America is a beautiful thing…

Toughness is a quality that undresses character.

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.