A pressing question for Tina was how she had allowed herself to get into such a quandary. Somehow it had come to pass that she now relied for safety and security on a man. Though this was typical for many women of her generation, it most certainly wasn’t what she had had in mind for her life. Just the same, within the span of only a couple of years she’d found herself dependent on someone she’d had serious doubts about from almost the very beginning. Considering how many times her mother had warned her about such romantic entrapment, this was a rude awakening. Tina wasn’t just frustrated by this turn of events, she was angry about it—angry at Mathew, angry at herself, and angry at the circumstances of her life as they had unfolded.
“Things got very rocky and my marriage became very tumultuous,” Tina recalled. “I was having all of these problems and I thought, ‘What have I done?’ I’d been out of the job market for four years [actually, at this point it was two] and my self-esteem was low. I was, like, ‘What do I do now?’ ”
With just three months left of beauty school before graduating, Tina sensed that her education could be her saving grace. “I knew I had to do something,” she said, “so I got very focused about school.” After she graduated, “I built a little salon at my house and I did hair,” she recalled.
Tina may have hoped the arrival of a new baby would help her through what she later called “the adversity of a bad marriage.” However, if it didn’t, at least she now had her own business. In other words, she was preparing for a life that didn’t include Mathew—unlikely as it still seemed to her—if it were to come to that. As she became more focused on business, she saw that she actually did have the acumen for it. Nothing was going to ruin her, she decided early on—not even Mathew Knowles.
Headliners
Beyoncé Giselle Knowles was born on September 4, 1981, at the Park Plaza Hospital, a relatively new medical center in Houston’s Museum District. Tina and Mathew agreed that she would pick the baby’s first name, he her middle name. Beyoncé, of course, is derived from Tina’s maiden name, Beyincé. Because only one of her brothers had a son, Tina had feared that her family name would die out. “I said, ‘Oh, God, we’ll run out of Beyincés,’ ” she told the journalist Touré for Rolling Stone—thus her idea of naming her daughter in a variant of Beyincé. Her father, Lumis Beyincé, didn’t much like the idea, though. “My family was not happy,” Tina confirmed. “My dad said, ‘She’s gonna be really mad at you, because that’s a last name.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s not a last name to anybody but you guys!’ ”
“She was a beautiful baby,” Mathew Knowles recalled of the infant Beyoncé. “I can’t describe the excitement I felt as a father, holding her for the first time. Everywhere I’d go, I would take Beyoncé with me. It was kind of an automatic duo.”
Though she was overwhelmed with joy at becoming a mother, it would seem that the most important thing in Tina’s mind, at this juncture anyway, was her freedom. After taking out a small-business loan, she was able to finance the opening of her own beauty salon. It would be tough going at first and would take all of her focus, time, and energy, but she knew she had to strike while the iron was hot. Therefore, when Beyoncé was about two months old, Tina says she took her to live with her paternal grandmother. She recalled, “I said, ‘Listen, you gotta keep her because I need to open a business.’ ” At that same time, she remembered thinking, “I will never be in this position again. I will never be totally dependent on someone. I will never give up myself.”
There seems to be something missing from Tina’s story, though. She specifically leaves Mathew out of the equation, begging the question: Why would she take baby Beyoncé to his mother’s if he was home and available to help out? Some say that what was really going in the Knowles household was that Mathew either left Tina at this time or she asked him to leave.
“She felt she couldn’t raise the baby on her own and also focus on starting a business, and that this is why she took Beyoncé to her mother-in-law’s,” says one source. Though we really don’t know what happened, the theory would make sense. One of Tina’s relatives explains further. “It’s no surprise that there would be confusion,” she says, “because Tina is not always forthcoming about these things, and why should she be? I don’t know if she asked Mathew to leave or if he left by his own accord. But whatever happened, it motivated her even more and pushed her forward to give everything she had to the starting of her own business, which is how her baby ended up staying at her mother-in-law’s for six months. This was a woman who was not going to stop until she was self-sufficient.”
Whatever the circumstances, in 1985, Tina opened her own hairstylist operation called Headliners Hair Salon on Montrose Avenue in Houston. Her business, which was geared toward black hairstyles, started slowly and would be unsteady for a number of years before it began to thrive, which it would do for long afterward. At first the staff consisted of just Tina, her niece, and another employee. However, Tina worked hard and saw her clientele grow steadily. She would eventually move the business to Bissonet Street, near Rice University.
“She was more than a hairstylist, she was a therapist,” Beyoncé would observe many years later. “A lady could come into that salon with problems, express herself to my mom, get a complete makeover . . . and then walk out feeling like a new woman.”
When Beyoncé was just a tyke, Tina would let her sweep up the hair from the floor and spend time with the customers. (Beyoncé would save the money Tina paid her from tips and use it to buy a season pass to Six Flags, where she loved riding the roller coasters.) In 2013, she would say that her takeaway from those many hours interacting with the women at Headliners was that “we’re all going through our problems, we all have the same insecurities and we need each other. I have been around the world, I’ve seen so many things,” she concluded, “but there’s nothing like a conversation with a woman who understands you. I grow so much from those conversations. I need my sisters.”
