Becoming Beyoncé Read online

  Family would always be of the utmost importance to Tina. Many of the decisions she would make in her lifetime would be predicated on how they would affect her relationships with her husband and her children, and theirs with one another. “Going all the way back, we Beyincés have been very close,” she once said. “It’s just who we are, who we’ll always be.”

  In tracing the maternal side of Beyoncé’s family history, one learns that the parents of her mother, Tina, were both French-speaking Creoles of predominantly French, African, Spanish, and Native American descent. Tina’s father, Lumis Albert Beyincé (also spelled Buyincé and Boyance), was born in 1910 in Abbeville, Louisiana, the son of Alexandre and Marie Oliver Boyance. Not much is known about the light-skinned, handsome, and athletically built Lumis, who passed away in August 1982. In interviews, Tina rarely mentions him, focusing on memories of her mother. (In contrast, Mathew Knowles rarely speaks of his mother, remembering instead his father.) Relatives say that Lumis was an excellent student as a youngster, popular in his neighborhood, outgoing and gregarious. Fluent in French, he worked as a longshoreman. As a result of a mine explosion, he was deaf in one ear.

  Tina’s mother, Agnez DeRouen (or Deréon), was born in 1909 in Delcambre, Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, a town near the city of Abbeville. (She would die on July 4, 1980.) Daughter of Eugene-Gustave “Eugenie” and Odelia Broussard DeRouen, the pretty, light-skinned Agnez was raised in Police Jury Ward 2 in Delcambre, a middle-class neighborhood. A census taken in 1920 when she was eleven has her race listed as “mulatto.” It also suggests that she was unable to read or write and notes that, as well as her parents, there were seven siblings living at home ranging from the ages of a year and a half to twenty-four. Tina has said that her mother and father were “poor but upwardly mobile.”

  Agnez DeRouen met Lumis Beyincé when they were fifteen and sixteen, respectively. By this time, Lumis was a studious-looking young man, given to wearing sharp pinstripe suits and well-knotted ties when he wasn’t working at the docks, which wasn’t often. Though he was a hardworking laborer, people in his neighborhood who didn’t know him well viewed him as being professorial. “With his hair slicked back and with his spectacles and formal weekend attire, he always stood out,” said one of his relatives. “People who didn’t know him thought he was a teacher. As well as being big and strong, he was smart and well-spoken.”

  Agnez and Lumis settled in Galveston, where they raised their three daughters, Selena, Florence, and Celestine Ann (Tina), and four sons, Marvin, Larry, Roland, and Lumis Jr. Tina was the youngest; she was born on January 4, 1954. “I got the sneaking suspicion, since they were forty-four, that I might not have been planned,” Tina once quipped.

  “Growing up in Galveston was amazing,” Tina said in a 2011 oral history for the Living Archives at the University of Houston, “because it’s a small island, so a lot of activities revolved around the beach. My mom’s house was open to all children, all the kids in the neighborhood, and we had a ball.”

  Though they were very popular in the neighborhood, Agnez and Lumis made it clear to their offspring that the needs of their nuclear family should never be overlooked or ignored. For instance, Agnez made sure they all had dinner together every night. It was required that the siblings, especially when they were teenagers, converge over a meal at the requisite hour, for that was the opportunity to check in with one another and cherish their connection. Also, relatives on both sides of the family were often at the Beyincés’ home, a large and sometimes unwieldy group present for all holidays, birthdays, and other important celebrations. Agnez and Lumis both agreed that all of those in their bloodline were worth nurturing; nobody was left out. You didn’t walk away, not from family. It would be a philosophy Tina would take with her as a wife and mother and one that would enrich the lives of her own offspring.

  As a young woman, Agnez was a highly sought-after, self-taught seamstress with many wealthy clients who paid for her unique designs that creatively featured appliqués, embroidery, and smocking. Some viewed the designs, with all of their beads and jeweled buttons, as gaudy. However, examining them all these years later, it seems clear that her creations were purposely theatrical and certainly not meant for daily wear. In other words, Agnez had show business in her blood. A supremely imaginative woman, she considered her work a means of escapism, a fantasy. It’s one of the reasons she was so popular. Her customers loved her flair.

