There are moments which can change a life for ever. For , one was the day she was driven, barefoot and afraid, through the main streets of her hometown of Galveston, Texas - in the back of the car.
The driver had apparently taken a deliberate detour through her neighbourhood, parading his “perpetrator”. It was intended to - to be a drive of shame. But, as she would later come to realise, the shame of that moment should never have been hers.
It only ever should have belonged to the white cop at the wheel.
For the same cop, she claims, called her friends “monkeys” and likened her neighbourhood to a “zoo”. He was the same cop there the night officers pulled a gun on her brother Skip - for the , she says, of drunkenly passing out on a neighbour’s porch.
And he was the same cop who - along with his pals - had been known to pull over her hard-working father on a higher than usual number of stops.
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Tina’s “crime” that day, aged 20, in 1974 was to ride barefoot on a dirt bike (it was her “hippie” phase).
It was a traffic violation - but one for which she should be quickly bailed. Instead she says the cop and his colleagues insisted on a full strip and cavity search.
“It was the most humiliating, horrible thing,” Tina this week recalled. “When it was over, I put my clothes back on, trying to put an armour of dignity over me too.”
It’s a tale of prejudice which sadly is not unfamiliar even today.
But it’s also a snapshot of Tina’s younger years that answers an enduring mystery in showbiz - what kind of woman does it take to raise a global icon, activist and role model like ?
The answer? A strong one.
Tina, 71, has now shared this story for the first time in her no-holds barred memoir, Matriarch. But it was by far not the only bombshell about her life. From racism to cheating husbands to her recent breast cancer ordeal, the woman born Celestine Ann Beyoncé, in Texas, 1954, has not had it easy.
The youngest of seven siblings, her mum was a seamstress and her dad was a longshoreman. Their surname was Beyince, but a typo on Tina’s birth certificate meant she was officially Tina “Beyonce” - a slip up by a clerk that would change pop culture.
Her early life was affected by the racism in the Southern states, but she had a clear passion: singing. She formed a girl group The Veltones, inspired by as a teen, but her dreams of stardom ended early when she had to look after her elderly parents.
By 26, she had met and married a run-of-the-mill Xerox salesman
But Tina was not meant for a little life in Galveston. Although it would be her daughters Beyonce, born in 1981, and in 1986, who would help her achieve that singing success she never personally did.
And they didn’t do it by halves. By 16, Beyonce was in . Mathew quit the day job to be the band’s manager and the family never looked back.
However, as Tina shares in her new memoir - and as we know from their acrimonious split - success put more pressure on her already tempestuous marriage.
In a bombshell claim in the book, Tina reveals was already a ladies’ man when the girls were small.
In fact, she even suspected him of cheating in the days after she had given birth to Solange - after he picked her up from the hospital and dropped her at a friends’ house with the newborn baby and five-year-old Beyonce, announcing he had to fly to a conference in Atlanta.
“I suspected that a woman was involved,” Tina says in her book Matriarch. “We had a huge blowout at the hospital, but he wouldn’t budge. Sure enough, the next day he dropped me, Beyoncé, and our newborn off [at the friend’s]. He practically ran out of the house to his getaway car, I said to myself, 'Okay, I’m done.'”
She left him. But, like other times to follow, she ended up going back. This time her return was the fault of the friend’s rottweiler, “Killer”.
“Killer charged up the stairs and he snapped, foaming at the mouth and growling as loud as a freight train,” she recalls, claiming he was aggravated by her perfume. So when Mathew called grovelling for her to come back later that night she reluctantly agreed.
“I was so annoyed with myself for having escaped a lousy marriage to almost get killed,” she adds in her book. “I felt I had no choice but to go back and reclaim our home—but only under one condition….”
The condition was that they got intensive counselling.
They were still trapped in their love/hate relationship years later when Tina this week revealed she accidentally spilt a pan of boiling grease on herself while frying fish. The police arrived before the ambulance and proceeded to quiz her on whether Mathew had actually done it to her..
“Even at a time like this, we were suspect. Presumed guilty,” she writes in her book.
She was furious. But not as furious as Mathew allegedly was at the hospital, when Tina was lying screaming in pain and doctors were dragging their feet.
She claims he flipped over a doctor’s tray in frustration - and that only made her love him more.
“Mathew finally broke. My crazy husband, the man I loved, turned over a tray in rage,” she claims in the book. “‘Give my wife some fucking pain medicine. Give her something right now’.”
