A glorious chronicle of a life like none other - enlightening, entertaining, surprising, empowering - and a testament to the world-changing power of Black motherhood.
"You are Celestine," she said. She squatted to push the hair off my face and pull leaves off my pajama legs. "Like my sister and my grandmother." And there under the pecan tree, as she did countless times, that day my mother told me stories of the mothers and daughters that went before me.
Tina Knowles, the mother of iconic singer-songwriters Beyonce Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known the world over as a Matriarch with a capital M: a determined, self-possessed, self-aware and wise woman who raised and inspired some of the great artists of our time. But this story is about so much more than that.
Matriarch begins with a precocious, if unruly, little girl growing up in 1950s Galveston, the youngest of seven. She is in love with her world,