As a child, Bessie Coleman always knew she was going to amount to something. She knew there had to be more to life than picking cotton with her parents and twelve siblings in rural Waxahachie, Texas. She knew that being a sharecropper like her parents, which meant grow- ing cotton on someone else’s land for little money, was not for her. When Bessie set her mind to something, she made it happen. When she was 12, her church held a fundraiser. She was deter- mined to sell the most tickets and raise the most money, and that’s exactly what Bessie did, surpassing everyone in her congregation. On school days, when she wasn’t working in the fields, she walked four miles to her one-room schoolhouse, where she stud- ied hard to become a star pupil who excelled in reading and math. At night she entertained her family by reading aloud from books her mother borrowed from the wagon library. In 1915, twenty-three-year-old Bessie decided to leave Waxahachie for the opportunities of big city life in Chicago. There she moved in with her brother and set her mind to becoming a beautician. Within a year,
she became recognized as one of the best after winning a contest to discover the best and fastest man- icurist in Black Chicago. Despite her success, Bessie knew she could be more than just a great beauty specialist. As a result, she set the big- gest goal of her life and went after it — she was going to be a pilot!
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