They grew up together, apart before marrying
Cameria Shan “Tina” Beasley and Terrence Blake could have met, maybe they should have met — but they didn’t meet until the time was right.
“Now I’m like, ‘God meant for us to be together,’ but we just kept missing each other,” Tina says.
Tina and Terrence lived on the same street when they were babies — but Terrence and his family moved away when he was about 6 months old.
“I was just being born because we are six months apart. I’m born, he leaves,” she says.
They went to the same elementary, junior high and high school in the same small town, Camden, and they would find out later that their grandparents grew up together in the even smaller town of Rosston.
No doubt they passed in the halls countless times over the years, but Tina only remembers seeing Terrence once — when he rode her bus after school one day so he could go to the barber shop — before she got a glimpse of him through a window at school. She was a sophomore, in French class; he was a junior, in Spanish class. The Spanish and French classrooms were connected, with the teachers’ office in between.
“It was like one big office but on opposite sides,” she explains. “I could look through the window and I was like, ‘Who is he?”
Her friend knew.
“I was like, I like him. She said, ‘That’s T. Blake. You know, T. Blake.’ I was like, ‘No! I don’t know him,’” she says.
Her friend agreed to do some reconnaissance to find out if Terrence was dating anyone and to report back.
“He had just broken up with someone,” Tina says.
Terrence was on the football team, and Tina was under the impression he was shy.
“My friend didn’t think he was quiet,” she says. “She knew the other side of him. So she talked to him and when he came up to me I was blushing — I was really, really blushing. I couldn’t believe it because I had the idea he was going to be shy. But he came up and introduced himself to me.”
Terrence hadn’t seen Tina, either, before their friend pointed her out.
“I could be kind of tunnel-visioned so I had never noticed her. I thought she was pretty but her hairdo … it was a little ’hood,’” he jokes. “I didn’t really know if she was going to be nice or not.”
They talked for a few minutes and Terrence decided she was nice, and he said he would call her that night. She didn’t get that call, and the next day she asked him why. Terrence said he had called her but the woman who answered — Tina’s grandmother — told him Tina was busy washing dishes.
“I told my grandmother she almost ran off my husband,” Tina says.
Their first date was to a Valentine’s Day dance at school.
“My grandmother told me it wasn’t really a date because I wasn’t old enough for that,” she says.
Her grandmother dropped her off, nonetheless, and she went inside to wait for Terrence but he was late.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this dude is not coming,’ but he came,” she says.
It wasn’t that he had been complacent about their “date” — it was just the opposite.
“I was just nervous. I was trying to relax and not be anxious about the whole situation so I was trying to play it cool and I ended up dozing off,” he says. “I was pretty late.”
Tina gave him kudos for showing up after that.
“The picture guy waited and we were the last picture of the night,” she says.
They dated through high school, but took a break when Terrence graduated and went to Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, La. They kept talking, though, and when he transferred to Arkansas Tech University at Russellville, while Tina was attending the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, their proximity led to more time together.
“That’s when we got more serious,” she says.
Terrence proposed to Tina at his grandparents’ 50th anniversary reception, just after they had renewed their vows.
“I prayed and I was just so nervous and I was unsure and I didn’t want to get married and I didn’t want it to fail,” says Terrence of his preparation for popping the question. “My parents got divorced so I asked God if this is what I should do. I really feel like God put this on my heart that this was what I should do and that he would be with me.”
They were married on June 16, 2007, in Tina’s church, Shady Grove Baptist Church in Harmony Grove.
They have three children — Terrence II, 10, Terryn, 8, and Torryn, 3 months.
Tina is a mental health para-professional at Pinnacle Pointe Hospital. Terrence is a lab tech supervisor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Terrence did introduce himself to Tina when the time was right, but she still considers him reserved.
“He was trying to act like he wasn’t shy,” says Tina, who’s glad he talks to her now.