In her recently released Matriarch memoir, Tina Knowles recalled a time when her daughter Beyoncé was torn between choosing Jay-Z, who was pursuing her at the time, and another industry guy she was simultaneously talking to.
Knowles in her memoir said that her daughter and now-husband Jay-Z were initially friends when they established contact in the early 2000s, US Weekly reported.
“Beyoncé had developed a friendship with him, solely over the phone,” Knowles wrote. “They provided good counsel to each other as they discussed the industry, each sharing a singular confidence in their artistic vision.”
Knowles said she invited Jay-Z to come around for dinner when he arrived for a concert in their native Houston. “As Beyoncé and Jay then kept up with each other in calls, the friendship deepened,” Knowles revealed. “She would tell me, ‘He’s just so nice.’”
But Knowles recalled that “another guy in the industry” was also trying to establish a romantic relationship with her daughter at the time, adding when Jay-Z and that individual were coming to Los Angeles to visit Beyoncé while she was on set for 2002’s Austin Powers in Goldmember movie, she asked for advice on her next line of action.
“‘Well, who do you like the most?’” Knowles wrote about the question she asked Beyoncé. “‘Who do you enjoy talking to more?’ I watched her think. It was Jay. Isn’t it humbling how love can begin with such a simple feeling? You like talking to someone over the phone. You’re 21 years old and you can’t know someday you will take that love to the stars, but it begins with such a small instinct.”
As the story goes, Beyoncé went in for Jay-Z, with Knowles writing that she eventually met the trailblazing rapper’s mother Gloria Carter and his other family members when their relationship “got more serious.”
“That was the start of the Carter and Knowles families joining as one family, and we are all very close to this day,” she wrote, per US Weekly. “Our gatherings would become parties, rich with laughter and storytelling, drinking and dancing. In the Bible it says to eat, drink, and be merry, and that’s what our evenings are like with the Carters.”
Beyoncé and Jay-Z got married in a private ceremony at their home in 2008. “They had the wedding at their house on April 4 because it was the only place that we knew it wouldn’t get out,” Knowles wrote.
“We had a lady make white curtains to cover the walls and windows, right up to the 25-foot ceilings. … The details are my daughter and son-in-law’s, but what I will say is that I joined Jay’s grandmother and mother in cooking all the food. We did soul food, of course, the best food for a night of dancing and family love.”
And though Knowles did not provide deep insight into her daughter’s relationship with Jay-Z, she said she regards him and Tim Weatherspoon (Kelly Rowland’s husband) as her sons, per US Weekly.
“They are true blessings, and I could not ask for better providers and protectors of my daughters and their children, and I am always touched that their sense of protection extends to me,” she wrote.
“Jay is an example for his children, starting with very humble beginnings and overcoming every obstacle in the world to be the successful businessman he is. Tim is humble and quiet but incredibly perceptive, managing Kelly’s career for years before becoming an executive at Nickelodeon. Even with all the things they are involved in, their best performance is as fathers.”
