The Ambition of Tina Knowles (part two)

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Let’s get into it.

This month’s deep dive comes from the book Matriarch: A Memoir.

Beyonce was about three months old when her mother, Tina Knowles, came to the conclusion that she could no longer depend on her husband, and needed to make her own money.

You see, Matthew Knowles loved to cheat. And Tina made a mistake that many of our mothers did: she left the workforce to start a family.

From chapter 17:

“I knew what protected us: money. Pure and simple. But none of it was mine. What kept me and my daughter safe depended on a marriage I did not have faith in lasting. A man I was not sure of.”

So when Beyonce was four and Tina was thirty-one, she signed up for beauty school. Unfortunately that didn’t last; Beyonce was getting bullied at school, so Tina dropped out to spend more time with her daughter.

A few months later, Tina offered to do her friends hair; a woman named Cheryl Creuzot. Today, Cheryl is the president Wealth Development Strategies, LLC in Houston, Texas. But back then, she was a financial planner with a problem: the salons she went to weren’t built for professional, busy women.

The salon Cheryl visited typically took five or six hours to do what Tina could do in one or two. And the owners were big fans of gossip. So not only did Cheryl lose the equivalent of a workday at the salon, she also couldn’t trust the people running it.

And in business, if you don’t have trust, you don’t have anything.

Cheryl asked Tina to start her own salon, but Tina didn’t take the idea seriously. She was too focused on trying to fix something that was never going to be fixed: her marriage.

Matthew was in no way focused on being a better husband.

At this point in the story, Tina finds out she’s pregnant with Solange. And for some reason, Matthew is focused on frivolously spending money; he booked an expensive international trip and bought a Jaguar. He and claimed the car was a surprise for Tina. But let’s be real - he bought it for himself; what is a mother of two going to do with a sports car?

It’s unfortunate that Tina wanted to delay her independence because his cheating only got worse. The crazy thing is that now that she was visibly pregnant, he didn’t try to hide it. He flaunted it! It was incredibly public; in chapter 17 she says his cheating was “out there for all to see“.

And this treatment, this lack of respect, was the thing that lit a fire under Tina Knowles.

See you soon for part three,

LaToya