The anger over the banana stand initially surprised Calderone, she said, because nobody in the community reached out to her. “I did look inward, and I was like, maybe I am culturally insensitive,” she said. “So I started researching race relations and where do we go from here.”

Despite the deepening discord, Snyder told The Daily Beast he has no intention of resigning because he does not believe that will solve the problem. He said he hears the community’s anger and wishes he had handled the gift, which he threw away at home after the meeting, differently. Also, he noted, he is allergic to bananas. Still, nobody could have foreseen that a special summertime council meeting to discuss a new revenue tax proposal would leave Snyder under such intense public scrutiny.Terrence Owens, a school board member, also skewered Snyder. “When he spoke, we saw bananas,” he said, demanding that the council get diversity training. “We have to do better.” To understand the five monkeys experiment is to understand a little bit of the politics that’s been happening in Hutto,” Calderone explained. “I refer to myself as a monkey trying to climb the ladder and getting pulled down, and then what those bananas represent.” Wilcott told The Daily Beast that she and Thompson texted each other, asking, “Did that really just happen?" but did not say anything publicly. Several meeting attendees told The Daily Beast that there was no obvious reaction in the audience. Before long, the banana stand with the monkey motif was the talk of Hutto—a town previously best known for its official symbol: a hippo.

Calderone insisted that her gift’s monkey theme had no racial implications. Snyder apologized for offending anyone but claimed he wasn’t even aware of the monkey trope, and insisted that he was not racist. Thompson said that he did not think the “over-the-top” gift was racially motivated until after Calderone stressed that it was specifically for Snyder. “Then I started to get very angry,” he said. “I understand bringing a prop and presenting it to get your point across, but then gifting it to a mayor, knowing that the mayor has had allegations of being racially biased?” Days after the deal was approved by the council, the lawsuit alleges, Snyder and another council member launched a campaign to disparage Jones and scuttle the severance payout. They allegedly put out a press release that accused Jones of violating the agreement, trashed him in the media, and threatened to ruin his “life and career.”Meanwhile, residents are worried what Snyder’s refusal to resign and the continuing hostility will mean for a community centered around the “hippo way” of kindness and inclusiveness.

That is not how some others at the meeting viewed the gift or the fact that it sat in a place of prominence for the entire meeting. The lawsuit and the massive jury verdict—a sum that exceeds more than 10 percent of the city’s entire budget—put Snyder in a precarious position. At the Sept. 28 meeting, Calderone once again stood at the podium, thankfully without a shopping bag this time. She slammed the anti-banana stand group for never reaching out to her and said they had “no intention of trying to make this into a teachable moment.” In an interview last week, Snyder “100 percent” denied all the allegations made at trial, said there was “a lot of misunderstanding,” and predicted the truth would come out during the appeal. Jones disagreed—and seems to be well aware of the current race controversy enveloping Snyder. The morning after the council meeting, Facebook posts featuring Calderone’s speech and her gift began to pop up. Several residents told The Daily Beast that they immediately thought the fruit stand was racially charged and an example of Snyder’s insensitivity to minorities.When Calderone walked up to the podium, she was carrying a teal shopping bag, which she set down before launching into her speech. After she pulled the banana holder out of the bag and presented it to Snyder, she continued her remarks, which included a series of things she wants for Hutto, from the preservation of natural resources to limited government. When she was done talking, Calderone took the banana holder up to the dais, where it sat in front of the mayor’s face for the rest of the two-hour meeting. Its prolonged presence there has since sparked outraged complaints of racism and calls for the mayor—who is white, like approximately 49 percent of his constituents—to resign.