  “My mom didn’t have much money but she had a lot of style,” Tina recalled. “She also upholstered furniture, she did wallpaper, she painted and did everything to redecorate the house. She could do just about anything. I learned a lot from her. Even today I love to redecorate, I love to remodel houses and design things, not only for clothing but for the home as well.” Tina believes that if her mother had been “born in another time or place,” she might have become quite famous.

  In a keynote speech she gave in October 2014 for the Texas Women’s Empowerment Foundation’s Eighth Annual Women & Money Leadership Luncheon, Tina joked, “All four of my siblings and myself attended Holy Rosary Catholic Prison.” Then, with a chuckle, she added, “I mean . . . school.” After the laughter subsided, she said, “I joke about that because if any of you attended Catholic school back in the fifties and sixties—and I see hands—you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  Holy Rosary Catholic Church was Texas’s first African-American Catholic school and church. Organized in 1889 by its first resident pastor, Father Phillip Keller, it moved to its present site on Avenue N between 30th and 31st Streets. “The nuns, for one thing, they picked on us a lot,” Tina continued. “I didn’t understand it. The nuns were very hard on me, saying, ‘You know, you really don’t belong here. If you only knew, you’d be very grateful to be here. You’ve got a rebellious spirit. We need to take down that spirit and control it.’ It was always these things to kind of put me in my place.”

  As a youngster, Tina couldn’t fathom the reason her parents were so solicitous of these angry and abusive nuns, and why they demanded the same of her and her siblings. “My mom did the altar boys’ uniforms and she worked for the nuns,” Tina recalled. “My dad chauffeured the nuns around, my brother cleaned the schoolyard. And I often wondered why we were indentured servants to the church.

  “What I found out later is that my parents were actually bartering for us to go [to the school].” With tears in her eyes, she continued, “I get choked up about it because it was such a sacrifice for them to work and humble themselves just so that we could get an education. That’s why the nuns were saying the things they were saying, because we were the poor kids there, and they felt like we didn’t fit in.

  “The thing I take away from that is that I became a warrior at five. I refused to let [the nuns] take my spirit. I decided then that I would never let anyone decide for me who I am or what I was. I had to fight for myself.”

  And she did. Tina would always be tough-minded and assertive, a woman who to outsiders sometimes seemed defensive, as if she wanted to be sure she wasn’t taken advantage of. No shrinking violet, as a teenager she sometimes displayed a fiery temperament with the boys she dated. As she got older, she became a no-nonsense personality, someone who never suffered fools gladly. Not only had the nuns toughened her up, but she took after her mother, who was also a pragmatic, outspoken woman.

  Despite whatever happened to Tina at school, church was still very important in the lives of all the Beyincés. “This was as much a meeting place for those of us who lived in the neighborhood as it was hallowed ground,” recalled Bea Thomas, who remembers Tina sitting on the church’s steps after service and “being very social with the other parishioners. She held court, or at least that’s my memory of her as a teenager. People gravitated to her. In my mind’s eye, I still have an image of her sitting on those steps with a crowd of people around her. She was entertaining, was animated, and always had a good story to tell. She was popular, someone who stood out not only because of her great beau
ty but her big personality. She was also very stylish. She liked to wear an enormous Afro wig—it was huge. She always had on the best clothes. All of that said, you knew not to cross Tina. She had a little temper on her. She was definitely a firecracker.”

  As she got older and began to date, Tina and her sisters were imparted the same wisdom from their mother. “She used to say, ‘Never give yourself one hundred percent to any man. Always keep something for yourself,’ ” recalled one of Tina’s relatives.

