Kamala's Way

by Dan Morain

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  To Claudia, my everything

  1 Shyamala’s Daughter

  If Kamala Harris owes her place in history to anyone, it is to the twenty-six-year-old Indian immigrant who gave birth to her at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, California, in the fall of 1964. Perhaps it was no coincidence that her birth came just two weeks before Election Day, and that it came in California. It was a year and a state that proved to be the perfect incubator for a girl who grew up proving that social progress and bare-knuckle politics go hand in hand.

  That little girl grew up to be a tough, sharp-witted, exacting, hardworking, smart, multilayered, and multicultural woman. Kamala Harris misses little and forgets even less. She has loyal supporters who have been part of her political organization from the start, and she has alienated people who were once as close as family. When the cameras aren’t on, she has exhibited empathy and acts of kindness for people who could not help her, and some people who have known her well see her as cold and calculating. Though she lives on a national stage, Harris shares few personal details. She is a foodie who finds joy in cooking and dining at fine restaurants and out-of-the-way joints. The one time we had lunch she picked a small family-owned Caribbean place across from the capitol in Sacramento; she talked about the varied spices and ate slowly, unlike me, she noted. Mostly, she is her mother’s daughter. People who work closely with her say hardly a week goes by that she doesn’t recall some nugget of wisdom passed along by Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who died in 2009. The one she most often repeats publicly: “You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last.” Sometimes, at big moments in her life, she wells up when she remembers her mom, clearly wishing she were by her side.

  “My mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a force of nature and the greatest source of inspiration in my life,” Harris wrote on Instagram in a post honoring her mother during Women’s History Month in 2020. “She taught my sister Maya and me the importance of hard work and to believe in our power to right what is wrong.”

  Shyamala Gopalan stood a little taller than five feet. She was the eldest of four children of a senior civil servant in a family of high achievers, in a nation that gained its independence from Britain in 1947, nine years after she was born. She was nineteen in 1958 when she graduated with a degree in home science from Lady Irwin College in New Delhi, India, and with her father’s blessing, traveled to Berkeley in search of a higher and more meaningful education. Studying nutrition and endocrinology, she received her Ph.D. and, in the decades ahead, gained recognition for her research in breast cancer. She published more than one hundred research papers in academic journals, and she raised no less than $4.76 million in grants for her work.

  “My mother had been raised in a household where political activism and civic leadership came naturally,” Kamala Harris wrote in her 2019 autobiography, The Truths We Hold. She went on to explain, “From both of my grandparents, my mother developed a keen political consciousness. She was conscious of history, conscious of struggle, conscious of inequities. She was born with a sense of justice imprinted on her soul.”

  In the fall of 1962, Shyamala Gopalan attended a gathering of Black students where the speaker was a young graduate student from Jamaica, Donald Jasper Harris, who was studying to become an economist. He emigrated from Jamaica in 1961, arriving in Berkeley also in search of an education. He was a bit of a radical, or, as economists might say, a “heterodox.” He did not adhere to the traditional economic theories then favored by U.S. universities. Donald Harris told the New York Times that Gopalan, wearing a traditional sari, came up to him after his lecture and was “a standout in appearance relative to everybody else in the group of both men and women.” She charmed him, they met and spoke a few more times, and, as he said, “the rest is now history.”

  Gopalan and Harris married in 1963, the year after Jamaica gained its own independence from the United Kingdom. Their wedding announcement in the Kingston Gleaner on November 1, 1963, reported that they were both pursuing their Ph.D.s. Kamala Devi was born in 1964, and her sister, Maya Lakshmi, two years after that. Devi is the Hindu mother goddess. Lakshmi is the lotus goddess of wealth, beauty, and good fortune. Shyamala told a Los Angeles Times reporter in 2004 that she gave her daughters names derived from Indian mythology to help preserve their cultural identity and said, “A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women.”

  In the mid- to late 1960s, both parents were active in the civil rights movement. Harris tells of being wheeled to demonstrations in a stroller. She tells the family tale that on one occasion, as she was fussing in the stroller, her mother asked what she wanted.

  “Fee-dom!” she is said to have answered.

  Like many academics, Donald Harris was an itinerant in his early years, moving from Berkeley to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin, and back to the Bay Area and Stanford in 1972. The student newspaper, the Stanford Daily, characterized his economic philosophy as Marxist. Whether it was or not, it was not classical. That made his continued employment fraught with risk. In 1974, as his visiting professorship was ending, some of Stanford’s economics professors were reluctant to recommend him for a full-time position. The Union for Radical Political Economics got involved on Harris’s behalf, and the issue became a subject for the Stanford Daily. Students started a petition signed by more than 250 people demanding that the economics department make a “formal commitment” to Marxian economics and maintain a staff of three faculty members working in the field, and that the faculty recommend Harris for a full-time, tenure-track position. Donald Harris has written that he had “no great anxiety or desire to remain” at Stanford. But he was ultimately hired and became the first Black economist to achieve tenure in the Stanford Economics Department. He remained at the university until 1998, when he retired from teaching. Harris still holds professor emeritus status.

