A Small Town in Jamaica Watches Kamala Harris Campaign with Pride and Wariness 🇯🇲
'A small town in Jamaica watches Harris campaign with pride – and wariness,' The Guardian, Oct. 27, 2024. The Democratic nominee is proud of her Jamaican roots. Her story inspires some but others wonder if her presidency would benefit the country
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Brown’s Town, in the Jamaican parish of St Ann – where as a child, Kamala Harris spent many holidays with her family – has the unmistakable atmosphere of a close-knit rural Caribbean community. Narrow roads, cocooned by bowing trees and lush vegetation, wind past concrete houses and the rolling hills of the Dry Harbour mountain range. It gets busier in the town itself, where vehicles toot their horns as they manoeuvre past colourfully painted shops and the local market that a young Kamala used to visit with her parents.
The town of 6,000 inhabitants is named after an Irish enslaver, Hamilton Brown, who is believed to have been an ancestor of Harris’s paternal great-grandmother Christiana Brown, known in the family as Miss Chrishy. Heading out of the market area, the road arrives at the Harris family estate in Orange Hill, where Harris’s 86-year-old father, the distinguished economist Donald Harris, was born in 1938. The estate now has a quarry and some family homes. But it was once a place of adventure and delight for Harris, recalled her first cousin Sherman Harris, as he pointed to the areas where they used to play together.
Only a few days younger than the vice-president, Sherman remembers the Christmas holidays Harris and her younger sister, Maya, spent with their family in the Caribbean. “Maya was a little quiet, but Kamala was like a tomboy, running, jumping and leaping around the mountain areas. Miss Chrishy had to call her and tell her to ‘get inside now, it’s dinner time – come and stop the jumping over those places’,” he said. “And she would just do it for the better because her father encouraged her,” he added.
Even as a child, Sherman said, Kamala asked questions that belied her age and demonstrated “a deep level of intelligence and a mindset far above what we were accustomed to as little kids”. When she could not get answers from her peers, she would turn to her dad, he said. Harris has spoken fondly about her parents – Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan, a biomedical scientist who was born and grew up in India – describing “a home filled with laughter and music: Aretha, Coltrane and Miles”. She paid tribute to her father for believing in her, saying:
“At the park, my mother would say: ‘Stay close.’ But my father would say, as he smiled: ‘Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.’ From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless.”...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/kamala-harris-jamaica-roots