Matriarch

An upcoming book to be published by Penguin Random House.

Autorentext

Tina Knowles

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*#1 NEW YORK TIMES* BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • A revealing personal life story like no other—enlightening, entertaining, surprising, empowering—and a testament to the world-making power of Black motherhood

“A fascinating memoir of Tina Knowles’s journey to become the global figure she is today.”—Oprah Winfrey**

“You are Celestine,” she said. She squatted to push the hair off my face and pull leaves off my pajama legs. “Like my sister and my grandmother.” 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.

Tina Knowles, the mother of iconic singer-songwriters Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles, and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known the world over as a Matriarch with a capital M: a determined, self-possessed, self-aware, and wise woman who raised and inspired some of the great artists of our time. But this story is about so much more than that.

Matriarch begins with a precocious, if unruly, little girl growing up in 1950s Galveston, the youngest of seven. She is in love with her world, with extended family on every other porch and the sounds of Motown and the lapping beach always within earshot. But as the realities of race and the limitations of girlhood set in, she begins to dream of a more grandiose world. Her instincts and impulsive nature drive her far beyond the shores of Texas to discover the life awaiting her on the other side of childhood.

That life’s journey—through grief and tragedy, creative and romantic risks and turmoil, the nurturing of superstar offspring and of her own special gifts—is the remarkable story she shares with readers here. This is a page-turning chronicle of family love and heartbreak, of loss and perseverance, and of the kind of creativity, audacity, and will it takes for a girl from Galveston to change the world. It’s one brilliant woman’s intimate and revealing story, and a multigenerational family saga that carries within it the story of America—and the wisdom that women pass on to one another, mothers to daughters, across generations.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

Badass Tenie B

June 1959

I was three steps out the door by the time my mama realized I’d pulled my disappearing act again. She’d turned her head in the kitchen, and I was running out the house to my sister Selena’s.

“You need to let me comb your hair,” my mother called from the door. “And brush your teeth!”

“Okay, Mama,” I said, aiming to fall between pleasing and pleading as I kept my pace. I could not stop. A perfect summer day—­like this one at age five—­could last you forever if you started it early enough.

“Or else I’m not gonna let you go over there, Tenie,” she said, her voice farther from me now. She would not get louder than that, I knew. She had what people on the island called a “sweet demeaneh” and I could outrun the sound of her disapproval even if it followed me on the breeze off the water behind me.

In Galveston, the wind off the Gulf is a constant reminder that you are on an island. The city is a skinny strip of beach town two miles off the coast of Texas. Now the wind was at my back, and the gray pavement of the lane was already warmed by the morning Texas sun. I was barefoot, which was the only way to live in June. Wearing shoes just meant keeping track of them when you took them off at Galveston Beach or climbed a tree. And Selena’s house wasn’t more than a slim eighth of a block around the corner. Otherwise, my overprotective, fearful mother would never have let me go on my own.

When you’re little, you don’t know how small your world is. Mine was contained in my neighborhood, and the four points of my compass were set: There was the east and west daily back and forth between my house and Selena’s. Then Holy Rosary Catholic Church to the north, so close we could see into my siblings’ Catholic school directly from our front door. And just a few blocks south was the small strip of segregated beach that we were allowed onto. They took thirty miles of coastline and only allowed us access to three blocks’ worth of sand and water between 29th Street and 32nd Street. As kids on the tiny island of Galveston, our lives centered around that bit of beach—­but I still loved being at Selena’s house best of all.

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. My nieces and nephews were closer in age to me than my siblings, and they were my very best friends.

I ran faster in the lane, racing with myself as I passed the little houses tucked tight next to each other. I spotted a yellow buttercup in the grass I had not seen yesterday, but by the time I had decided to stop to pick it, my legs had kept moving until I found myself at the steps to the little porch of Selena’s duplex without the flower. This happened all the time—­my body moving and my brain catching up.

Now I could finally stand still, and my heart beat so fast from the run, like a tiny bird fluttering in my skinny chest. Not fluttering, more like hurling itself against the cage of my ribs, trying to escape. Sometimes that heart felt like it was leading me, making me run faster, outrunning boys with my long legs. And me, always following it, never going as fast as it wanted. A heart threatening to burst out and fly away from any tether—­me, my family, Galveston.

I gave myself a second to calm down outside Selena’s house. It looked big, but they only lived in the downstairs of the duplex and had no yard to really speak of. Suddenly, I moved, trying to jump the first two steps of her porch like the big kids did. A high jump in my mind, a prize I was always chasing as the baby of the family. I fell just short, having to do the stutter-­step compromise of taking two steps like a normal five-­year-­old. Next time, I told myself, marching through the open door to my sister’s house, a finish line into the living room.

Immediately the music of all that life in Selena’s house enveloped me, excited me, held me. The sounds of her three sons and five daughters: Deanne, Linda, Leslie, Elouise, and Elena, Tommie, and of course Ronnie and Johnny. Don’t try to keep track of all of them—­even Selena couldn’t.

And there she was, my big sister, turning to see me as she exhaled the smoke of a cigarette. The way Selena Mae Rittenhouse smoked her Salem Menthols was something out of a movie, the two manicured fingers holding the cigarette, rolling the smoke around her tongue and then blowing it out as a glamorous verdict on any situation. 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.

Selena, who her kids called M’dear, kept her house as streamlined, occasionally doling out a “get your stuff together because we don’t have time for that,” to keep everyone in line. Her husband was a trucker, often doing long drives as she did her seamstress work while looking after the kids. You can’t be so tender when you have eight stair-­step kids—­it would be hard to be soft and still keep ahold of things, so she was no-­nonsense in a sisterly way. I was starting to real…