Matriarch: A Memoir

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of racism, chattel slavery in the American South, discrimination, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.

Galveston, Texas is a symbol of entrapment. Throughout Tina Knowles’s childhood, she feared spending the rest of her life in Galveston. She witnessed many of her siblings, nieces, nephews, and friends get stuck in this town. The older she got, the more claustrophobic and limiting the place felt. In part, Knowles’s fraught relationship with Galveston related to her family; however, it also related to Galveston’s history:

Galveston was the most profitable cotton port on the Gulf, and all the cotton grown in Texas went through the city as it was sold to the world. And the shame of it is that Galveston was once one of the largest ports for the slave trafficking of human beings across the Atlantic. (16)

The place thus carried a dark racial history, and infected its atmosphere. It was a place defined by suffering, subjugation, and atrocities—all of which impacted Knowles’s regard for the town.

Furthermore, Knowles dreamed of creating a life for herself independent from her family. A dreamer at heart, she wanted to explore the world beyond her hometown. She did act on this longing when she moved to California, but was later compelled to return to Galveston to care for her ailing parents.