“My mom used to have this saying, ‘People can be pretty on the outside and raggedy as koshon guts on the inside,’” Tina Knowles pauses for a moment. “You know what koshon guts means?”
We are talking over zoom on a March morning, in the weeks before the publication of her memoir, MATRIARCH. Through the screen, Knowles sits at a desk in an airy, modernist space..all skylights and angular bannisters, like the chicest of beach houses. At the bottom of the screen is her identifier, MISS TINA–the name that fans of her daughters, the artists Beyoncé and Solange, have christened her.
“I don’t know what koshon means,” I admit, and Knowles launches into an explanation of Louisiana Creole vocabulary. Koshon is the word for pig. It can also mean, “so raggedy and torn up,” Knowles tells me. “It’s just as important to exude beauty from the inside. It’s my philosophy in life,” she says. “If you have a good heart, you’re going to be beautiful.”
The vocabulary lesson is fitting. Knowles’ memoir is as much an exploration of Black creole girlhood post World War II, as it is the story of how she raised two musical superstars in 1990s Houston. It’s over a hundred pages into the book before Beyonce even makes an appearance, with her birth in 1981 shortly after Knowles’ own mother died. Knowles herself was only twenty-six at the time–just past the edge of girlhood, newly a woman, and suddenly in a new identity, mother, that would come to publicly define her in a way that most mothers can understand.
In the hundred pages before that appearance, though, the book is an epic in the best sense. It stretches back through the family’s lineage in Louisiana, to the particularities of Creole culture and life, and spends many chapters lovingly describing a childhood filled with siblings, cousins and nieces and nephews in a Galveston, Texas on the brink of racial integration. “My life has been about uplifting people,” Knowles tells me. “I love to uplift somebody.”
A theme of this book is how often your ability to create beauty saved you. What was the first thing you understood as beautiful as a child?
TINA KNOWLES: I remember my mother repurposing the couch. She would always repost the furniture and put flowered wallpaper on it. We still joke about it because there were seven kids and we all hated flowered wallpaper. Now I have such an appreciation of it.
Back then we were like, ‘why does she always have to put these flowers?’ But I was just surrounded with beauty even though it was poverty. There was still a lot of beauty everywhere. The house that I grew up in had seven people in two bedrooms. But my mother made that little raggedy house beautiful. Roses out front…she just introduced me to beauty. I was born into it.
The first few chapters of the book trace your family's roots and the matriarchs who came before you. How much of that history did you know before you began writing?
TK: A lot of it my mom told me because she's a storyteller. I loved her stories. That's where I get it from and she would tell me stories about my family as much as a child could understand at the time. Doing this book, (my co-author), his name is Kevin O'Leary, and he is the guy who helped me. He found out such facts.
My mom would just tell the story, but she didn't have any background. I was probably too young to even understand all the racism and all the stuff that they had been through. Her stories were pretty. Kevin O’Leary has gone and researched Weeks Island, the place that my parents were born, just a couple of rungs above a slave.
At one time the whole island was a plantation. When my parents lived there, it wasn't far removed from slavery. The company that owned the island sold everybody a bill of goods that it was gonna be this idyllic life. But in reality, it was oppressive. Every Black person who lived there had to paint their house yellow. If you didn’t work at the salt mine there, you had three months to move. You had to get out. It's a free country, but you couldn't live on this island… A lot of things were uncovered, doing this book.
Sometimes, as children we can assume our parents always have this strength. You make it clear in the book that that is something that comes over time, that even as an adult you're still gathering those powers.
TK: I'm 71 years old. It was literally at 70 when a light bulb went off that I am truly enough without a man. It's really sad. When I put that in the book, my daughter said to me, “Mama, I don't know if you should say that.” But it's just the truth.
I wish I had somebody in my life that told me that, that drilled that into my head but I didn't. I was taught by my mother that being married and having a man was 75% of your life and I believed it. Not to say that I have a lot of regrets about my life, but if I had one thing to do over again, I would not stay in marriages that did not fulfill me and I would know that I'm gonna be just fine without a man.
Do I wish I would have got that when I was 50? Absolutely, because I would have done a lot of things differently. I will tell my girls and the young girls that I mentor over and over. You are gonna be fine with or without a man. It's about you and your spirit.
I think till the day I close my eyes, I will still be learning.
I wanted to talk about your salon in 1980s and 90s Houston, called Headliners. You also pioneered a high concept magazine of Black hair fashion.
