‘Fast Enough’: A Tale for all the Little Black Girls Who Want To Go Fast!

It is 2019, and I’m ready for more books about Black women that history hasn’t forgotten but also hasn’t had the chance to share them for bigger audiences through more mediums. This time this offering comes in the form of a children’s book. I had no clue who Bessie Stringfield was. Her name did not ring a bell. I did know of another Bessie. Bessie Coleman was the first woman of African-American and Native American descent to hold a pilot license. But this Bessie Stringfield, who was she? Some research on my end revealed that she was the first African-American woman to travel solo across the United States on a motorcycle among many other great accomplishments. WHEW! Look at that color coordinated fit! Those boots! Those curls! And that majestic ride! S-W-O-ON. [Photo via Ann Ferrar] She also had “accounts of being chased off the road as she traveled through the Jim Crow South; performing stunts on the Wall of Death at carnivals”. She was a pioneer and known as the “Motorcycle Queen of Miami” in a time when women weren’t encouraged by societal norms to ride motorcycles or do more outside the home. Her story is a fascinating one and one could almost consider her feats as superhuman or super-powered as she navigated the United States as a Black woman. No doubt, she experienced the home raised discrimination that’s a mix of equal parts of misogynoir way before it was coined by Moya Bailey much later. “Fast Enough is for anyone who has ever been told that they are not enough. You a…