Matriarch: Oprah's Book Club: A Memoir

by Tina Knowles

“Mama, our names…” I said, looking at her upside down, as she bent to the grass. “You know, it’s all those different spellings.” I talked as if maybe she had never noticed.

And then, in 1853, the widow who had enslaved them died, and all of her “property” was presented for public auction. Three generations of my family—Rosalie, Célestine, and her two children—were placed on a block to be sold individually. I type those words, say them aloud, and I feel that fear and rage in my blood, the trauma passed down through my DNA.

Éloi Réné Broussard came forward at the auction. A receipt shows he paid $1705 in cash for Célestine and her two children. His children. A relative of the widow put down money for Rosalie’s life, and she was taken from her daughter and grandchildren. I don’t know if they ever saw each other again.

Célestine and the children moved into Éloi’s house, where he had a white wife and his three daughters. He and Célestine would have ten more children, and s...

Once I was wearing a T-shirt that read “100% Black” while I was out buying groceries. “You better take that off,” a Black man I was walking by said, peppering the insult with a certain familiarity to soften the blow. “You’re no hundred percent.” I knew this was about my skin being light.

LMFAO

Stopping in my tracks, I turned to him. “Brother,” I said, “I’m the Blackest woman you’ll ever meet.”

My oldest sister, Selena, was twenty-seven years old when I was born, and she and her husband, John, had eight kids by the time she was thirty.

HELLO?!

You could not meet my sister and not think of the word “spitfire”—a spark taking the trim shape of a woman who swore by the power of dark red lipstick and wearing a girdle and sleeping in a bra to stay tight through having all those kids.

I was starting to realize that everyone in the neighborhood saw her as the big sister they wished they had, and as I put my arm around her waist as a greeting, I had the sense to be grateful that this beautiful, funny woman was mine.

I saw the buttercup flower again and stopped now to pick it. I breathed in the flower’s scent and resisted the urge to smear the yellow on someone’s face or chin. Instead, I tucked it over Johnny’s ear, and we smiled at each other.

One day I said to myself, “Oh, I’m gonna get a big one.” I let the gas go long, and then when I lit the match the flame was so ferocious the force of it sent me clear under the kitchen table in the middle of the floor. Knocked me out.

LMFAO

“She’s dead,” Larry said, as nonchalant as you please because he knew I was fine. He probably saw me fluttering my eyes to peek at them, the way little kids do. I was mad he was so easygoing about my death, but I kept my eyes closed because I needed all the sympathy I could get to keep from getting in trouble.

She was known as Tenie Mama in the neighborhood for all the times the kids said, “Tenie’s mama is taking us to the beach.” Or “I’m gonna ask Tenie’s mama.” I felt pride thinking that she was an extension of me. As children, and even as we grow into adults, our mothers become synonymous with us.

Mary Russell was our surrogate grandmother, so chatty from loneliness after outliving all her people that you had to walk fast by her house, or you’d hear “C’mere now” from her porch and be trapped.

We later found out Miss Russell was estimated to be born in 1870. Though slavery ended on paper in 1863, notice of emancipation came to Texas’s enslaved people of Galveston two and a half years late—the first Juneteenth of 1865. Who knows how long it took for word of newfound freedom to make it to a little girl living on a plantation.

Huh

With all the energy put into preventing Black people from doing things, what did they have that did not involve us?

This was how much Texas prioritized Galveston: It was the first city in the state to have a bank, then a post office, and then the first in the state to get telephones and electricity in homes.

They were dime stores—and they were popping.

I walked to the front of the bus. Marched with all the sense of a five-year-old who knew everything. “Tenie,” ordered Flo, but I didn’t look back. I took a seat and looked out the window. I heard a chorus behind me. Tuts and sighs, murmured half-sentences. This wasn’t only annoying Flo, this was upsetting people. Just me sitting in a seat. I didn’t know why they were tripping. This was the life, watching Galveston go by. And if they didn’t know better, well, let Flo and everyone else stand in the back like a fool.

When local officials had to stand up and be asked by some reporter about the protests around the South, they would say some variation of, “Oh, we don’t have that kind of racial tension in Galveston. Our Negroes are happy. They’ve got good jobs, and they like it as it is. Peaceful.”

“Next time, can we just let them know we coming?” Flo asked my daddy, mid-conversation in her mind but now letting us in.

Flo sighed in that way she had about her and shifted me off her lap to my mama’s. I noticed she brushed the invisible crumbs of me off the cotton of her dress. I had a flash of little-sister anger but was too tired to do anything more than breathe out a huff.

My Aunt Mandy was talking, which I think was her way of breathing she did it so much.

Growing up, Lydia was considered country even for Weeks Island, never abandoning her Creole for English as so many other people did. So her name was always pronounced “Leeedja,” the E’s going down like a slide, and the ja a quick uppercut. And Lydia, this country girl, loved Galveston. She couldn’t be happier to leave Weeks Island, and quickly got herself a boyfriend—saying “buwahfrien” in her Creole accent, laughing at this found luck of a new life away from Weeks Island.

