Matriarch: Oprah's Book Club: A Memoir

by Tina Knowles

Sometimes being present is both the best thing and the only thing a parent can do.

“Destiny’s Child has warned you.”

A lot of times the clothes got lost in transit, and oftentimes there was a problem with the looks showing up on time or even being stolen. I would have to run to a mall and do a speed-sweep for four performance looks to customize with barely any budget and no time to spare. Sometimes there was literally no time, like when we were in Germany for an event and the showroom sent four pairs of shoes, one with two lefts. Beyoncé took the hit for everyone. “I can handle it,” she said, putting on the two left shoes. On the red carpet, she turned her foot just so, enough that no one would notice. This was always her, the peacemaker who could pull off anything.

it’s easy to give away shit you don’t want. Stuff that’s not important to you. But if you can give it to someone who will love it as much as you, it’s like the best joy.”

“Yo, who styled y’all?” he asked. Beyoncé nervously answered, “Oh, my mom.” Wyclef knew me from the studio and looked right at me. “Well, you need to style them all the time,” he said. “Because this is unique—they don’t look like everybody else.”

In many ways, I was unconsciously re-creating my own girl-group days in Galveston, designing for Destiny’s Child with the love and care my mother and I brought to every look for the Veltones.

All kids need different things. Solange required the dependability of a schedule and time with her peers. My vision—her being with me, her father, and her sisters—creating a home wherever we were, worked for us but not for her. What I saw as togetherness, she felt as loneliness. A world of adults where she was always told where to stand and what to do.

Solange had already lost her therapist to AIDS, and watching Johnny decline was very hard on her. She feels things so deeply, internalizing pain until it reappears later as art or words.

I still love that song, “Walk with Me,” because it’s not a plea for help, wailing and waiting for God to come save you from your troubles. You are on the journey through your trials, humbly asking God to be with you as you put one foot in front of the other on the path laid before you.

That new home was the start of a good time for Mathew and me. You cannot watch each other fight so many individual day-to-day battles on behalf of your daughters and not continually fall in love again.

“Breaking News: Beyoncé’s Dad in Baby Scandal.” As a reporter talked, there was footage of me leaving the luncheon without sound, smiling like a fool in her Before life. I expected the people in the room to turn around. Nobody even paid attention. I was still humiliated, and tried to stay invisible until my flight took off.

Having an affair with my estranged husband was the last thing I expected after I filed for divorce in November. For three months, we did not speak. But then in New York City, he came to my apartment and laid his heart bare. He’d changed after new counseling. I didn’t believe him, but he was persistent, proved he’d gotten help, and as he courted me, I found myself falling in love again. The magnetic pull between us, this cosmic cord I had tried to cut so many times, was stronger than ever.

I have a fondness for that time of reunion with Mathew, a year of my life. This coincided with a time when Beyoncé reluctantly decided to part ways with Mathew as her manager.

You can be brave and scared at the same time.

If I met me, I would want to date me. If I met me, I would want to be my friend. I would like me. Now I just had to meet me.

I made a decision. I’d had a hell of a life as a mother and a wife, now it was time to start my own life. I looked at the stacks of art books in my house and decided to begin there. All the ones I’d ordered to support Black artists or purchased as a sort of IOU to be read someday when I could find some breathing room. That time was now. I started packing those books to ship them to New York City to really enjoy them. So I could enjoy life. I was back.

With this new pregnancy, Beyoncé understandably wanted to wait a long time before even telling close friends. This journey she was on was grueling emotionally and physically, and as her mother I vowed to help her keep it an absolute secret as long as possible. A tangible thing I could do for her was to continually find new ways to camouflage her growing pregnancy with all sorts of wardrobe tricks. By mid-August, it was becoming a challenge to mask her pregnancy and keep her privacy. The most difficult was a four-night concert gig at New York’s famed Roseland Ballroom, a smaller, more intimate space than the huge arenas she was accustomed to. People were so up close, yet we pulled it off. People study the footage now, freeze-framing on a turn in her gold dress, claiming they can see the bump now. But not then. For a little while longer, her secret remained safe. My daughter waited two more weeks to announce the good news onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards at the very end of August. She only had four months to go, and we were all in the clear. And then in October she did a TV appearance in Australia, wearing a dress with a stiff fabric that folded when she sat. Media outlets helped spread a hateful rumor that she was faking being pregnant—there was even an ABC News bulletin calling it a “mystery.” Mainstream news sources ran photos of Beyoncé from months of earlier events, when I’d used magic and fabric to hide her growing stomach, and in reporting on “the speculation” th...

This sacred time, after such tragedy and pain, was marred by some of the stupidest shit I had ever seen. People could not understand how hurtful it was for the media to exploit a life that miraculous and doubt its existence and origin. The worst thing is that people had no idea how hard it was for Beyoncé to go through multiple miscarriages and then when finally blessed to carry a baby to term, the world starts heckling you as you both try to make it to the finish line.

This child was prayed for and prayed over—a wanted, cherished, real baby, and people were making a living off saying she was a lie. I wanted to curse some people out and scream at these losers to set the record straight. They had no idea what she and Jay, and our whole family, had been through. I...