Their dynamic and what Tina calls their “cosmic” pull is perhaps the reason she later did the unthinkable: After learning he’d fathered a child Nixon, now 15, with his mistress Alexsandra Wright in 2009, she filed for divorce. But a few months later, he visited her where she was living in New York - and this time she became The Other Woman.
“He'd changed after new counseling,” she recalls in her 432-page tell-all. “He was persistent, proved he'd gotten help, and as he courted me, I found myself falling in love again.” The pair had an affair for a year - before he allegedly cheated on her again and in 2011, it was over for good.
She went on to in 2015 but split with him in 2023, saying: “I wanted someone to be happy when I walked in the room”.
It’s telling that Beyonce has had more than her share of her own marital problems. The between Solange and will go down in history. And yet she too, like her mum, has fought hard for her marriage to work.
But love life troubles are by far the least thing the mum and daughter have in common. They both were as driven for Beyonce to be a success as each other. Indeed, the superstar was just nine when Tina faced one of her hardest moments of motherhood.
Beyonce was in school girl group Gyrl’s Time but came home crying one day. The teachers had reassigned all her parts to another girl and Beyonce was demanding Tina go and shout at them. Tina said No.
“I couldn’t just be her mom for that moment; I needed to be her mom for her whole life,” she explains in her book. So she told her: “‘That girl is not your competition. You are your only competition and that’s how it always will be. You gotta work harder’.”
That was the first time Beyonce told her mum “I hate you” - but a few months later she was thanking her for the tough love. And the unstoppable determination and work ethic of Beyonce was born.
A few years later Tina did something else controversial: she put a teenage Beyonce and Solange into joint therapy sessions to eradicate what she saw as the beginnings of sibling rivalry. Then when Beyonce was 16, her friend - and soon-to-be Destiny’s Child bandmate grew so close to the family she started calling Mathew “dad”. Tina had a tough talk with Bey about not being jealous.
Perhaps the most important advice she gave her daughter however was when it came to. Tina lets slip in her book that Beyonce was seeing two men at the same time when they first started dating.
Both men had been travelling to see the Crazy in Love singer on the set of 2002’s in Goldmember. Tina doesn’t name the other man, but it’s thought it may have been high school boyfriend, Lyndall Locke, whom she dated from 1993 to 2001.
Beyonce was lost on what to do and asked Tina for advice. She asked her daughter to answer one simple question: “Who do you enjoy talking to more?”
“I watched her think. It was Jay,” Tina writes. “Isn’t it humbling how love can begin with such a simple feeling? You’re 21 years old and you can’t know someday you will love to the stars, but it begins with such a small instinct.”
The Mama bear instinct kicked in in a slightly different way when Solange fell pregnant aged 17 and declared she was going to get married to her then boyfriend, Daniel Smith, however. Tina confesses she rang Daniel to convince him not to marry her daughter. He dutifully called Solange to say perhaps they should wait.
Solange took it about as well as a young Tina would have done. According to Daniel, Solange had replied: “F*** you, and f*** my mama, because I know [she] put you up to this.”
Tina backed down, arranged a dream wedding in just three days and somehow wangled a private plane and service on a remote island belonging to John Travolta. Because at the end of the day she would move mountains to give her kids what they wanted.
And Solange just wanted one gift for her wedding: privacy away from the circus that came with her sister’s fame. Tina would later give that same present to Beyonce when she finished a gruelling tour, taking her back to her home neighbourhood in Galveston, where the superstar could go almost unnoticed out of her popstar get up.
Beyonce’s only wish was to go to Walgreen’s - the US answer to Boots. “When we left, she was glowing, so empowered,” writes Tina, “Not a single person approached her. Not one. It felt like a fairy tale.”
Tina’s bond with her daughters was once again cemented last year when the mum went for a routine mammogram - having not been for four years because of the pandemic. . It was stage one - the second stage under the American system. Tina was nonplussed: “I had been through all of this stuff in life getting to be seventy years old, and now I’m gonna get cancer?,” she writes.
Beyonce moved Tina into her home and sat in on appointments. And when it came to the day of her lumpectomy, the daughters sat with her in the ward ahead of her being taken down to surgery and sang Destiny’s Child Walk With Me.
“It's about God walking with you and protecting you,” Tina recalled in her interview on US TV this week. “And I went in there feeling just like God has got me.”
A year on, she’s now cancer-free and happily one of the Single Ladies for the first time in decades.
For like everything in this Galveston girl’s life - be it police harassment, racism, cheating spouses or how to raise a star - she faced it head on. And like her daughter sings, she’s a survivor.
Matriarch By Tina Knowles is out now from Dialogue Books.
