Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Knowles was known to stay up all night battling fires for free, and then showing up first thing in the morning at his day job. His work ethic was one about which his friends and family marveled, and it was a character trait he would pass down to his children. “I didn’t realize when I was a kid how poor we were,” Mathew told the radio host Tony Cox in 2006. “My father made between thirty dollars and fifty dollars a week. And the reason why I know that so vividly is my mom used to constantly give him a hard time for that.” Mathew may not have been conscious of his family’s poverty when he was younger, because it was all that he knew. It was not an easy life, though, and he would most certainly bear the scars of his youth.

  “Mathew told me they had to use an outhouse,” AlexSandra Wright, who would have a romantic relationship with Mathew in 2008 recalled, “so that tells you how poor they were. He often talked about his childhood with great sadness. This is a man who wanted more from life than what he had as a kid, and I think he was somehow defined by the stigma of extreme and absolute poverty.”

  Unlike the Beyincés, the Knowleses didn’t have a very close bond. Eating dinner together to check in with one another was not something they did very often—it wouldn’t have occurred to them. Mathew and his siblings were self-sufficient, some of them fairly close to one another, others not so much. They were also largely independent of their parents, none of them seeming particularly attached to them. Of course, it’s imprudent to try to summarize complex relationships that span many decades. Most certainly there had to have been times along the way when some of the Knowleses were bonded to one another, but to say that they were a closely knit family would be overstating it. There were relatives Mathew didn’t even know, on both sides of the family. Unlike the Beyincés, they didn’t make much of an effort to connect. However, they were satisfied with that status quo. It was all they knew.

  Mathew started his education in the small Catholic school St. Martin de Porres in Gadsden. Darryl Dunn went to the same school and recalled, “We went to St. Martin’s from the first grade to eighth together. We were actually altar boys together. Yes, Mathew was an altar boy!”

  When he was eight, Mathew went into business—selling candy. “I knew from this young age that I wanted to be a businessman,” he recalled. “I would buy a dollar’s worth of candy and then sell it to others for three dollars. Then I would convince the store owner to give me a discount since I was a regular buyer, and repeat the cycle. At the time, I had no idea what I was doing, only that it was working for me.”

  Knowles then became one of the first African-American students to enroll in Litchfield Junior High School. “On my first day, a traumatic experience for me was standing up and reading and being laughed at by the white kids because I made a mistake,” he recalled. “This was the eighth grade. It was a traumatic experience that forced me to always want to learn more. So as a kid I was always inquisitive and always reading. I wanted to know what I was saying, and speak with confidence.”

  Mathew was later also one of the first African Americans to attend Gadsden City High School. It was there in sports that he distinguished himself. “It was the challenges, working together to overcome those challenges, the teamwork and trust, believing in each other,” he recalled. “Sports was a very exciting time in my life.”

  “Mathew wasn’t a real good basketball player,” recalled Darryl Dunn, who went on to become a Gadsden High Basketball Hall of Famer. “Some guys are natural athletes, but not Mathew. He practiced a lot, though, was determined to play, and eventually he got real good. He was always a very focused individual.” (Knowles still enjoys playing basketball, though, like many weekend warriors, he has had his fair share of sports-related injuries; he has undergone at least five surgeries as a result of playing. He also suffers from rather serious knee problems.)

  “He was also popular with the ladies in school,” Dunn recalled, laughing. “He was just this tall, lanky, good-looking drink of water. His nickname was ‘Pool Stick’ because he was so slim—though not the best pool player in the world! Always had a mischievous look in his eyes. I thought he might one day be a singer because he had a pretty decent voice.”