Headliners salon gave Tina the opportunity she so craved to learn, grow, and become independent of Mathew. As well as a venue for her to make an independent living, Tina’s place of business was “a labor of love,” she says. “I loved making women feel good and it was an opportunity to do it and do it in a big way. The adversity of me having this bad marriage caused me to do something about my situation.”
When Tina retrieved her baby from her mother-in-law, Mathew apparently returned to her as well. Was she now happy? That’s difficult to say. She was still angry at him for whatever had occurred, that much seemed clear to her friends and family. But still she took him back. If her marriage worked out, fine. If not, at least she now had options.
Childhood Days
Beyoncé Knowles was about six years old when she came home from school one afternoon and proudly announced to her mother that her first-grade teacher had taught her a new song. “Really?” Tina Knowles asked. “Okay,” she said, drying her hands with a dishtowel. “I’d like to hear it, then.” She sat down at the kitchen table and listened as Beyoncé sang a nursery rhyme. Beyoncé didn’t just sing it, though. She acted it out; she performed it. Whereas most kids her age might have sung the little song with their eyes cast bashfully downward, not Beyoncé. She made direct eye contact with her mom and delivered the rhyming tune with total authority. “I sat there thinking, ‘My goodness, this is really . . . something,’ ” Tina would recall many years later. “It was a moment I don’t think I’ll ever forget.” She wasn’t the only one struck by it. “I’ll never forget that feeling,” Beyoncé would recall as an adult. “I loved performing for my mother in that second. It was a rush.” There weren’t a lot of other happy memories attached to her school years, which is another reason why this one seems so significant.
Beyoncé has said that her school years—grades one through eight, before she was homeschooled and tutored from about the ninth grade onward—were problematic, that she was targeted because of her light skin and hair.
“Sometimes in the black communi
ty, it’s the lighter girls who are picked on,” Tina Knowles confirmed. “Of course, the opposite is often true as well, sadly—the darker girls are also picked on. It’s a shame, but it’s a fact of life. Beyoncé would often come home crying that the other girls were making fun of her. ‘I wish I was darker,’ she would say. I wanted her to embrace who she was. ‘Don’t wish to be anything other than what you are,’ I would tell her. I know it’s easy for adults to say such things, but harder for little girls to understand.”
It has never been easy to pigeonhole Beyoncé into a specific racial category. Questions about her race and heritage have been raised ever since she became famous. In fact, according to Google’s own statistics, Beyoncé’s ethnicity remains a subject of fascination, with more than two thousand users per month typing into its search engine the question “Is Beyoncé black?” and another two hundred wondering, “Is Beyoncé full black?” Over two hundred more pose the question “Is Beyoncé white?” Like most African Americans of mixed descent, Beyoncé self-identifies as black. In truth, she epitomizes the notion of America as being a “melting pot” of cultures, with a father, Mathew, of African-American extraction and a mother, Tina, of French Creole ancestry.
Her unusual, exotic-sounding name was also a reason for some children to single her out. “I hated my name when I was a kid,” Beyoncé has said. “It was just something else for them to use against me.”
Then there was the matter of her ears. “My head was smaller and I looked like I had big Dumbo ears,” she would recall. “I still do not wear my ears out [from behind her hair]. That’s also why I wear big earrings, because they camouflage your ears.”
In short, she didn’t fit in, or at least that’s how the other kids in school made Beyoncé feel. The result of schoolyard taunting was that she became incredibly shy and withdrawn, so much so that some of the students viewed her as snobbish or maybe even egotistical. “I couldn’t win,” she recalled. “I was bashful because the kids picked on me. And I was then picked on because I was bashful.”
“I would go to pick her up at school and she’d just be pushing the swing by herself with no one on it,” Tina recalled. “I once asked this little girl in the school playground, ‘Why don’t you like Beyoncé?’ and she got very flip with me and said, ‘I just don’t like her!’ I thought, ‘Oh my Lord! What am I going to do about this?’ ”
After watching and listening to Beyoncé singing around the house, Tina started to think that perhaps she had some talent and that maybe it could somehow be used to help her out of her bashful nature. “I began to notice that she was a little more extroverted when she was singing,” said Tina. “So when she was about seven I signed her up for dance classes at a local studio to bring her out of her shell. I also wanted her to make new friends and meet people other than the mean kids at school. It was in those dance classes that she started to get just a bit of self-esteem,” Tina concluded. “Then one of the dance instructors arranged for Beyoncé to be included in a community show performance, and that’s when things really started coming together.”
“For that first performance, both my mom and dad came,” Beyoncé recalled. “It was the first time I had ever walked onstage in front of an audience. I looked into the crowd and saw teachers, classmates, and parents fanning themselves with the paper programs and trying to get comfortable on yellow plastic chairs. Then I opened my mouth and started to sing. My parents were shocked. I can still see the looks on their faces. I’m not sure where I found the courage,” she recalled of this defining moment. “All I know is that I felt at home on that stage, more so than anywhere else. I saw my parents stand up and clap after I sang. I knew they were very proud of me.
