All Together Now

There’s a special kind of electric gladness that results when women team up for a common goal. On the following pages, you’ll find a collection of crews who hop on boards, rev engines, or lace up their boots for a heady climb to a spot with a clear view—and, in the process, prove that when we move in sync, there’s precious little we cannot do.

- Molly Simms

A MOTORCYCLE SQUAD CRUISES THE PAVEMENT AND CONQUERS HEARTS.

ON A SIDE STREET in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, next to the crawfish spot Cajun Seafood, a crowd is gathering on a muggy afternoon. Jaws literally dropping, bystanders whip out their phones for photos, as all eyes are fixed on a cluster of ladies straddling custom-airbrushed motorcycles. These biker queens are wearing navy catsuits, stilettos, and helmets with a hedge of pink bristles running up the back. But before anyone can chat them up, the light changes and they zoom off, leaving behind a wake of exhaust and the boisterous whine of engines. This corner’s just been blessed with an appearance by the Caramel Curves.

Asked to picture someone in a motorcycle club, you might conjure a 60-year-old white dude with neck tattoos and a Fu Manchu. But the Caramel Curves—all female, all black—buck that tradition handily. The Curves didn’t consciously model themselves on Bessie Stringfield (the “Motorcycle Queen of Miami” and first African American woman to bike solo across the U.S.—in the 1930s, no less), but they’re following in her boundary-busting tread marks.