She Mentioned Him With A Smile

By Dennis Edwards
Columnist

It was a brief illustration, within an important moment, during a major DNC convention. But the cause for celebration in my spirit came from the smile on Vice President Kamala Harris’ face as she reflected on the advice her father gave her as a child. While playing in a park she recalled how her father, Dr. Donald Harris, a world renowned and retired Stanford University Economics Professor, overruled her mother’s urges for caution as she ran while playing. She talked with adoration through slight crackles in her voice about how he taught her as a young child to be fearless. “My father would say, as he smiled” … ‘Don’t let anything stop you.’” She remembers the love in that smile as much as his advice. 

In that moment I realized Kamala is a “Daddy’s Girl.” I could see it in her eyes and the brief smile she allowed to slip through while talking about him. There was a sense of relief in pride as she told that story. As if she’d been wanting to say it for a long time. The magnitude of this moment is in her eyes. Just as her sister looks like her mom. Kamala looks very much like her Dad. My sense is she acts like him as well. Maybe I can see it because I’m a “Daddy’s Boy.” My mother and I were close. She and my stepfather Henry Hardie raised me and my brother after my father Leroy T. Edwards, Sr. died of a heart attack when I was four-years-old. I love and loved them deeply.

But even after death I’ve always had a special connection to my dad. I am his doppelgänger, so to speak. I look like him, talk like him, probably think like him and write like him. So does my son Justin Dennis. Denying either parental connection limits the sunlight under which we all live our lives. The light of and from a father and mother makes us who we are. Where we have pride in one and not the other exists a lasting void.

When she talked about Dr. Harris, I saw something familiar as the “Daddy’s Girl” look flashed across her face. The expression as she told that story and her appreciation for his teaching her determination … ‘don’t let anything stop you’” is apparently practiced everyday in her life. Even on the stage his sense of fairness is front and center as she made sure all of her nieces and nephews were part of her inauguration and received their moment in the spotlight. There was no denying the love and admiration she has for her dad.

Much is made of her mother’s role in the Vice President’s and her sister’s lives. But it’s clear she is her father’s child. I want to see them together at the White House one day. It would be good for them both. Good for the nation, too. Good for fathers left out of their children’s lives for whatever reason. Good for the estranged and for faithful fathers who can say more in brevity, silence and through their actions than many utter in a life time of words. 

Imagine what being brought to the White House as the father of the Vice President and or the father of the President Elect of the United States would mean to him. Imagine what it would symbolize to the millions of men who look like her, as well as those who don’t, who’ve played major roles in the lives of their children but were shut out by family dynamics beyond their control.

Imagine what that small gesture of appreciation would say to the millions of fathers out there who did for their daughters and sons what her father got the chance to do for her in spite of likely intra family politics and cultural bias.

Reconciliation always heals more than one wound. It is its own special kind of contagion. In the twinkle in her eyes I see a glimpse of a Daddy’s Girl. A peek, a sliver so to speak. But it is there and I’m glad she shared it with a world that needs to know how special both her parents are and were.

(Dennis Edwards is a Major Market Emmy and Virginia Associated Press Broadcasters Award Winning T.V. and WRVA Radio News Anchor, Investigative Reporter, Columnist and Pastor. He is a graduate of Virginia Union University and its Samuel Dewitt Proctor School of Theology)

(Copyright August 2024)