The Truths We Hold by Kamala Harris. 
In this excerpt from Chapter 1, “For the People”, Harris thinks back on her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a biomedical scientist, who died in 2009. Shyamala had left southern India as a teenager for a graduate programme at Berkeley in California, and Harris recalls her as an imposing presence. “My mother was barely five foot one, but I felt like she was six foot two,” she writes.
Shyamala was raised in a politically active family – her mother, who never attended high school, was a skilled community organiser who worked with abused women, and her father had been part of India’s independence movement. He eventually became a senior diplomat in the Indian government, and the couple spent time living in Zambia after it gained independence in the 1960s, helping to settle refugees.
From her parents, Shyamala inherited a keen political consciousness, which she passed on to her own daughters, Kamala and Maya. “She was conscious of history, conscious of struggle, conscious of inequities,” Harris writes. “She was born with a sense of justice imprinted on her soul.” Read the excerpt below.
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My parents often brought me in a stroller with them to civil rights marches. I have young memories of a sea of legs moving about, of the energy and shouts and chants. Social justice was a central part of family discussions. My mother would laugh telling a story she loved about the time when I was fussing as a toddler. “What do you want?” she asked, trying to soothe me. “Fweedom!” I yelled back.
My mother surrounded herself with close friends who were really more like sisters. My godmother, a fellow Berkeley student whom I knew as “Aunt Mary,” was one of them. They met through the civil rights movement that was taking shape in the early 1960s and was being debated and defended from the streets of Oakland to the soapboxes in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza. As black students spoke out against injustice, a group of passionate, keenly intelligent, politically engaged young men and women found one another – my mother and Aunt Mary among them.
They went to peaceful protests where they were attacked by police with hoses. They marched against the Vietnam War and for civil rights and voting rights. They went together to see Martin Luther King Jr. speak at Berkeley, and my mother had a chance to meet him. She told me that at one anti-war protest, the marchers were confronted by the Hell’s Angels. She told me that at another, she and her friends were forced to run for safety, with me in a stroller, after violence broke out against the protesters.
But my parents and their friends were more than just protesters. They were big thinkers, pushing big ideas, organizing their community. Aunt Mary, her brother (my “Uncle Freddy”), my mother and father, and about a dozen other students organized a study group to read the black writers that the university was ignoring. They met on Sundays at Aunt Mary and Uncle Freddy’s Harmon Street home, where they devoured Ralph Ellison, discussed Carter G. Woodson, debated W. E. B. Du Bois. They talked about apartheid, about African decolonization, about liberation movements in the developing world, and about the history of racism in America. But it wasn’t just talking. There was an urgency to their fight. They received prominent guests, too, including civil rights and intellectual leaders from LeRoi Jones to Fannie Lou Hamer.
After Berkeley, Aunt Mary took a job teaching at San Francisco State University, where she continued to celebrate and elevate the black experience. SFSU had a student-run Experimental College, and in 1966, another of my mother’s dear friends, whom I knew as Uncle Aubrey, taught the college’s first-ever class in black studies. The campus was a proving ground for redefining the meaning and substance of higher education.
These were my mother’s people.
In a country where she had no family, they were her family – and she was theirs. From almost the moment she arrived from India, she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the black community. It was the foundation of her new American life. DM
The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris is published by Penguin Random House SA (R295). Visit The Reading List for South African book news, daily – including excerpts!