A small town in Jamaica watches Harris campaign with pride – and wariness

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.

Kamala Harris and her sister, Maya (far right), spend time with their cousins in Jamaica. Photograph: Courtesy of Kamala Harris

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.”

The New York Times reported this month that relations between father and daughter grew strained after her parents’ divorce in 1972. The relationship worsened over the years, according to the article, which claimed that Harris had been upset when her father did not attend Gopalan’s funeral in 2009.

Sherman dismissed the reported rift as “total rubbish”.

“We know that, but we don’t fight issues with people because it’s a losing battle. People have all kinds of different views. I even saw [people] on social media saying her father said he is not going to vote for her, but it’s not true. He is in full support of her, and he is happy for her,” he said.

After her parents’ divorce, Harris’s childhood was mostly split between Montreal, where her mother taught at McGill University, and California, where her father taught at Stanford University.

“My father, like so many Jamaicans, has immense pride in our Jamaican heritage and instilled that same pride in my sister and me,” Harris told the Washington Post in 2021. “We love Jamaica. He taught us the history of where we’re from, the struggles and beauty of the Jamaican people, and the richness of the culture.”

The home where Kamala Harris’s great-uncle, Newton Harris, lived, in Orange Hill, St Ann, Jamaica. Photograph: Sharlene Hendricks/AP

Donald Trump has sought to question Harris’s mixed heritage, falsely claiming that she had only identified with her mother’s ethnicity. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went – she became a Black person,” he said.

But Sherman Harris said that the connection between his cousin and Jamaica has always been strong: “Jamaicans are indeed proud of her, and Jamaicans ought to be proud of her,” he said.

Certainly, in St Ann parish, there has been strong support for the Democratic candidate. Mayor Michael Belnavis told CNN: “You have to recognize individuals who come from humble abodes and really excel … Coming from Brown’s Town is as humble as it gets.”

Harris’s achievements – as San Francisco district attorney, California senator, vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate – have inspired Jamaicans across the island.

“It says to me that it doesn’t matter your race or your background. As long as you hold your head up high, know what you want and go for it, you can be whatever you want to be,” said Alexcia White, a journalism student in Kingston. “She just makes me proud to know that she is of Jamaican descent and making big waves in the US.”

Others question whether a Harris presidency would actually bring any concrete benefits for the country.

“Will she do anything that will improve our economy? I don’t see how her becoming president will affect Jamaicans,” said architecture student Dana McCallum, who expressed hope Harris could make US visas more accessible for Jamaicans if she won.

Kamala Harris with her paternal grandmother, Beryl, in Jamaica. Photograph: Courtesy of Kamala Harris

Marlon Hill, a Jamaican-American lawyer who served as an elector for Florida for Barack Obama in 2008, warned about overstating Harris’s connection to Jamaica, adding that “Kamala’s immigrant story is unique, and we should not draw a straight line to it being exactly the same as our own experience”.

He said: “Jamaicans want her to say more vocal, visible things about their connection. And I don’t know if we’re going to get that in this campaign because she’s running to be the president of the entire United States of America, and not just for Americans of Jamaican descent.

“What I would say, though, is that when she wins, it’s going to be up to us, as Jamaican Americans, to hold her accountable to have a keen interest in her heritage and in how that experience can be leveraged for the benefit of Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean.”

Not all Jamaican Americans are Democrats: Commonwealth Games gold medalist Claston Bernard, who ran for the United States House of Representatives as a Republican in 2021, said that, notwithstanding Harris’s Jamaican roots, he could not support her policies, citing his views on religious freedom, abortion and wealth taxes. “Jamaicans should be very cautious about getting behind socialist policies that do not support wealth building, are a threat to religious worship, or attack the rights of people to bear arms to protect themselves and their properties,” he said.

Whatever their views, the elections on 5 November are expected to be a historic moment for Jamaicans at home, in the US and around the world. In the small community of Brown’s Town, Sherman and other residents will be looking forward to the moment Kamala is declared president of the US.

“I have no doubt that the American people will favour her because she is getting good support,” Sherman said, adding: “She is going to make history, and Jamaica’s name, its flag, is going to fly high once more!”