Matriarch: Oprah's Book Club: A Memoir

by Tina Knowles

Even badasses get the blues.

Beyoncé was worried about me. We were sitting on the couch at her place, talking about her upcoming world tour, The Mrs. Carter Show, which would start in April. She was talking a mile a minute, full of ideas, and I found myself nodding. And then she asked me a simple question. “Mama, what makes you happy?”

She picked up! “Monica?” “Oh,” she said, real proper and chilly. “Tina. Yes?” “Well, why are you talking like that?” She paused. “Tina, my mom died.” “I had no idea.” “No, you did not, because I haven’t talked to you in forever.” “I am so sorry to hear that. I wish I could have been there for you.” I was heartbroken for her, and as we talked about what she’d been through, I felt her softening to me. “Well, what made you reach out?” she asked.

Monica and I spent mornings exercising, because our goal was to get really fine on this trip, which I have to say we did.

And every show, for the first time in years, I got to watch my daughter from down front, not backstage working. There’s a section in all the concerts, about ten feet between the stage and the first seats, and I would hide out there. The back of my head is in so many videos of people taping the show.

The tour photographer Yosra El-Essawy, a gorgeous young British Egyptian woman, had been hired about a week before the first stop, and no matter how I hid from her, she would follow me around to take pictures. She saw me ducking from the frame. “Miss Tina, you’re so beautiful.” “Girl, please,” I said, thinking how I wasn’t done up. “You deserve to be captured,” Yosra said. “One day you’re going to be so happy you have these photos.”

I didn’t want to plan a dream wedding when I couldn’t even get a date.

Making it worse, so much worse, was that Mathew was about to marry his girlfriend in Houston the week before my friend’s wedding.

Yuck!

“Monica,” I said, forcing a laugh so this now dead-silent couple would know this was just my crazy friend running her mouth. They didn’t laugh with me.

Monica spoke in a hurry. “Hey, you know Tina’s in town, and you know…” She paused, seeming to remember manners—“What you doing?”—but then skipped past his response to an eager “Where can we find some men?”

Richard looked at me. “Well, what are you looking for?” I started talking before Monica made a joke. I had prayed on this, so I knew right away. “I want someone with integrity who believes in God. Someone who likes to dance and likes art and is just…” I heard myself say, “Free.” “Oh,” Richard said quietly. “Well, what about me?” Monica and I paused maybe a quarter of a second and didn’t even have to look at each other. We both said, simultaneously: “Hell no.”

The sadness of that time is that just a month after Kelly became a mother herself, her mother Doris passed from a heart attack.

Ah crap

I ran to be in the photo with them, not wanting to miss this moment. Standing proudly between them, I placed my hands on their shoulders, grateful to bridge these generations.

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.

Aww

“I’m ready for it,” I said. “Because guess what? I don’t really give a shit.” When you get older, you become freer. I was making up for lost time.

The New York Times called Solange’s work “sublime” and pointed out the transgressive power of bringing her art to the Guggenheim (even if the paper used lowercase for Black):

I often wonder what my mother could have crafted if she had more exposure, more education, and more opportunities. She showed such promise, and now Solange is the fulfillment.

“If you could do or be anything in life,” I asked her, “what would it be?” “I’m just gonna move down the street from my mama,” she said. “Yeah, but what are you gonna do?” “I don’t know,” she said, sounding so resigned at this young age.

These kids could stand in front of Kerry James Marshall’s works, these beautiful huge paintings, scenes of barbershops and beauty shops and liquor stores, and see the things that go on in their neighborhoods. But because it was in a museum, it showed them their own surroundings were beautiful, and worthy of art.

KIPP was on a tough block, elementary school on one side, a junior high on the other, and in the middle was a motel that rented out by the hour.

Yuck!

At the end, we give the high school graduates a whole set of luggage for the places they’ll go. It’s our way of manifesting.

Aww

We knew Solange would not be able to make it because of a huge commitment she had, but Beyoncé admitted to me that with each helicopter that landed, she had thought, “I hope it’s Solange.”

Tina, you gotta be a big girl. I went over to his wife to make her feel welcome, and she hugged me. Maybe a beat too long, but she was very nice.