  Shyamala and Donald separated in 1969, when Donald was teaching at the University of Wisconsin and when Kamala was five and Maya was three. They filed for divorce in January 1972. Harris wrote in her autobiography that “had they been a little older, a little more emotionally mature, maybe the marriage could have survived. But they were so young. My father was my mother’s first boyfriend.”

  In a 2018 essay, Donald Harris lamented that close contact with Kamala and Maya “came to an abrupt halt” after a contentious custody battle. He blamed the custody arrangement on “the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting (especially in the case of this father, ‘a neegroe from da eyelans’ ”—a “Yankee stereotype” that suggested such a father “might just end up eating his children for breakfast!”). He wrote, “Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children.”

  The final divorce judgment, dated July 23, 1973, shows Shyamala gained physical custody, but that Donald was entitled to take the girls on alternating weekends and for sixty days in the summer. He writes about bringing his daughters to Jamaica to meet relatives and show them the world he knew as a child: “I tried to convey this message in very concrete terms, through frequent visits to Jamaica and engaging life there in all its richness and complexity.”

  “Of course,” Donald Harris wrote, “in later years, when they were more mature to
understand, I would also try to explain to them the contradictions of economic and social life in a ‘poor’ country, like the striking juxtaposition of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, while working hard myself with the government of Jamaica to design a plan and appropriate policies to do something about those conditions.”

  Try as he did, lessons taught by Harris’s mother seems to have stuck more. Harris weaves references to her mother throughout her autobiography. She mentions her father on fewer than a dozen pages. “My father is a good guy, but we are not close,” she told an interviewer in 2003.

  In her official biography on the California attorney general’s website, Harris describes herself as “the daughter of Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, a Tamilian breast cancer specialist who traveled to the United States from Chennai, India to pursue her graduate studies at UC Berkeley.” That biography makes no mention of her father.

  * * *

  In an essay about his Jamaican ancestors, Donald Harris writes about a Hamilton in his family’s past, although the Harris family’s Hamilton, Hamilton Brown, shared little in common with Alexander Hamilton, one of this nation’s Founding Fathers and an abolitionist. “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother, Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town).” Hamilton Brown was born in about 1775 in County Antrim, Ireland, and sailed as a young man to the Caribbean island of Jamaica. His first recorded act in his new homeland took place in 1803, when he sold Black people to another man. In the next three decades, Brown became a willing participant in and perpetrator of the brutal system of Jamaican slavery and was one of its outspoken defenders against the abolitionist movement led by Baptists and Methodists.

  The work was a common route to prosperity for White men of his era and provenance. “Managing slaves was a means of employment, and for white men, owning slaves was a path to material betterment, to independence, and to greater freedom,” Christer Petley, a history professor at the University of Southampton, writes in his book Slaveholders in Jamaica.

  Indeed, Hamilton Brown ascended in Jamaican society, attaining a seat in the House of Assembly, the island’s lawmaking body. An attorney, he was listed as the agent, assignee, executor, guardian, manager, receiver, or trustee for more than fifty estates. Petley writes that estates in Jamaica had as many as two hundred enslaved people.

  Whites owned vast sugar, pimento, and coffee plantations, while enslaved Black people provided the labor. Jamaican slave-produced sugar was central to transatlantic trade, and “more than a third of all slave vessels trading to British America docked there,” Petley writes. At the height of Jamaica’s slave economy, 354,000 Black people were held in bondage by 8,000 to 10,000 White people.

  “In Jamaica, sexual relations between white men and enslaved women were common, and since legal status passed from one generation to the next via the female line, the children of enslaved mothers were born into slavery, regardless of their father’s status,” Petley writes.

  Whatever specific acts of violence Hamilton Brown perpetrated against the people he enslaved almost 220 years ago is lost to history. What of his DNA lives on cannot be known without genetic testing. But Petley writes that “the sexual opportunism of white men was an important vestige of their coercive power and high social status.”

  Among his many roles, Brown became a ranking member of the militia. In the early 1830s, when enslaved people rebelled, he and his militia were deployed to help put the uprising down. At one stop, he and his soldiers located insurgents. Ten were hanged and thirteen received three hundred lashes.

  “Brown worked hard to repress the uprising and was proud of what he did,” Petley writes.

  In 1833, after the slave rebellion, the British government bowed to the abolitionist movement and passed legislation freeing Jamaican slaves. In later years, Brown tried to supplement the shortage of plantation workers by importing laborers from Ireland. In 1842, he offered an apology for not having greater wealth to bequeath to the next generation and lamented the financial hit he took because of “the great deterioration of Jamaican property.” He died in 1843.