I started with this little salon and within 6 months I had to (expand to) the other side of the building. Within a year I moved into a bigger space. It just took off because it really valued women's time.
I always did my own hair, but when I started going to a salon, I would go there for like 5 or 6 hours. I'd be like, ‘I'm paying a babysitter to keep my job while I'm here and I don't have time. I don't enjoy them selling hot food and the gossip.’ There were plenty of people that loved that experience. They relish going to the salon and hearing the gossip and eating and people coming in selling pies. I didn't like anything about that experience other than my hair.
My thought process was to open a salon for professional women. We waited on customers within 15 minutes or they got their money back. It made my stylists get on the job. I taught my stylists to help each other. We made the best of our time. We were state of the art. We got the first computer in a salon in Texas.
But the thing that I'm most proud of is the stylists I mentored. I didn't know I was mentoring them, but I was teaching them not just how to have a job but about life and how to do your best and to have goals. I can call up any of those people and they are doing well and I think I had something to do with that.
Can you talk a little bit about the hair magazine you started?
Well you know, there were Black hair magazines. But most of the big, glossy,hairstyling books with good lighting and all of that were white magazines. I just wanted us to have something with us on the cover in our salon, so that we don't have to have the little small paper flyer with style options.
It started off with me wanting to do one. I said, ‘I just want to do a flyer magazine with a shiny paper, put it out there.’ We had to charge $25 for a magazine, which was a lot of money. I was scared all the way up until the time we did it. But we sold out the issue. I realized that our people will pay for something that's quality.
And then I got really into it. For the next one, I was like, ‘How cool would it be for stylists in different cities to put photos of their work in there?’ We reached out to people. We would say, ‘Listen, take 3 lamps from your house and take the lampshades off and put them on.’ Teaching them the importance of lighting and doing some makeup and putting some fabric in the back.
It was such a labor of love for me and I was very sad when we couldn't do it because we really never made any money off of it. We just spent the money that we spent to do it and we just didn't know what we were doing.
The last issue was a little rough because my husband, you know, cut corners on it. But my girls are proud of it. I got one of the magazines from Solange. She collected it on eBay. She's not gonna give it to me [laughs] but she let me use it.
The magazine was the most fun I had in the salon, just setting up the shoots and getting submissions in from other people. Kelly (Rowland) is in it. Beyoncé did it. One of the girls didn't show up for a shoot, so I put a hairstyle on her. She looks so crazy because she’s about 10 and I put makeup on her. She's like, ‘Mama, the hairstyle is so wrong. Please cut that.’ But I think it's cute.
There's a beautiful exchange in the book towards the end about taking compliments, and you write “so many women mistake shame for humility.”
My daughter Beyoncé taught me that lesson. She taught Kelly that lesson. Solange, I don't think so much. But she said she had to learn how to take a compliment. I still get embarrassed sometimes if people give me too much praise. I don't know what it is in me that does that, but it's really important to work on that. It's just what we women do. We think of it as humility, but a lot of times it is shame because you have this thing inside you that tells you that you're an impostor.
You write really candidly about seeking out mental health support throughout your life, both for yourself and your family, even when your daughters were very young. I'm wondering what led you to understand and value that kind of support so early in your journey.
I think it was exposure. I’m someone with a high school diploma because I didn't go to college. I feel so blessed that I had that salon and I had all these educated people around me. I had a therapist that was one of my clients. That was pretty revolutionary for back then to have a Black therapist, but she was fly and put together. I was like, “I want some of that, I want to be like that.” I attribute my being so open-minded by my exposure to that person.
On the other hand, you have a family and your church telling you, “don't put your kids in therapy. They're gonna be crazy because you’re giving them problems.”
I needed an outlet. And I needed one for my kids. You know, they're five years apart and the separation that happened when Beyonce got in the group and got all of this attention…I just saw Solange getting on her nerves and getting in her stuff and her being kind of mean to her and Solange being mean to her and it scared the crap out of me.
So I got some help for them. And even though I couldn't tell a lot of people, it was the best move I could have ever made. It made me know how much I needed it too. It saved my life really, and I've been in it for probably 30 years on and off.
What's the hardest lesson that you learned from parenting?
The hardest lesson from being a mother is that you never stop. I was just on the phone with my baby…you know, I say my baby, she's 38 years old and she's still my baby.
Whenever there's something that's going on, then I'm the first person that she's gonna call and try to work it out. I'm not complaining. I'm just saying that I think the hardest part is that you never stop worrying about them.