  “In high school, I had these three friends and we had this boy band,” Mathew recalled. “I went to a Catholic school early on, and I was in the choir there, so, you know, I enjoy singing. But my girls—Beyoncé and Solange—they tell me not to sing. ‘Don’t sing, Daddy. Please, don’t sing!’ ”

  Of course, because of the climate of the era, both Darryl and Mathew saw their share of ugly racism. There was racial division in movie theaters in the city, for instance, with blacks relegated to the balcony seats, separate bathrooms and water fountains, and a side door from which to enter and exit. Like many cities in the South in the 1950s and ’60s, Gadsden suffered from extreme bitterness between the races. As riots and protest marches became the norm, federal courts made integration in the school system mandatory. The National Guard was recruited to make sure it was a peaceful process. “You don’t experience this kind of thing without taking some scars from it with you through life,” said Darryl Dunn. “Black youngsters were begrudgingly welcomed into the city’s formerly all-white high school, Gadsden High. And when I say begrudgingly, I mean begrudgingly.”

  “My father was part of the first generation of black men that attended an all-white school,” Beyoncé confirmed in February 2015, “and he has grown up with a lot of trauma from those experiences. I feel that, now, I can sing for his pain,” she said, “and I can sing for my grandparents’ pain as well,” she added, noting that her paternal grandparents marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

  “I remember that when I got accepted into the Hall of Fame they had a little club for teenagers. I was never allowed to go in there, even though I was one of the best team players,” Darryl Dunn remembered. “The whites didn’t want us mixing with their kids, and then the black kids in other schools didn’t like us because not only were we in this formerly white school, we were beating them at basketball. So, even in the best of circumstances, there was severe and very, very hurtful racism. Mat would say, ‘It is what it is. But that doesn’t mean I can accept it, and I swear to God, I never will.’ It made him angry. We both had this sort of rage.

  “Mathew was a product of this ugly world. If there are people who have viewed him as being ruthless in business, it’s because they don’t know where he came from. In our time, Negroes were hardened by what we went through in our youth. You can’t separate it out and say, ‘Okay, that was then and now is now.’ No. Now is then. And then is now.”

  As the number two scorer on the team—with Darryl Dunn the number one—Mathew was able to secure a basketball scholarship. He attended the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, being one of the first African Americans to enroll there. He then continued his education at Fisk University, an elite black university in Nashville. This scholastic transition presented a bit of a culture shock for him because, as he explained to Jamie Foster Brown in an interview for Sister 2 Sister magazine, “At Fisk, when I went in 1972, one of the most unpopular things was to be an athlete. You weren’t cool because you were a basketball or football player, you were cool if you were smart. And if you had smarts and had swagger, then you were really cool.” Mathew would graduate from Fisk in 1970 with degrees in both economics and business administration.

  Mathew—now tall (well over six feet), lean, and exceedingly handsome—moved to Houston in 1976 at the age of nineteen. “I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Gadsden and I never looked back,” he said.

  In 1976 and 1977, Knowles would work a variety of jobs, from selling insurance for Metropolitan Life to postage meters for Pitney Bowes to telephone equipment for Southern Bell. Around 1978, he went to work for Xerox Corporation selling copiers and duplicators, then in 1980 for the company’s Xerox Medical Systems division. He was eventually promoted to their so-called elite division, where he sold medical systems, most notably breast cancer detection and ultrasound tech
nology. By 1981, he was driving a Jaguar XJ6 and earning a six-figure income, quite unheard of for a black salesman in Texas in the 1980s.

  What most people who did business with Mathew came to know about him was that he was obsessive about his work. Doggedly determined to distinguish himself, he never let up on himself or on the people with whom he worked. He was tough on everybody, but certainly toughest on himself. “He was a pit bull,” recalled one coworker. “This is a man who would call fifty times an hour to get something he needed from you. He wasn’t the kind of person to whom you could say, ‘I’ll get back to you in fifteen minutes.’ Not Mathew. He would be back on the phone in five minutes asking again for whatever he needed, and he would be on you like white on rice until he got it. On one hand, you had to have great admiration for him. On the other, you wanted to tell him to take a pill and relax. He was determined, to put it mildly.”

  Engaged

  Mathew Knowles met Tina Beyincé in Houston in 1978. By this time, she was working as a secretary for a credit card company, while he was at his job at Xerox Corporation.

