Matriarch: Oprah's Book Club: A Memoir

by Tina Knowles

Agnes Derouen Buyince had polished her soft voice to a pleasing shine on her way to the sixth grade, as far as school went for a Black girl back where she grew up in Louisiana.

My mother had a gift for making the most beautiful masterpieces from remnants.

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.

Just like she did in her work as a seamstress, my mother could take the stories of lives that might have been discarded or lost, some precious scrap of information, and weave it into the tapestry of her storytelling as something precious and unique.

“I was told, ‘Be happy that you’re getting a birth certificate.’ Because, at one time, Black people didn’t even get birth certificates.” There was a hurt in my mother’s voice, and she picked up pecans quicker, as if they might run off.

My mother’s sister had died as a baby, and she was named for her grandmother—my great-grandmother—Célestine Joséphine Lacy, who had lived to be almost a hundred.

And there under the pecan tree, as she did countless times, that day my mother told me stories of the mothers and daughters that went before me. The house of Derouen, her maiden name, a matrilineal line as worthy of memorization as the bloodlines of the mythological Greek gods I would learn later. I am the daughter of Agnes, who was Odilia’s daughter, who was Célestine’s, who was Rosalie’s. My mom did not have the details found in the records of modern historians and genealogists. She had what had been passed down to her, which was, above all, the knowledge that these mothers held on to their daughters against all odds.

Rosalie, born around 1800, had been enslaved all her life in Louisiana when she had her daughter Célestine on a June day in 1826.

Three generations of my family—Rosalie, Célestine, and her two children—were placed on a block to be sold individually.

But under the pecan tree, what mattered was this: Célestine was enslaved, and she became free. And she got her kids free. They stayed together.

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.

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.

The storm of 1900—a hurricane that remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history—destroyed Galveston and killed at least eight thousand people.

“Tenie, you can’t go in there while white kids are in there,” Tall said. “Why?” “You can’t,” Small said. “You gotta wait till they come out.” But they were taking so long. “They can’t stop you from going in a store,” I said, reaching for the door to push it open. “I don’t want to wait—” I was one step inside. The lady working at the counter hissed, “You need to go back outside.” I froze, more scared of the venom in the voice than understanding what she was telling me to do.

It wasn’t until visiting Weeks Island that I felt confronted by racism. The first time it was targeted so directly at me that the behavior didn’t have to be explained. Now, I was clear enough to connect the dots: There were rules. I could reel them off: the bus, the beach, and the one that said if you were walking on the sidewalk and a white person was walking by, you had to step off the sidewalk into the street. How many rules did I know, but not even know that I knew?

She wasn’t afraid of snakes. It was people who terrified her. We were only four years on from the murder of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Chicago child who like so many kids was visiting relatives in the South.

Each time I was punished, I would run, out that door and racing home to my mother. For the first time, the girl who was always running to some place began running away from something. “Mama, what’s ‘vain’?” I was crying on our doorstep. She had learned not to even let me in the house when I ran home from school. Sister Fidelis had just called me that. “That you think you’re cute,” my mother said, buttoning her coat to bring me back. Oh, I thought, deciding I never wanted people to think that I thought I was cute. It would be safer to let them know that I knew I wasn’t cute. Better yet, just show them that I knew I wasn’t worthy. Then they wouldn’t have to try so hard to convince me.

“Johnny, if you make clothes for people? They will adore you. They’re not going to make fun of you.” She also knew what bullies at school could do, and she knew he needed armor. She took his hands and guided him along the path of a stitch.

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. Knowing how to sew gave us opportunities and security, but in the end, it was still bartering. My mother would teach me so much, but this was another lesson it would take me almost my whole life to unlearn.

We left. Thirteen young people were arrested. Loitering charges were dismissed by a judge weeks later, but even after that, the Galveston Daily News listed each high schooler’s full name and home address. All for the crime of buying a hamburger.

“Just tell them I’m Tina Beyoncé,” I said. That was the new name I’d come up with, because I hated being called Celestine with a passion. I’d prayed on being able to change it, and asked God to find some way.

No teacher had ever said anything positive to me before. 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.