The Times Magazine 43an assured performance at a town hall. But
in the first phase of the primary she remained
unreadable – not the revolutionary, not the
wonk; not the fresh-faced millennial or the
safe bet. To the extent that she had crafted
a persona, it was a contradictory one,
evading categorisation.
By the time we met, the first Democratic
debate was only three weeks away, and Harris
urgently needed to define herself and her
platform. “The challenge is, I think, people
rightly want to have a sense of who somebody
is,” she told me. “I’ve been thinking a lot about
it recently, ’cos I know I need to frame it.”
Harris, in 2019, was supposed to be a
senator working alongside the first female
president of the United States, not yet a
candidate herself. Campaigning in the spring,
she sometimes seemed startled, like an
understudy who’s just found out that the
leading lady broke her foot. Her stump
speech, delivered seamlessly, was nonetheless
forgettable. But she applied herself to the
task of candidacy with A-student intensity.
After our coffee in Beverly Hills, she was
scheduled for back-to-back events and then
a red-eye to DC. “In high school, when I was
getting distracted by other things, my mother
would say, ‘Don’t do anything half-assed,’ ”
Harris told me.
During her Senate campaign, Harris’s
penchant for high-end travel made her staff
cringe. These days, she carries a small tote and
sits in economy. In April, on a flight to Iowa,
connecting through Chicago, Harris found
her way to the middle of the plane and sat
in an exit row. As it happened, the Rev Jesse
Jackson had a seat nearby, and he switched
to sit next to her. In transit, people stopped
her at airport gates, in corridors, outside the
ladies’ loo. She always had a minute to hear
from them, nodding thoughtfully, head slightly
cocked, while her assistant collected an email
address for follow-up.
The next morning, Harris was scheduled to
appear at a house party in Des Moines, Iowa.
Harris spoke about her mother’s experience.
“She was one of the very few women of colour
in science,” she said. “When I decided to run,
she said, ‘Honey, you watch out for what’s
going to happen, because there are still certain
myths about what women can do and cannot
do, in spite of the fact of what women actually
do in life.’ And she said, ‘Two of those myths
are that women can do certain things but not
necessarily be in charge of your security or
your money.’ In spite of the fact that who is
the lioness protecting those cubs at all costs?
Who is it invariably sitting at that kitchen
table in the middle of the night trying to
figure out how to get those bills paid?”
Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan,
the Brahman daughter of a diplomat from
Chennai, graduated from the University
of Delhi at 19, and, avoiding an arranged
marriage, went to Berkeley to study nutrition
and endocrinology. There, she met another
graduate student, Donald Harris, from
Jamaica, who was pursuing a PhD in
economics. The student civil-rights movement,
centred on the Berkeley campus, gave the
two young immigrants a shared context. They
were married while still in graduate school
and Kamala was born in 1964; another
daughter, Maya, came two years after that.
Donald Harris got his doctorate, and the
family followed him as he took jobs at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
at Northwestern, and at the University of
Wisconsin. Eventually, he was hired as a
professor of economics at Stanford, where he
is now emeritus. Gopalan, who had earned her
PhD, began a career in breast-cancer research
at Berkeley. They separated when Kamalawas seven, splitting what little they had. Her
mother got the slide projector, the movie
screen and the 20 albums her father had in his
possession at the time. Her father got three
metal bookshelves and a filing cabinet.
In an essay about the Harris family
history, on a website devoted to the Jamaican
diaspora, Donald Harris writes that he
encouraged his children to believe “the sky is
the limit”, but also told them, as relatives had
told him, to “memba whe yu cum fram”.
According to Harris’s 2019 memoir, The
Truths We Hold, Gopalan chose to remain
on the top floor of a yellow stucco house in
Berkeley. The family unit, as Harris configures
it, was matriarchal – “Shyamala and the girls”.
She devotes dozens of pages to describing the
lessons that Gopalan imparted. “My mother
cooked like a scientist,” she writes. “She had a
giant Chinese-style cleaver that she chopped
with, and a cupboard full of spices. I loved
that okra could be soul food or Indian food,
depending on what spices you chose.” Hindu
customs and cosmology infused their lives.
The name Kamala means lotus, and is another
name for the goddess Lakshmi.
Growing up, Harris was surrounded by
African-American intellectuals and activists.
One of her mother’s closest friends was Mary
Lewis, who helped found the field of black
studies at San Francisco State University.
When Gopalan worked late at the lab, Kamala
spent time with her “second mother”, Regina
Shelton, who ran a daycare centre in the
apartment below theirs, decorated with posters
of abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner
Truth. Harris writes that Gopalan “knew that
her adopted homeland would see Maya and
me as black girls, and she was determined
to make sure we would grow into confident,
proud black women”.
In her late teens, Harris fell in with a group
of friends who were bound for historically
black colleges. “We all went to private school,
we all were educated, we all were very much
parented, but we knew kids that weren’t,”
Derreck Johnson, a restaurateur in Oakland,
told me. He attended the same Catholic
school as Maya before going to Fisk University,
and remains close to the family. “The idea
of the struggle was embedded in us from
our mothers, who told their stories,” he said.
Kamala went to Howard University and
returned to San Francisco for law school. By
then, Maya, who had given birth to Meena at
17, was in college, so Kamala and her mother
often took Meena for overnights and
weekends. The matriarchy was intact.
Gopalan, who died of colon cancer in
2009, had high moral standards. Five feet
tall, she commanded respect. Harris now tells
audiences that, whenever she complained,
her mother issued a challenge: “Well,
Kamala, what are you going to do aboutKamala, left, with her sister, Maya, and mother, Shyamala, 1970. Right: with her husband, Douglas Emhoff, in 2015