Beyonce’s name is a beautiful mistake
Speaking of Angie Bayins, Tina and her siblings all had different spellings of their last names, so Tina’s niece got that last name. As it happened, Tina’s birth certificate read “Celestine Ann Beyoncé.”
Tina recalled in Matriarch that she wanted to change herself. One night, as she sat with her brother Larry doing homework, she wrote: “When I said I wanted to practice my name, he lent me a pencil and said it for me, letter by letter.” When Larry heard her last name, he had to think for a moment.
“He reminded me that all of us children have different spellings of our parents’ last names, Bayinsu,” she wrote. “There was Beyoncé, Boyance, and my Beyoncé.”
When Tina asked her mother, Agnes, to fix the misspelling on her birth certificate, she said, “She told me, ‘You should be happy to have your birth certificate.'” Because in the past, black people didn’t even receive birth certificates. Agnès also added, “Your name is beautiful.”
Apparently the name stuck with her, as Tina named her first son Beyoncé. “When it was given to me, it didn’t matter how it was spelled; it was our name,” Tina writes. “Our history. The most precious possession I had, and now it’s mine to give. I’ve kept my word.”
