This undated photo provided by the Kamala Harris campaign in April 2019 shows her as a child at her mother’s lab in Berkeley, Calif. (Kamala Harris campaign via AP)
“It’s her saying, ‘I believe in you and I want people to see what I see in you,'” Simon says. Remembering her brush with the senator’s mother, Simon says: “If I got that from Shyamala just in that one moment, can you imagine the many jewels Kamala got from her growing up?”
It’s an influence that far outweighed that of Harris’ father. He and her mother separated when she was 5 before ultimately divorcing. She writes of seeing him on weekends and over summers after he became a professor at Stanford University.
In a piece he wrote for the Jamaica Global website, Harris says he never gave up his love for his daughters, and the senator trumpeted her father as a superhero in her children’s book. But the iciness of their relationship was on display in February when she jokingly linked her use of marijuana to her Jamaican heritage. Her father labeled the comment a “travesty” and a shameful soiling of the family reputation “in the pursuit of identity politics.”
The senator is curt in responding to questions about him, saying they have “off and on” contact and that she doesn’t know if he’ll have a role in her campaign. Labrie says though the father attended his daughter’s Senate swearing-in, he wasn’t at her campaign kickoff. He thinks the marijuana hubbub worsened their relationship. “I think that was the straw that really broke the camel’s back,” he says.
The singularity of her mother’s role in her life made her death even harder for Harris. Gopalan Harris relished roles in her daughter’s early campaigns but was gone before seeing her advance beyond a local office. The senator says she still thinks of her constantly.
“It can still get me choked up,” she said in an interview. “It doesn’t matter how many years have passed.”
The senator still uses pots and wooden spoons of her mother and thinks of her when she is back home and able to cook. Her mother’s amethyst ring sparkles from her hand. She finds herself asking her mother for advice or remembering one of her oft-repeated lines.
She pictures the pride her mother wore as she stood beside her when she was sworn in as district attorney. She remembers worrying about staying composed as she uttered her mother’s name in her inaugural address as attorney general. She thinks of her mother asking a hospice nurse if her daughters would be OK as cancer drew her final day closer.
“There is no title or honor on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’ daughter,” she wrote. “That is the truth I hold dearest of all.”
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