In the Name of the Mother - How Shyamala Gopalan Harris raised a presidential contender

Shyamala Gopalan Harris did not believe in coddling. Pay her daughters, Kamala and Maya, an allowance for doing chores? “If you do the dishes, you should get two dollars,” scoffed the woman who this past summer, almost two decades after we spoke, would launch a million coconut memes. “You ate from the damn dishes!” Reward the future vice president of the United States—and possible future president—for good grades? Ridiculous. “What does that tell you?” her mother chided. “It says, ‘You know, I really thought you were stupid. Oh, you surprised Mommy!’ No.”

- By Nina Martin - Illustration by K. Wroten

Shyamala Gopalan Harris did not believe in coddling. Pay her daughters, Kamala and Maya, an allowance for doing chores? “If you do the dishes, you should get two dollars,” scoffed the woman who this past summer, almost two decades after we spoke, would launch a million coconut memes. “You ate from the damn dishes!” Reward the future vice president of the United States—and possible future president—for good grades? Ridiculous. “What does that tell you?” her mother chided. “It says, ‘You know, I really thought you were stupid. Oh, you surprised Mommy!’ No.”

I interviewed Kamala Harris’ mother back in 2007, when her daughter, San Francisco’s popular district attorney, was running for reelection. In a city of political superstars—Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom, Jerry and Willie Brown—Kamala stood out for all the reasons she energized dispirited Democrats after stepping in for Joe Biden. She was sharp, empathetic, self-assured, funny. Highly polished, but not too slick. The child of immigrants, she looked like the future. Her policies sounded like the future, too—progressive enough to win support from the city’s lefties but commonsense enough to appeal to crime-conscious moderates.

But while Kamala was friendly, she was also maddeningly elusive, firmly latching the door on anything remotely private. Everyone told me, if you want to understand Kamala, you need to talk to her mother. I wrangled a meeting with Dr. Harris, then a breast cancer researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She arrived at the downtown bistro freshly manicured and coiffed, a ferocious bundle of energy and opinions in a tiny frame.