  Tina was a knockout, her shoulder-length, wavy dark hair highlighted with flashy red streaks. She wasn’t a skinny girl by any means; she was curvaceous. Her skin, the color of dark copper, was flawless, her lipstick usually bright cherry red—a color she still favors to this day. She had gone to a Saturday evening party with a man who happened to be a friend of Mathew’s. She and Mathew made eye contact throughout the night, with Tina wondering all the while when the handsome, tall, and athletic-looking stranger might make his move. Finally, Mathew walked over to her to make small talk. They clicked. Soon Mathew, a man of great charm and self-assurance, was asking her to have lunch with him the following Monday. She agreed to meet him at noon at her job. “What struck me about her? Woo! She was damn good-looking,” he recalled many years later. “But she also seemed like a good person in heart and spirit.”

  That night, Mathew went home and, using his little General Electric “shoebox” recorder, taped himself saying her last name, “Beyincé,” before he could forget how to pronounce it. Then on Monday, at the appointed hour of noon, he showed up at the MasterCard office in downtown Houston looking for Tina. However, he was told by the receptionist that no one by that unusual last name worked there. “Are you sure?” he asked, completely bewildered. “It’s Tina Beyonah, or Beince, or . . .” Finally he told the receptionist that he was MasterCard’s local Xerox representative and asked her to go inside to check their copiers for efficiency. Actually he was just looking for an opportunity to take a look around himself and see if he could find Tina. After a thorough search of the premises, Tina was nowhere to be found. Mathew left, feeling rejected. Obviously she had steered him to the wrong place in an effort to ditch him.

  An entire year passed.

  One day, Mathew was walking down the street at about 9:30 in the morning and saw Tina in a coffee shop. Though he recognized her immediately, he walked right by her. He had his pride, after all. But then, a few hours later, by sheer coincidence he saw her again at the popular Foley’s department store in downtown Houston with some of her girlfriends. Though they made brief eye contact, he decided to ignore her—or at least act as if he was ignoring her. “Then, at 3:00, downtown Houston, I’m standing at a stoplight,” he recalled, “and there she is again! She’s on one side of the road and I’m on the other. We’re looking at each other . . .” While crossing the street, they had no choice but to acknowledge each other. When they met halfway, Mathew asked to have a word with her.

  “You’re that pretty chick who said she worked at MasterCard,” Mathew told Tina. “I made a date with you, but you don’t work there at all. Why’d you blow me off like that?”

  Tina had to laugh. “Fool! First of all, can we please get out of the middle of the road?” she asked. They walked to a curb.

  “So, why’d you tell me you worked at MasterCard?” Mathew asked again. “You could have just said you weren’t interested.”

  “Fool!” she repeated. “I told you Visa. Not MasterCard. You went to the wrong place!”

  That was the beginning of what felt at the time like a head-over-heels romance. It wasn’t long before the couple was engaged. At the time, Mathew told family members he was looking for a partner as much as he was a wife. He wanted someone who would stand by his side as he conquered the world, and Tina Beyincé definitely seemed to fit the bill.

  “Mathew had been raised to be productive,” recalled one of Tina’s relatives, “and this is something Tina found compelling about him. He was anything but lazy. She felt she would have a good life with him, that he would be able to provide for her. Besides that, the passion she shared with him was strong.”

  What Mathew took note of about Tina very early in the relationship was that she could stand up to him if need be. If he was late for a date, he heard about it. If he said something she regarded as insulting, he would be taken to task. He was intrigued by her forceful personality and appreciated that she had a backbone, that she would gladly put him in his place.

  He also noticed that she was guarded. Maybe it was because Tina seemed to sense something about Mathew early on that made her go deep into self-protection mode. She was rarely completely vulnerable with him, always reserving a big part of herself. It wasn’t just what her mother had taught her about life and love, either. It was as if she had some sort of women’s intuition about Mathew specifically. “She somehow knew she needed to protect her heart,” said one of her relatives in looking back at this time.

