The Top Banana

Our swing state finally swung, and no one was more surprised than we were.

My friend Marian was stunned to see so many Obama signs in Detroit suburbs that typically vote Republican. Marian has long been my guide to voting patterns in this state, particularly among Poles, a key Michigan voting bloc (of which he is a member). Alongside die-hard union Democrats in cities like Hamtramck, there are Poles who still blame Franklin D. Roosevelt for handing their homeland to Stalin at Yalta and Poles who fled Detroit in the ’70s and ’80s and would never vote for a black candidate because they blame a string of African-American mayors, including the recently deposed Kwame Kilpatrick, for their city’s devastation.

Many older Polish Catholics fall into this last category, and Marian was so intrigued by the possibility that they might be voting for Barack Obama that he took me to the Banana Festival at St. Hyacinth Church, on the east side of Detroit where he grew up, to hear what the parishioners there were saying.

Poletown was once a vibrant, relatively harmonious district of blacks and Poles. Then the automobile factories like Packard and Dodge Main closed — the hulking ruins still brood ominously above the landscape — and in the 1980s the city used eminent domain to seize nearly the entire area and give the land to General Motors for a Cadillac plant. (One of Poletown’s only remnants, a Jewish cemetery, lies within the G.M. factory’s sprawling grounds.)

The copses of trees and unmown fields in the sparsely populated neighborhood that surrounds St. Hyacinth could fool you into thinking you were in rural Appalachia. The cars in the fenced-in lot behind the church belong to Poles who live in the suburbs but return to the old neighborhood for weekly Mass and yearly fund-raising events like the Banana Festival. (Why bananas? Well, in the old days, every parish put on a festival named for a fruit, and by the time St. Hyacinth got into the act, all the other fruits were taken.)

After a morning Polka Mass, with three musicians in shiny red jackets playing beside the priests at the lovingly decorated altar, everyone trooped next door to eat pork chops and banana bread and to buy raffle tickets to support the church. The parishioners seemed warm and kind, but Marian and I didn’t exactly unearth a cabal of Obama supporters.

A woman selling ice cream in a room with face-painting clowns said she didn’t approve of the way Mr. Obama tries to pass himself off as black despite being raised by a white mother and white grandparents. Another woman was willing to claim that she is the only pro-choice member of her parish, but even she refused to say that she might vote for Mr. Obama.

Our friend Tom, who was selling tokens from a booth, had told us at dinner a few nights before that John McCain is “too old, he has cancer, he isn’t nice.” But he called Sarah Palin “a breath of fresh air,” a phrase echoed by so many parishioners that you could almost feel the wind whooshing through the basement.

The last Democrat Tom voted for was John F. Kennedy. (Tom said Joe Biden reminded him of a salesman, but he softened when he found out that Mr. Biden is Catholic.) Tom would love to vote for a black Republican like Condoleezza Rice, but he is suspicious of Mr. Obama. “Isn’t he a Muslim? And I don’t like that church he belonged to.” He’s surprised that half his neighbors in Clinton Township have put Obama signs on their lawns, especially because “they’re voting for a man I happen to know they wouldn’t sit down to lunch with.”

That might be true, but Marian and I agreed that voting for a black man for president seems a pretty important first step toward sitting down with a black man for lunch. And even if most of the parishioners at St. Hyacinth won’t be swinging for Mr. Obama, if he were to drop by the church some afternoon and offer to take everyone to the Polish Yacht Club (no yachts, just flowered vinyl tablecloths, Red Wing memorabilia and photographs of the pope — the Polish one — beaming down from the walls) for pierogies, kielbasa and a draft of Stroh’s, I think that few, if any, parishioners would refuse.

Eileen Pollack, the author of the story collection In the Mouth.