By CHICAGO — Doris Johnson and Stacey Johnson-Batiste huddled backstage at the United Center on Monday night, preparing to deliver their mother-daughter duet of a convention speech, when Kamala Harris strode toward them, the hall still resounding with cheers from the Democratic presidential nominee’s brief introductory appearance.
Johnson, at age 88, a close friend of Shyamala Gopalan Harris, the vice president’s late mother, had developed a sudden chill from a blast of air conditioning. Her mouth went dry and she fretted that it would make her voice raspy. Johnson-Batiste, who first met Harris in kindergarten, had never used a teleprompter before, and the only rehearsal the organizers provided was in a backroom without one. Afraid that she would have difficulty reading the words from that distance, she memorized her lines, but a speechwriter had made some late changes, so she had to relearn them.
Their anxiety vanished at the sight of their old friend.
“You’re speaking, right?” Harris said as she hugged them.
“Yeah, we’re about to go on!” Johnson-Batiste said.
“Oh, my lord,” Johnson said. “I just couldn’t imagine when Stacey called me and told me you wanted me to come. I said, “Whaaat? Are you serious? And I had just had my 88th birthday. … All my days, all my years, and then something like this would happen that I would really witness this.”
The hotels of Chicago this week are buzzing with friends of Harris from all stages of her life: her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters, her colleagues when she was district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California, and early supporters calling themselves Originals who hitched onto her star when she came to Washington as a senator in 2017 and then launched her first truncated bid for the presidency two years later. All are part of her story. But if, as the saying almost goes, the child is the mother of the woman, then much can be gleaned from those who first knew the child.
It was Hillary Clinton, the first woman to reach these political heights, who popularized the phrase “It takes a village,” but it was Harris who more clearly lived it. Her childhood in the flatlands of West Berkeley was shaped by a tight-knit group of African American friends who embraced Shyamala, Kamala and her younger sister, Maya. They included Doris and her husband, Robert Johnson, Sherman and Mary Williams, and Regina and Arthur Shelton, among others, many of whom had known Shyamala since her days at the University of California at Berkeley when she joined a discussion group on Black history.
In one sense, Harris’s story mirrors that of the Black politician who paved the way for her, Barack Obama. Both were mixed-race, with Black fathers who came from different lands — Kenya for Barack Obama Sr., Jamaica for Donald Harris. Both fathers were intellectuals trained in economics who wanted to help their homelands, but who left their wives and children behind — the elder Obama when Barack was a baby, Harris when Kamala was only 5. Unlike Obama Sr., Donald Harris stayed mostly in the United States and remained part of his daughters’ lives after he separated from their mother, but only a small part, and it was left to the “uncles and aunts” to fill the void.
The journey that took Johnson-Batiste and her mother, the last living member of the older generation, to that moment backstage at the Democratic National Convention began 54 years ago when Kamala and Stacey were in the same kindergarten class at Berkwood Hedge School. Although Stacey and Kamala were classmates only that single year, soon separated by different schools and later at times by different cities, they developed a lifetime bond of sisterhood, the sort of deep friendship where they could pick up exactly where they had left off no matter how long they had been apart, and could communicate a shared feeling with just a look. Johnson said it was the same for her and Shyamala. A memory she most cherishes is a photograph at a Mother’s Day brunch of her bent back in raucous laughter at something Shyamala had just said.
As Johnson and Johnson-Batiste explained during a recent joint interview at the Sofitel Hotel here near Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, the key to appreciating Harris was through Shyamala, who was born in Madras (now Chennai), India, arrived in the United States for graduate school at age 19, earned a PhD at Berkeley in nutrition and endocrinology, and spent her career as a breast cancer researcher.
“Kamala is just like her mother,” Johnson said. “I used to tell Shyamala, ‘She is just like you, Shyamala.’ Very, very similar. Very smart. Very independent. Forceful. Shyamala was a no-nonsense woman.”
“But [Shyamala] was very well-rounded, had many talents,” Johnson-Batiste added. “A terrific cook, a renowned scientist, an absolute fabulous mother to Kamala and Maya, and a great friend to my mom. And she enjoyed life. And that’s the way Kamala is, too.”
Cars were a central part of that enjoyment. As Johnson briefly mentioned in her convention speech, “On weekends, we’d pile into my 1966 Mustang … and off we’d go … to the movies or some adventure,” mothers in front, girls in back. That sporty dark green hardback was not the only car that bonded them. The mother-daughter group would also tool around in Shyamala’s clunky Dodge Dart, and years later, after Stacey got her driver’s license, she would pick up Kamala in her dad’s Cadillac Coupe DeVille, and “we’d go to San Francisco on the town and dance so much our feet would hurt and we’d have to take our shoes off.”
When Donald Trump recently made the claim that his surprise new presidential opponent was a South Asian who “happened to turn Black,” he not only demonstrated a lack of understanding about the lives of people of mixed races, but also about Harris’s early life. Her mother inculcated her daughters in both cultures. They learned the food and music and sensibility of their mother’s Indian roots, but they lived in a predominantly Black neighborhood and were surrounded by Black life. Two Black players on the Oakland Raiders, Larry Todd and L.C. Joyner, lived down the street, not far from the West Campus public school where the Black Panthers ran a free breakfast program.
The matriarch of the neighborhood was Regina Shelton, who ran a day-care center below the second-floor apartment in the yellow stucco duplex on Bancroft Place where Shyamala and the girls lived. Mrs. Shelton, as everyone called her, with her hair in a bun and a clipboard in her hand, knew the name of every kid in the area and made sure that they appreciated Black history. Her school was all about Black excellence. There were posters of Aretha Franklin and Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois and Black doctors and writers and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” on her classroom walls.
Carole Porter, who lived down the street and met Kamala in first grade when the city’s volunteer busing program found them riding the bus together up to Thousand Oaks Elementary School in the predominantly White and wealthier Berkeley Hills, said that Mrs. Shelton was a profound influence in shaping the sensibility of Kamala and all the Black children in the neighborhood. “It seemed she had a wisdom about her,” Porter recalled. “I know that she helped mentor Shyamala to help her daughters be Black women. Be strong and proud about it.”
To Johnson-Batiste, the prevailing sensibility of the village in which she andHarris grew up was one of activism, intellectual curiosity and fearlessness — attributes that carried her friend to the United Center as the Democratic nominee for president. Johnson-Batiste said she first saw those attributes when a boy in their art class at Mrs. Shelton’s took a pottery piece that she had made and threw it to the ground, shattering it. Kamala upbraided the boy, which made him so mad that he picked up a broken piece and slashed Kamala above the eye, leaving a scar that is still there today.
Johnson-Batiste and her mother were at Johnson-Batiste’s house in Reno, Nev., that Sunday last month when President Joe Biden revealed that he would not seek reelection and wanted Harris to succeed him. “It was amazing,” she recalled. “I kind of felt like this was going to happen anyway. I just felt this was the plan, this was God’s plan. Like the universe, everything was lining up the way it was supposed to be. And this time was the perfect time. Like when she ran for president in 2019, that kind of set the stage but it wasn’t her time. But now she is bringing all of her experience, all of her network and these phenomenal people who have been with her from the Berkeley village to the DA’s office to the AG’s office to the Senate to the sorority, bringing all of that to bear. You can see what’s happening. It gives me the chills.”
Johnson, looking back on the moment when she and her daughter took the stage at the convention, said that her hoarse voice disappeared as soon as she walked onto the stage and looked out at the vast audience. “Once I got out there, I just felt good. I felt happy,” she said. “I only wish that her mother could have been there to see it.”
