Politics at the Five-and-Dime

"I said, '$9.25 an hour,' " Fleck says. "He said, 'We can't do that, but we can do $9 an hour.' "

She takes home $300 a week. Dollar General provides her health plan, and she pays in $42 a week for it. She drives her Taurus four miles to work, but because of gas prices, no more aimless drives. To help with expenses, she rents out a spare bedroom of her mobile home.

So when a candidate comes along and uses the word "change," she is receptive, even if his name is Barack Hussein Obama. "A part of me thinks that, and I hate to say this, that because he is black -- or partly black -- and then struggling to get to higher places in life, maybe he will say, 'I know what you are going through,' " Fleck says.

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Forty-one days before the election, she wakes up and puts on make-up, has a cup of coffee and then vacuums. On the drive to work, she passes an old ranch house with a "Veterans for McCain" sign in the yard. Moving through the more upscale section of Southfield, she notices an Obama sign in front of a gated mansion and wonders who lives there. The Dollar General sits in the corner of a concrete plaza in Southfield. Fleck works the register, restocks and rides herd over the part-time employees who work the aisles of discount life. The customers are mostly working-class and African American.

Fleck was at the register recently when two female customers picked up a copy of the Globe tabloid with the headline "SARAH PALIN SEX SCANDAL: the lies, the baby secret, the raunchy photos." One of the women said to the other that if a black candidate's 17-year-old daughter were pregnant, America wouldn't be so charitable. Fleck glared at the customers but kept ringing them up. "If I said something like that in front of a black person, do you think I'd get away with it?" she later asked. If she was willing to put race aside, why couldn't they?

There is a donation jar at the register for a literacy fund and Fleck notices how even the poorest customers put a few coins in. She worries about them. "Prices have gone up more in the last six months than the entire six years I've worked there, " she says. "I'm so glad my kids are grown." She takes her lunch hour in her car. Walking out to the scrappy parking lot, she sits in her Taurus with a bag of chips and uses the time to think. "Once in a great while I'll go to Subway," she says.

On the night a truck brings a delivery, she arrives at 8 and doesn't stop moving till past midnight. "No matter if you're male or female, 20 or 60, it has to get done," she says.

The next morning, she's at home when her store manager calls. The manager suspects an employee stole a bottle of green tea while unloading the truck because she found the empty bottle. The conversation about the missing green tea goes on for 10 minutes. Finally she hangs up and shakes her head. "As manager, she is accountable for everything," Fleck says. "I feel for her."

Recently, and somewhat tentatively, she asked her manager whom she was voting for.

"Uh-oh, I don't want to start a war here," the manager said, according to Fleck. "Who are you voting for?"

Obama, Fleck said.