More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
These people, my people—my ancestors and my parents when they were young—were characters in a long drama that I was now a part of. Their struggles were not mine, but their lessons could be. This was my inheritance, these stories that people had done their best to erase or degrade to keep us from passing them down. So that we wouldn’t know our history and ourselves.
He reminded me that all of us kids had different spellings of our parents’ last name, Buyince. There was Beyincé, Boyance, and mine, Beyoncé.
We all have this power to be matriarchs, to be women of the sacred practice of nurturing, guiding, protecting—foreseeing and remembering. The matriarch’s wisdom is ancient, for she is filled with the most enduring, ferocious love.
We were playing poor, none of us knowing we were actually very poor. Some of that comes from living in a neighborhood with so many people in the same boat—you don’t have people to feel less than in comparison.
As children, and even as we grow into adults, our mothers become synonymous with us. They exist for our needs. Many of us think we give them life, rather than understanding the truth that we owe our existence to them.
Dividing attention, food, money—all that care—into equal parts. The algebra of motherhood.
One of the many cruelties of racism is that mothers are made to be the guards of their children, enforcing rules that were designed to limit them. Constantly telling them what they cannot do for fear that if they don’t remember the box they were put in, they will be hurt or killed.
And yet…I see how limited that hope was. She couldn’t dream for him beyond survival. Because she didn’t just teach him sewing: This was her way, and I didn’t know it at the time, of earning love. In her effort to keep us safe, she taught us we were only as loved as we made people feel, and the only way to prove our worth was to show our value to others.
When a teacher believes in you, that can sustain you for an entire lifetime. It can create a new foundation, and everything that went before can become fertilizer to grow on.
But one of the ways racism works is erasure. They didn’t want us to know our history because they were afraid of our futures.
“I was thinking about how I’m the last Beyoncé,” I said. “I don’t like the name getting lost. So I’m thinking about Beyoncé for a girl.” It was to honor him and the bloodline, I said, and I know it was also because I really missed being Tina Beyoncé as I got used to a quieter life as Tina Knowles.
“Ain’t nobody ever heard of Beyoncé, so this child will be original.”
I have no problem saying that my children are geniuses born with gifts, but all that just remains unrealized potential if they don’t work on their craft.
“Those little Knowles girls, they just take all the attention,” parents would say. They didn’t try to—they just wanted to dance,
True wealth was measured in their ability to share blessings, feeling the honor of someone letting you care for them, and staying grateful that you even have anything to give.