  During an era when very often the best a woman could hope for was to snare a good man, marry him, and raise his children no matter the circumstances, Agnez was quite the feminist. She never wanted to live a restricted life. She wanted her own career, her own friends. She was devoted to the notion of family, as are most Creoles, but when it came to her husband she had a very specific agenda. “No man needs to know everything about you,” she used to tell her daughters. She had other axioms as well: “No man needs that much control.” “Don’t give away your power.” “Live your own life.” “Find something to do that is your own.” These kinds of sentiments, especially during Agnez’s time, were practically revolutionary. Who knows what it was in her childhood, what she may have witnessed in the marriage of her own mother, that had led her to these ideas. But she held fast to them and passed them on to her daughters.

  Tina, whose nickname was always “Tenie B.,” took her mother’s advice that she should find a career for herself, and an early ambition was to become a singer. After she left Catholic school in the sixth grade and went on to a public junior high in Galveston, she became a member of a performing trio act called the Veltones. She and her mother designed the costumes for the group; a photo shows two of the girls in miniskirts—one rose-colored, the other cream—and the third in a pantsuit that merged both colors. Tina says one of her fondest memories of her mom has to do with their designing such costumes together for her group, “and us rehearsing and her giving her input on that. It would come full circle because I’d be able to pass those things on to my daughter.” Of the Veltones, she added, “We were known as much for our costumes as for our talent. Just singing in this group and practicing and doing the outfits and all of that prepared me for what I would do later.”

  Mathew Knowles recalled, “At one of the showcases, the group got to the finals and people in the record industry were coming to see them. Typical story: The night before, one of the girls’ mothers told her she couldn’t be in the act anymore. So they ended up not going. Who knows what would have happened?” From there, Tina became the lead vocalist in a cover band. That didn’t last long, though; a career in show business just wasn’t in the cards for her.

  “Even though Galveston is such a small town in Texas, you’re only limited by the expectations you put on yourself,” Tina would say, “but as a child, I didn’t have a lot of role models of people who were fashion designers or the music business or any kind of business other than the local industry of hotels and the large medical center there. But I always had a great love for fashion. I made all of my clothes growing up. My nephew, Johnny, who was also a designer and a seamstress, we made all of our clothes for school and we were the best dressed in school. I dressed all of my friends for the proms.”

  Tina graduated from Ball High School in 1972. “I admire people who know exactly what they want to do when they get out of school,” she’s said. “ ‘I want to be a doctor.’ ‘I want to be a lawyer.’ ‘I want to go to college.’ ‘I want to be a nurse,’ or whatever. I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I just knew that I wanted to get out of Galveston and do something that related to beauty, something that would make women feel good about themselves.”

  Though Tina would not get a degree, she would take some courses at a Los Angeles community college. Then she would work at World Wide Health Studios, a fitness gym, for three years. After that, she moved to Denver. “I did a little modeling,” she remembered. “I learned how to walk in heels. All of these experiences were tools that I didn’t know I was collecting, which I would use later. That’s how God works,” she continued. “Sometimes you don’t understand it, but He is giving you things that you can take out of your toolbox and use later in life.”

  Mathew

  In 1964, twelve-year-old Mathew Knowles sat on a dusty old sofa in the middle of the cluttered living room of the small Gadsden, Alabama, home he shared with his parents and siblings. It was more like a clapboard shack than a dwelling for a family. Or, as Mathew would later recall, “Our house looked like Sanford and Son’s. We had old cars, lumber, copper, refrigerators, batteries. It was a disaster zone.” While he pretended to be watching the small black-and-white television, Mathew listened to his parents as they argued in the kitchen. “I’m sorry, but we can’t live on thirty dollars a week,” Lue Helen Knowles said.

  “What are you talking about?” her husband, Matthew, responded. “Last week I brought home fifty dollars.”

  “Well, it’s not enough. We got six kids to feed!”

  “Get off my back, will you?” Matthew demanded of his wife. “I’m doing the best I can.”

  With that, Lue Helen stormed out of the kitchen, through the living room past her son, and then into the bedroom. She slammed the door. She had a hot temper and it was often on display, especially when it came to her husband’s income. Matthew chuckled as he walked into the living room and sat next to his boy in front of the television. “Times are tough,” he told him, “but you know what I got that all the money in the world can’t buy?”