“From that moment on, I decided that all the world would be a stage—chairs, tables, the kitchen countertop,” Beyoncé recalled, laughing. “I made my own stages. That’s how I expressed myself—through music. I only felt comfortable when I was singing or dancing. My personality would totally change. It’s still true today. Normally, I keep to myself, and you wouldn’t even know if I was in the same room. But when I’m in performance mode, I become a totally different person.”
After Beyoncé won that first talent contest, Tina decided to enroll her in local beauty pageants. She wasn’t interested in seeing her daughter model pretty clothes on a runway (in makeup that would probably be considered inappropriate for a tyke) as much as she wanted her to have a venue in which she could sing. While Beyoncé enjoyed the talent part of these shows, she detested the beauty segments. “Getting all dolled up was not for me at that age,” she recalled. “I was too self-conscious and didn’t feel like I was as pretty as the other girls.” On the plus side, though, the contests taught her the value of healthy competition, “and also how to learn from everyone else on the show,” she said, “kids who were better than me. I became a sponge.”
It was at around this time that Mathew began to share Tina’s enthusiasm for Beyoncé’s budding talent. He wasn’t sure what to make of it yet, but if performing was something she enjoyed, he wanted to encourage it. He began talking to her more about it, wanting to know her specific thoughts and feelings. He liked what he heard. It wasn’t so much the performing aspect of it as the fact that she wanted something, that something mattered to her. Anytime a kid of Mathew Knowles’s was going to be directed and focused about anything, whatever it was, Mathew was going to approve. “I’m going to help her,” he told Tina. “If only to encourage her to do more pageants. I think it’s good for her. I’m one hundred percent behind it.”
Tina was happy about Mathew’s enthusiasm, though maybe also just a little wary of it. She knew that once Mathew became invested in something, he didn’t give half an effort to it. He went all the way. “He can be a little—sometimes a lot—obsessive,” is how she once put it. She was just thinking hobby where Beyoncé’s pageants were concerned, and she didn’t want Mathew to have bigger ideas. Still, she liked seeing his support of their daughter and definitely wanted it to continue. She would monitor it, though—in her own way.
In 1988, when Beyoncé was seven, she won in the “Baby Junior” category of the Sammy Awards—an homage to the great entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.—at a local recreational center. A year later, in the fall of 1989, she returned to the Sammy Awards, not as a contestant but as a guest performer. Wearing a white blouse and a sequined blue dress with white leggings, her curled black hair falling to her shoulders, she sang “Home” from the 1975 Broadway musical The Wiz. It was a good—if also maybe just a tad overwrought—performance. At its end, she managed ten little spins, and then, flashing a big and dazzling smile, a graceful curtsey.
It’s easy to put a glossy cast on the unfolding of these early years, if only because Beyoncé was so precocious a child, and also one so obviously eager to please. Looking back on it now, it was obviously the dawning of something very big and exciting for her and her family. She wasn’t being forced into these pageants, either. Once she got started, there would have been no way for her parents to talk her out of participating in them—not that they would have tried to do so. Still, though, she would apparently spend many years dealing with unresolved feelings where this time in her life is concerned.
It’s not unusual that people who become famous at an early age feel a loss of their childhood in the process; it’s the most common complaint of child stars. Unlike Michael Jackson, for instance, who became famous at about the age of ten, Beyoncé would not become truly well known until she was sixteen. Definitely, though, when it came to her early years of performing in pageants and talent shows—those years of putting herself forth for harsh judgment and heavy scrutiny—she would later look back and feel a certain amount of discontentment. Was she talented enough? It was a question constantly drummed into her head just by virtue of the competitive venue in which she found herself. More to the core of a young girl’s soul, though, was always the pointed question: Was she pretty enough?
In her 2013 video for her song “Pretty Hurts,” Beyoncé’s me
ssage concerns the pitfalls of pursuing unrealistic notions of physical perfection as dictated by the media, and the destructive nature of such a hopeless quest. In the video she portrays a contender at a pageant, calling herself “Miss Third Ward.” She frames her message with the story of beauty contestants furiously grooming and preening in preparation for a big competition. “I basically starved,” she recalled in speaking of her inspiration for the video. “I neglected all of the people that I loved. I conformed to what everybody else thought I should be . . . and [then] I have this trophy. What does it all mean?” she asked. “The trophy [in the video] represents all of the sacrifices I made as a kid. All of the time that I lost, being on the road and in the studios as a child, and I just want to blow that shit up!”
In fact, in the video an infuriated Beyoncé is actually shown destroying the trophies, breaking them into pieces in a violent rage. “I have a lot of these awards . . . I worked my ass off,” she later explained. “I worked harder than probably everybody I know to get those things.”
Becoming Beyoncé Page 4