  Despite any misgivings Tina may have had about Mathew, their engagement was officially announced in the Galveston Daily News in the summer of 1978. While most couples would likely announce their impending nuptials with a happy photo posed together, Tina’s notice was accompanied by a lovely picture of her alone, looking like the most celebrated of movie stars—head tilted, a pensive look in her eyes, full glamour makeup, and a luxurious flowing mane of hair cascading to one shoulder. The couple would be wed on January 5, 1980, at Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Galveston.

  Trapped

  Like all couples, Mathew and Tina entered into their marriage full of optimistic hopes and dreams. However, from the start it was as if the union was fraught with grim omens.

  The warning signs started shortly before the marriage took place. “I was so excited about my dad walking me down the aisle,” Tina recalled. “But the day before the wedding he had a heart attack.” Of course this put a cloud over the proceedings, but the ceremony went on. However, the bad luck would continue. “The next day we were supposed to go on our honeymoon, but we missed the flight,” Tina continued. “So I called to see how my father was, and they said, ‘Oh, your dad is in intensive care. He had a massive heart attack!”

  The couple immediately abandoned plans for leaving on the next flight for their honeymoon and instead rushed to Galveston. “My dad was really bad,” Tina said, “I decided to stay at the hospital. Mathew went back to the house because his parents were in town. And then he called me crying that his grandfather had died! So it was like, ‘Okay, what’s going on here?’ ”

  By Wednesday Tina’s father was stable enough for her to attend Mathew’s grandfather’s funeral. “I went to the funeral on Thursday, and then when I got back on Friday, my mom was in intensive care,” Tina added, still in disbelief so many years later about this unfortunate chain of events. “It was a tough time,” she concluded, an understatement if ever there was one.

  Along with all of the immediate familial turmoil came the question of the newlyweds’ finances. Mathew’s job at that time wasn’t paying much; Tina felt she should contribute. “No,” he insisted. “You don’t have to work. You should go and take care of your parents.”

  “I treasure that to this day,” Tina recalled of Mathew’s gesture, “because within six months my mom passed away.”

  After her mother’s death, Tina didn’t immediately reenter the workforce, a decision she would later greatly regret. Instead
she enrolled in beauty school. Then she got pregnant.

  “After I got pregnant, my marriage just got really bad,” Tina recalled in October 2014. She didn’t elaborate on the nature of the problems she was experiencing with Mathew, but certainly later on his infidelity would become an issue. Tina did spend a lot of time wondering about Mathew’s devotion, especially in the first year of their marriage. He seemed always to be restless and unhappy, as if searching for validation. He was never satisfied, and somehow to her it felt connected to his disadvantaged youth, to being thought of as “less than” back in Gadsden. Whatever his personal demons, they began to influence his marriage early on, and there wasn’t much Tina or anyone else could do about it. It was as if she had come into the picture too late. Mathew was already who he was going to be, and now she would just have to find a way to deal with him as best she could.

  It was upsetting, but from all available evidence, Tina suppressed her acute sadness and did what she could to go on with and manage her life. This was an unusual turn of events for her. Before Mathew, she had a fiery temper and could be explosive when pushed, the kind of woman who would not put up with much from a man. Something happened to her, though, when Mathew came along. Who knows what psychology in her would be triggered by her abiding love for him, but after Mathew she would never be quite the same. The way she concealed her unhappiness and maybe even her anger at this time in her life would become a template for the way she would handle her issues with Mathew in the future. It was also a behavior that appears to have been passed on to her daughter Beyoncé, who would one day seemingly deal with conflict in her life in much the same manner.

  Within a year of their wedding, Tina already thought of leaving Mathew, but says she felt utterly trapped. First, she didn’t have any money of her own. More urgent, though, was that she was out of the job market, a decision she now regretted. Plus, the premium she placed on the notion of family trumped all desire to leave the marriage. There was something about Mathew that drew her to him and made her think he might still be the answer to her deep longing for family. “I think she felt she could possibly fix him,” said one of her friends from that time in her life. “I know for certain that she loved him with all her heart and wanted his children. At the end of the day, that was the real problem, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just her being out of the job market, it wasn’t just her not having money, it was as simple and as complicated as her loving him and wanting desperately to bear his children.”