  * * *

  Shyamala and Donald Harris lived in Berkeley and Oakland when the East Bay Cities were at the center of the free speech movement and of many kinds of transformative politics for the nation. The anti–Vietnam War movement, the rise of environmentalism, demands for racial justice, the nascent prisoners’ rights movement, and more were part of the swirl of their times.

  “They fell in love in that most American way, while marching for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In the streets of Oakland and Berkeley, I got a stroller’s-eye view of people getting into what the great John Lewis called ‘good trouble,’ ” Harris said at the 2020 Democratic National Convention when she accepted her party’s nomination to be Joe Biden’s running mate.

  They were heady days, and deadly serious. The National Guard was called to the UC Berkeley campus regularly. Tear-gas canisters were launched from the ground and from helicopters. Police shot to death an unarmed protester at a 1969 demonstration over a plot of vacant land that came to be known as People’s Park. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was born in 1966, cofounded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Panthers openly carried guns as they observed police stops of people of color in Oakland. The notion that young Black men could legally display guns alarmed authorities. In May 1967, shortly after Ronald Reagan became governor, Newton and Seale led two dozen Panthers, wearing berets, dark glasses, and leather jackets and carrying unloaded guns, into the California capitol in Sacramento. The Sacramento Bee’s headline read: “Armed Black Panthers Invade Capitol.” The Panthers were there to protest legislation that sought to forbid the open carrying of loaded firearms. Authored by a Republican assemblyman from the affluent Oakland Hills, the legislation included a provision that banned carrying firearms into the capitol. It passed overwhelmingly with Republican and Democratic support.

  With the National Rifle Association’s support, Governor Reagan signed the bill the day after the legislature approved it. “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons,” he said. It was one of California’s first gun control measures. There would be many more, though in later years, the NRA would try to block those measures, with little success.

  That new law didn’t stop the streets of Oakland from being full of strife and danger. In October 1967, police stopped Newton in the city. A gunfight broke out and Officer John Frey was shot to death. Newton, who was shot in the stomach, was charged with murder. “Free Huey” became a rallying cry. Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sent to prison, though a state appellate court reversed the conviction. After three mistrials, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office decided against retrying him, and he was back on the streets, though not for long. He was charged with killing a prostitute and pistol-whipping a man who had been his tailor.

  Newton had been a charismatic leader in the 1960s and became a cultlike figure when he was in prison. Alameda County deputy district attorney Thomas Orloff had a different view. Orloff prosecuted Newton for killing the prostitute and for the pistol-whipping “with limited success.” Orloff, who became Alameda County district attorney, said, “The Huey Newton I saw was basically a gangster.”

  Newton received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, but met an untimely end when he was gunned down on a West Oakland street in 1989 during a drug buy.

  * * *

  While Shyamala Gopalan was witnessing the birth of a new political culture in the United States, she also made sure her daughters knew their Indian heritage and brought them halfway around the world to meet their grandparents. But America and its racial and gender outlooks were sinking in. She also understood that “she was raising two black daughters,” and that in this country, people would view them as Black, Harris wrote in her autobiography.

  Som
e of the lessons Shyamala taught her daughters took place during Thursday-evening gatherings at Rainbow Sign, a Black cultural center in Berkeley. There, guests included Shirley Chisholm, the New York congresswoman and first Black presidential candidate; jazz singer, musician, and civil rights leader Nina Simone; and poet Maya Angelou.

  “This #BlackHistoryMonth, I want to lift up my mother and the community at Rainbow Sign who taught us anything was possible, unburdened by what has been,” Harris posted on social media in 2020.

  But that lesson was not always true for Shyamala. She had been working at UC Berkeley with a friend, Dr. Mina Bissell, who recalled that Shyamala had been promised a promotion that ultimately went to a man. The single mom of Kamala, twelve, and Maya, ten, reacted by getting a job teaching at McGill University in Montreal in 1976 and researching breast cancer at Jewish General Hospital in that city.

  Shyamala had traveled extensively as a child. Her father was a high-ranking civil servant in India who, over the course of Shyamala’s childhood, took posts in Chennai, New Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata. It likely would have felt natural for her to move from California to Quebec in pursuit of a new opportunity. For her eldest daughter, however, the move was intimidating. Kamala recalls in her memoir that “the thought of moving away from sunny California in February, in the middle of the school year, to a French-speaking foreign city covered in twelve feet of snow was distressing.” Shyamala enrolled her in Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, a French-speaking primary school, and later Westmount High School, one of the oldest English-speaking schools in Quebec.

  At Westmount, Kamala Harris took part in pep rallies and started a dance troupe called “Midnight Magic,” and with five friends by her side, she danced to early 1980s pop in glittery, homemade costumes. She also learned a hard reality.