This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMayo.

It is the freedom, right?

That is the thing about motorcycles.

The speed, sure, the agility, of course, but it is the freedom.

The person on the bike, on the Harley, on the highway,

the cars, the trucks stuck in traffic, but that biker weaving their way through,

faster toward the open road, the freedom of the open road, the loner, the lone figure in the vastness

of the desert landscape, or up the California coast, the wild Pacific crashing, Redwoods, that's the thing.

Advertisers know it. A man on a motorcycle,

a woman on a motorcycle, could sell you a cigarette, vacation, anything that feels like escape from whatever gridlock you have driven your life into. Hollywood knows it, has given us

Marlon Brando, the wild one. Peter Fonda,

again and again, a wild angel, born to be that way. See him an easy rider on his chopper

with Dennis Hopper, American flag helmet. An image once so counterculture cool, but at this point

so American, you could probably just swap it in for the flag itself.

Freedom itself. It is the freedom.

And that is the thing about Bessie Stringfield.

The story she would tell, and let me tell you that for most of her life, the story of her young life wasn't always true. But there is

freedom in that too, making up your own origin story. Bob Dylan did it. In a time before the

internet when it wasn't easy to fact-check some stranger's claims, it was a time-honored American

tradition. So in that tradition, Bessie Stringfield told people she was born in Jamaica, to Jamaican

parents, but she was probably born to black American parents around 1911 in North Carolina.

No one's quite sure where the Jamaica park came from, but that was the story she told.

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