  Young Mathew may have thought his father was about to pass on some wisdom along the lines of “Money can’t buy happiness,” but that’s not where his father was headed in this brief chat. “What’s that, Pop?” the teen asked.

  “A-1 credit,” Matthew said proudly. “You’re a black man,” he continued. “You want to get ahead in this world as a black man? Then pay your bills on time. I got no money, but I got A-1 credit, and if I have to use it, which I ain’t, at least I got it. You understand, boy?”

  Mathew nodded.

  “Now, let me go see if I can calm your mother down,” the older Matthew said as he rose from the couch. “A-1 credit,” he repeated. “Remember that, boy.”

  Of course, Mathew would never forget it. He would grow up to become a raconteur of the first order, and this was a story he’d tell many times over. It was a light moment in an otherwise bleak childhood, a very painful period in his life. If it’s true that everyone’s childhood plays itself out repeatedly into adulthood, it would seem that Mathew’s influenced many of his personal choices.

  Mathew Knowles (spelled with one t) was born to Matthew and Lue Helen Knowles on January 9, 1952, one of seven children. The family lived in the small city of Gadsden, about fifty-five miles northeast of Birmingham.

  Mathew’s father, Matthew Q. Knowles (born on April 4, 1927, and died on December 30, 1996), was a large man who stood well over six feet tall and weighed almost three hundred pounds. His wife and mother to his children, Lue Helen—who would die in September 1977—was a pretty and stately woman who attended Lincoln High school with Coretta Scott King. An industrious woman, she worked as a maid for a white family during the day, earning three dollars a day, while at night and on weekends she sold handmade quilts. She would also can peaches, string beans, and other fruits and vegetables and sell them for a small profit, anything to help the family get by.

  Just as his wife, Tina’s, biggest inspiration was her mother, Agnez, the greatest influence in Mathew’s life was his father, Matthew, known to his friends as “Big Boy,” or sometimes “Big Mack.” He was employed as a produce truck driver for Stamps & Co., a wholesale fruit and vegetable company. Matthew was renowned in the city as someone who could lift hundred-pound sacks of potatoes and toss them onto a truck with ease, and the other employees at Stamps & Co. always sought to be partnered with him because he made their work so much easier. “If you were partnered with Big Boy,” said one of the former employees years later, “you knew you were
going to have an easy day. He was like a machine. He could do the work of three men.”

  An enterprising man, Matthew convinced Stamps & Co. to allow him to use their truck in his spare time. During that time, as Mathew recalled it, “he’d tear down houses and then use the truck to haul copper, metal, the refrigerator, batteries, car parts, whatever . . . and sell it all for money.” Mathew’s half-Cherokee maternal grandfather, David Hogue, was also a go-getter; he owned a three-hundred-acre farm that he leased to a local paper mill. “My people didn’t have a lot of education,” Mathew has said, “but they had drive and ambition, a strong work ethic, and a business savvy which I recognized at an early age and began to emulate.”

  Matthew Knowles became noted in Gadsden, however, not for his work at Stamps & Co. but for his spare-time endeavors as a volunteer fireman. In December 1972, the Gadsden Times’s George Butler wrote a profile of Knowles (“Big Boy’s Always There”) and his dedication to being a volunteer fireman. At the time, Knowles—who was forty-six and lived with his family at 502 Pioneer Street in East Gadsden—had been volunteering with the fire department for more than twenty years.

  “When you have to drag lines around lines that are charged with water, they get hard to handle,” fire chief James R. Speer told Butler. “But when Big Boy gets hold of them, the lines start moving.” He noted that it often took two firemen to handle high-pressure hoses, but that Knowles had been known to do so by himself on several occasions. The writer noted his participation in one major fire in the neighborhood “involving three homes in the Negro section.” All of the residents had been rescued except for one man too drunk to make sense of the situation. Without concern for himself, Knowles rushed into the burning building and carried the man to safety on his shoulders “like a sack of flour.”