I got a lot of reasons for believing that two creative Black women born just 21 days and 85 miles apart, each as the eldest in a pair of daughters with deeply rooted histories in Texas and Louisiana were meant to be together.

I won’t get into all the other commonalities, but just because my other half is Beyoncé doesn’t mean it’s not true.

By Track 6 of Queen Bey’s masterpiece “Lemonade,” it’s easy to know her heart, but when “Daddy Lessons” played, it felt like she knew mine too.

Of course, it’d be silly to think that “Daddy Lessons” is a wholly biographical account of Beyoncé’s experience with Matthew Knowles. But in music’s serendipitous way, “Daddy Lessons” IS near biographical for me.

I’m the first girl in my generation on my Mama’s side, and the second by double-digits on my Daddy’s. I was by every definition of the phrase “Daddy’s Little Girl.”

Between my tremendously kind, God-fearing Grandpaw who taught me to shoot a BB gun and advised that if I had to fight, “just pick up a brick;” my outdoorsman uncle who brought home a cooler full of fish every weekend and raised big dogs who loved us littles; and my older cousins who rode motorcycles and/or horses, every line of “Daddy Lessons” is a retelling of stories about the “daddies” in my life.

But it’s the parts about my real Daddy that steal my heart. The one who indeed loved classic vinyl and substituted Beyoncé’s southern whiskey and blackjack for Crown Royal and dominoes. The one who constantly advised me as a teenager to “watch out for boys selling them wolf cookies.” The one who, even before I was possibly old enough to follow through, would pull me aside before he left home (or vice versa) to remind me word for word:

“Take care of your mother, watch out for your sister.”

Of all the things he’d pull me in close to say, I probably took that one most for granted, never recognizing those little moments as his first bricks in the foundation for my birthright until he was gone.

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