My daughters—girls I’d helped nurture into full-grown women—were now caring for me. I had a big bed, large enough for us all to get into and watch movies.

My girls were loving me back whole. “I just feel blessed,” I said. “I am so blessed to have you all right here.” And I began to cry a river of cleansing tears. “I’m good,” I said. That was the breakthrough they had been waiting for. My daughters had let me feel sorry for myself long enough, and now in this moment of emotional clarity they wanted me to know what they’d known the whole time: “Mama, you’re a bad bitch,” said Solange. “A bad bitch,” repeated Beyoncé and Angie in unison. “The baddest,” said Kelly, with attitude. “Period.” They reminded me I had too much going on for me to feel my life was over. God had something for me, bigger than I could dream, in the same way I couldn’t imagine all the other blessings in my life. God’s imagination is infinite—and despite my divorce, my incredible life was my proof. I just had to remember to trust.

Sometimes, your children become the wise ones parenting the wounded child in you. And if you are open to it, sometimes your children will fight for you, advocate for you, in ways that you thought only a mother could.

It was clear that to be the great mother I always wanted to be, I needed to model a new kind of self-love. “Listen, I’ll be there if you need me, but really it’s gonna be about me now,” I told them each individually. “This is my selfish era.”

I have never had the gift of a natural-born son, but God has given me my sons-in-law, Tim and Jay.

The sadness of that time is that just a month after Kelly became a mother herself, her mother Doris passed from a heart attack. Losing that vibrant, funny storyteller a month into Titan’s life was devastating to all of us. Her funeral services would be held in Georgia. I had just had my knee surgery the week before, so my doctor told me I could not fly. But there was no way I was not going to be at Kelly’s side at the hardest time of her life. In a way, I knew what it was like to be her, a new mother facing the unknown without your own mother there. She later let me know that she was grateful I made it: “I had a mother in heaven and a mother next to me.” We will never leave her.

I compensated for this loss, periodically going on Instagram to announce it was “corny joke time.” No one could know this was really for Skip, telling the absolute shaggiest dog of a joke and then overexplaining it just like him.

When Mathew came into the room I hugged him. “Careful,” I said. “I hear your ex-wife is around here.” We shared a small laugh, and it was the beginning of me coming to understand how to navigate being with Mathew. He was like a little fuck-up brother—you love him and can be happy to see him, but you can’t be around him all the time. As we talked that day, I saw Mathew had grown so much—a changed man after facing his demons.

In addition to the book, I also gave one student, Nyarae, extra reading assignments. When she started, she had been reading at a second-grade level, but she loved books. She just needed the support to stick with them. The more I called on her, the more confident she became, and we all lavished praise on her for the poetic way she would put things.

Nyarae wrote a piece called “Tina’s Angels” to share with the group: “Ms. Tina hands us red diaries. Tells me, ‘Hold your head up.’ We travel to museums of beauty, see our culture and neighborhood, and parking lots and beauty shops in a new light. We are the roses that grew from the concrete. Proving nature’s law is wrong. Learning to fly when given wings. Funny it seems, but by keeping our dreams, we learned to breathe fresh air. Long live the legacy that grew from concrete. When someone cared.”

I never questioned whether Mathew loved me or his family, and that was what made his issues so hard for me. Here I was so protected by him—if you messed with me, you had to deal with him—and the

only person he ever let hurt me was him with his demons.

I just grew up at sixty-nine, and realized I deserved so much more. I wanted to be happy. I wanted someone to be happy when I walked in the room. If I stayed in this relationship, I would never feel whole, loved, cherished, and respected. And seen. Nothing else in a marriage matters if you are not first priority with each other. There was also the pressure of being an example for so many people who hoped to find a second chance at love. But I had to choose.

My minister, Juanita Rasmus, says that when you’re going through something, it means you’re going through it—you’re not going to get stuck there. You will come out the other side and survive.

I’d like a companion in life, even to get married again, but whether or not I was with somebody, I would still be good. I would lead a fulfilled life, because I’d come to truly value the woman in the mirror. I’d never felt I could claim that with confidence before—and that in itself was an amazing gift to have, even if it was at that late time in my life.

As women, we convince ourselves that if we sacrifice our happiness, it will lead to the happiness of our children. But they will never know happiness if we don’t have it. They will never have power until we do.

Joy, for Black women, is transformative. My mother’s history of illness and violence made her fearful in life, but her prayers were for me, for all the children she nurtured, to have something that would seem this miraculous. All of us somewhere together, swimming in the miracle of safety, freedom, and love.

A lot of people, especially Black people, feel they have to go with the doctor they are given even if we are not treated well. You deserve second opinions, and it’s your opinion that sets the decision.

I didn’t want the night to end, feeling like my daddy at one of those homecoming nights with his brothers at Weeks Island, or my mom at one of Holy Rosary’s masquerade balls, laying eyes on all of the children who were hers or loved into being hers. She’d come to Galveston, taken life’s sorrow, and planted a garden. Mama understood it’s in the chill of February that is the best time to plant roses. She turned her tears to water for her garden and relied on the full sun of God’s light to warm us.