that since what, 2007? What good have we done Ursula?
We don’t even talk to her. Remember, we’re democrats, we’re the “professional class” (thank you Bill and Hillary). Too bad there are not enough of us “professionals” to win elections. But no, Ursula is not our type and we’re going to criticize and belittle her until it’s we who are no longer relevant. Because Ursula is much of America today. She’s looking for a belief system because she needs one (we all need one). And because we on the left failed to provide one, she looked elsewhere. And we have the gall to call her a hypocrite for taking a few dollars a month in disability? That’s the least she deserves. After all, it’s we who abandoned her.
In our condescension, we imagine ourselves to be the intellectual elite, the smart people calling the shots and charting direction for the good of the little people. And the little people are sick of it. Because we’re not good at it. We don’t honor them or value them or, as I wrote above, even talk to them. We don’t provide aspiration and vision, we don’t project optimism and hope, we don’t paint a picture of a better tomorrow. And worst of all, we don’t deliver on whatever modest aspirations we do articulate. We’re losers. And nobody wants to be associated with losers, no matter how smart we imagine ourselves to be.
Reconsider your thoughts on Ursula. I’ll try to be a better writer.