My daddy’s nine brothers heard the explosion where they were on the surface of the mine. “We were begging management,” said one of my uncles. “You know, ‘Please let us dig through, because they might be alive.’ And the company says, ‘No. There’s no way they could survive that blast. They’re dead.’ ”

They were all still at the hospital when management showed up with the police, who also worked for the company. Every single one of the brothers was fired, including my father and the one-legged man still in the operating room. They said my uncles had disobeyed company orders and stolen the equipment.

Aw come on

Slack’s new wife helped them get settled in for the night. I have lost track which one he was on, so don’t go thinking he’s a saint.

I asked my mother once, much later, “How did you feel being in that house?” She answered quick. “I felt horrible,” she said, as if she’d been waiting to be asked.

Now, in this bright living room in the dark of Weeks Island, I had leaned back in the safety of my mother’s arms. She lifted me up, and I was carried—in her arms and in their story—to sleep.

“Do you want to walk around with us?” Tall and Small asked. “What do you guys do here?” I asked. “Walk around” was the short answer from Tall, as if there was something wrong with me.

“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.

I’d always witnessed my mother’s anxiety, heard it and seen it, but this was the beginning of me feeling that fear. Worse, it felt natural, like it had been there all along, passed down to me with all her trauma. Waiting to activate inside me.

The two holes in the stick made a shrill whistle in the air as she brought it down again, the warning before the lightning of pain.

Alone with me outside the classroom, Sister Fidelis leaned down so that her face was even with mine. This short ancient woman and a tall little girl. “If only you knew,” she said. And then, unable to resist whatever mean devil whispered on the dark expanse of her slumped shoulder, Sister said plainly: “You don’t belong here.”

I tried to talk to Glen under that sun, anything to distract myself from my arms shaking. But he was afraid. “We can say we were praying,” I said. But he was afraid, and I gave up.

Kids had to be seven or eight before they were considered worthy of a first communion, so I was always jealous that Flo and my older brothers could go. They came solemnly back up the aisle like seen-it-all models on a runway, looking so grown.

“What do you mean you’re not allowed?” “Tenie, if you don’t—” she whispered. “Later.” I held her to it later, when she and I went for a walk. In an age-appropriate way, my mama told me that because she had been divorced, the Church said she wasn’t able to receive communion. It was a hard rule.

Aww

“We’ll let her one day,” Sister Fidelis said, making a promise she would not keep. As my mom walked back, her shoulders slumped, I turned but didn’t know where to look, and my eyes fell on Sister Fidelis’s fingers rubbing one of her rosary beads like it was her last coin. She leaned slightly to my ear. “We’re going to break that rebellious spirit in you.” That day, I watched Linda Kendeson in the dress my mother made for me, bright as a light marching to the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Watching her, I felt something I didn’t expect. I realized I was happy for her; proud that my sacrifice brought her this moment of joy. A lesson was deeply ingrained right then: It made me feel so good to give up things that were very important to me.

This sucks

He was trying, running around in his natural way, not putting on some butch act. When he would shoot the ball, he’d groan a loud “oooh” with the effort. Sounding somewhere between Lena Horne and himself.

LMAO

“Man up,” someone said, dismissive and exasperated, the way they would say to a friend in the game. But this was Johnny. He looked down for a second, and quietly said, more to himself than the boys, “I don’t like this at all.”

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.

And after weeks of commitment from those young people, in April Woolworth’s caved along with the other businesses running lunch counters, making Galveston the first city in the South to desegregate the act of eating a burger in peace.

A cop reached for Flo and had her by the arm. I immediately started crying—fake crying—screaming, “Please don’t take my sister.” I was so angry, but some instinct told me to make as much of a sobbing, snotty six-year-old nuisance of myself that the cops wouldn’t want me. I did a tug-of-war with the cop over Flo, until he relented, acting disgusted. I pulled Flo to me, half climbing her, half pulling her down to me—really playing it to the hilt. He bent to our faces and yelled in a harsh hot-breathed tone, “Go home now!”

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.

He’d heard from God knows where. A nun was whaling on a fourth grader with a ruler, and he’d grabbed it from her. “He called her a bitch!” “No,” I said. It was unfathomable. To grab the ruler and call one of the sisters that word? You would burn on the spot. It was terrible, it was awful, it was…the best thing we had ever heard.

“And you really called her a bitch?” “Yeah.” I looked at him closer, thinking maybe I could tell if he was damned now. But he looked proud. “Tenie,” he said. “Everybody applauded.”

“Just tell them I’m Tina Beyoncé,” I said.

“Sulluh-steen,” Skip joked, purposely saying it wrong like everyone else. “Who’s that?” I asked. “I don’t know her. She doesn’t sound like anyone I want to know.”

“Tina,” Miss Olivier started. I braced myself as she looked as if she was searching for the words. “You are so smart.” 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.

I was drinking my milk when this girl came up to me with three girls flanking her. “Just so you know, Mary Elizabeth is going to fight you after school.” The talker rocked back and forth with the air of a boxing promoter. Don King in box braids. “Me?” “Yeah,” she said, pulling this pretty girl to her side. “Tell her.” “I’m gonna fight you,” the girl murmured.