When I then went over to the side, I started chatting with Angie and Kelly. But I realized nobody else was talking to Mathew’s wife. There was a sense of loyalty—“Team Tina”—that I had to make clear I didn’t need. I went over again to make small talk about their flight and their summer.

Aww

It was a party every night, and we all dressed in blue silk monogrammed pajamas to sit on the deck as Beyoncé played us some of the album she was working on, Renaissance

As I dropped it low before a backdrop of Capri’s twinkling light, my daughter sang for me from my jam “CHURCH GIRL”: “I’m finally on the other side. I finally found the urge to smile.”

We were staying in Paris as the family’s central base of operations during the tour, spending time together in our own house in the hotel.

People make jokes about Blue being Beyoncé’s manager because she is so on top of things, adding her thoughts at meetings.

“Grandma, I really want to go dance one time with my mom.” “Well, you should—” I stopped myself. A grandmother knows when she is being asked for assurance. “We should talk to her about it.” Beyoncé’s immediate answer was “No.”

I cried watching my granddaughter perform. This child who had been bullied by strangers since before she was born was willing to show her gifts in front of almost seventy thousand people. The response from the crowd was so amazing, all of these throngs of lovely people cheering her on.

“Those little Carter girls,” I found myself saying as I watched her move in time to the music, echoing “Those little Knowles girls” I used to hear around Miss Darlette’s dance class in Houston.

One of the other joys of that time was seeing Kelly return to acting, a great love of hers. All my daughters have these incredible talents, and something I have noticed about her is how much the camera loves her. You push a button and Kelly can turn it on, making a connection with the viewer. She had just finished filming Tyler Perry’s Mea Culpa, which would become the number-one streamed film on Netflix.

Cmon

My dream for her is to play Donna Summer in a biopic, a role I know she’d be a knockout in.

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.

I made the decision to divorce with a heavy heart but totally without malice, and I have not lost a night of sleep over it. Which, for me, is growth.

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.

Strangers on the internet said mean things, including one that cracked me up: “Tina Knowles can’t keep a man.” Well, I kept one for thirty-three years and the next one for ten, but okay.

LMFAO

Seeing all the hate directed at me on Instagram, so much of it posted by women, I thought about how much we ourselves promote sexist thinking, how often we buy into the narrative that men are superior and that we should just adore them.

I had a revealing conversation with Tyler Perry.

Ugh

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.

The current owners weren’t home, and somewhere there is Ring camera footage of me leaning in, saying, “Hi, I used to live here, and I was just wondering if we could look around. My daughter Beyoncé used to live here too….” They were probably like, “Oh my God.”

With Beyoncé lingering back a little, I made a beeline to the children to say hi, which naturally terrified their teacher. I heard her say, “Hurry, kids” as I got closer, this strange woman in a white suit coming at them with open arms.

LMFAO

“My mama loves Beyoncé,” one said, talking right to Bey in the third person. “She’s going to see Beyoncé Saturday night.”

“That’s so cool,” Beyoncé told her. “I’ll see your mom there.” Then this little boy started breakdancing, totally auditioning for her.

“I used to go and pick berries right there,” she said. She held out her hand, and in that moment, she was my little girl in the Third Ward again, eating the berries as wild and free as she.

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.

She conceded, but there was something about the way she said “If you insist” that rubbed me wrong.

“That’s up to the individual, right? I want to know.” “Oh, you want to know if you’re gonna die of cancer?” Well, that did me in. She tried to recover, saying it would only lead patients to worry, but as I continued to ask questions, that insensitivity colored everything. She predicted that I would not need chemotherapy but would definitely need radiation—five to ten treatments if I was lucky. In fact, she said I would be on a hormone blocker for five years, nullifying any natural estrogen my body still produced. She wasn’t receptive to my questions about what that would mean for my quality of life.

In July that year, Selena passed, the girl who’d been left behind as a little one, only to become the woman who held us all together over ninety-two years.

Nooo

And Noah said in his cute three-year-old voice, so protective of me: “Him told you him not wanna get wet!” Noah always called me “him,” and I brought him close as I then let the water carry me.