For my second election postcard from Michigan, I visited the Banana Festival at St. Hyacinth Church in what remains of Polish Detroit. Here’s a link to the version of the op-ed piece that ran in The Times:
The Top Banana.
And here’s the (longer) version I originally wrote. (Note my prediction that the reverse Bradley effect would be as important as the Bradley effect, not to mention the prediction that Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama would be important. Too bad I cut the part about Powell, whose endorsement came out the same day as my op-ed piece. I kicked myself for days.)
Our swing state suddenly swung, and no one was more surprised than we were.
We knew that African-Americans in Detroit and college students in Ann Arbor would rally around Obama. But the fervor of the volunteers who went door to door signing up voters in both groups produced far more registered Democrats than any of us had predicted.
And we were pleasantly shocked to note a sort of reverse Bradley effect by which white Michiganders who until recently couldn’t admit to themselves, let alone to their neighbors, that they actually might vote for a Democratic half-black senator named Barack Hussein Obama not only made up their minds to do so but put Obama signs on their lawns. One of my neighbor’s customers told her that when her father, a lifelong conservative who lives in the Upper Peninsula, revealed that he was voting for Obama, she became so dizzy she needed to sit down.
When my friend Marian visited his parents in Troy, a suburb of Detroit that typically votes Republican, he was stunned to see so many Obama signs. Marian runs an institute that studies the Michigan economy, and he said that if the auto companies weren’t staggering on the brink of financial collapse and if John McCain hadn’t told Michiganders that manufacturing jobs here were never coming back, you would see few, if any, Obama signs in Troy.
Marian, who is Polish, has long been my guide to the complexities of his people’s voting patterns in his state. There are die-hard union Democrats in Hamtramck, Poles who still blame FDR for handing their homeland to Stalin at Yalta, and Poles who fled Detroit in the seventies and eighties and would never vote for a black man because they blame a string of African-American mayors, including the recently deposed Kwame Kilpatrick, for their city’s devastation.
Many of the older Polish Catholics of Macomb and Oakland counties fall in this latter category, and Marian was so intrigued by the possibility that they might be voting for Obama that he took me to the Banana Festival at St. Hyacinth Church, in the blasted eastside Detroit neighborhood where all of them grew up, to hear what parishioners there were saying.
Poletown was once a vibrant, relatively harmonious district of blacks and Poles who could walk to their jobs at factories like Dodge Main and Packard. Then the factories closed—the hulking ruins still brood ominously above the landscape—and the city used eminent domain to seize the neighborhood and give the land to GM for a Cadillac plant. (One of the only remnants of Poletown, a Jewish cemetery, still lies within the factory’s sprawling grounds.)
The copses of trees and unmown fields in the sparsely populated parish 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 parishioners who live in the suburbs but flock back to their former neighborhood for weekly mass and yearly fundraisers like the Banana Festival. (Why bananas? Well, in the old days, every parish put on a festival, and by the time St. Hyacinth got into the act, all the other fruits were taken.)
After that morning’s Polka Mass, with three musicians in shiny red jackets playing beside the priests, everyone trooped next door to eat pork chops and banana bread and 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.
The woman selling ice cream in the room with the face-painting clowns didn’t approve of the way Obama tries to pass himself off as black despite being raised by a white mother and white grandparents. Another woman was willing to admit that she is the only pro-choice member of her parish, but even she refused—reverse Bradley effect—to say that she might vote for Obama.
Our friend Tom, who was selling tokens from a booth, believes that John McCain is “too old” and “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.
Then again, the last Democrat Tom voted for was John F. Kennedy. (Tom said Joe Biden reminded him of a slick salesman, but he softened when he found out that Biden is Catholic.) Mostly, he votes Republican because he objects to the government taking his money and giving it to people who haven’t worked as hard to succeed as he did, “except for, you know, a widow who lost her husband.” He admires Colin Powell and would love to vote for a black Republican like Condi Rice, but he is suspicious of Obama. “Isn’t he a Muslim? And I don’t like that church he belonged to.” Frankly, he’s surprised that half his neighbors in Sterling Heights put Obama signs on their lawns, especially since “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 parishioners at St. Hyacinth won’t be swinging for Obama, we couldn’t help but think that if he were to drop by St. Hyacinth some afternoon and offer to treat everyone to pierogies, kielbasa, and a draft of Stroh’s at the Polish Yacht Club (no lake, no yachts, just the lone restaurant and bar that remains in Poletown, with flowered vinyl tablecloths, Red Wing memorabilia, and photographs of the pope—the Polish one—beaming down from the walls), few, if any, parishioners would refuse.
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