Succotash

by Sandra Hugus

While I was attending Rochester Junior College in Rochester, MN, I had an Anthropology/Sociology professor, Walter Bateman, who loved to stir up the masses with esoteric facts. They frequently showed up on his tests, so everyone intent on passing spent the hour frantically scribbling.
This professor would give one fake lecture a year. The one rule was, once you caught on, you could not tell anyone else. The fake lecture for my year was on a tribe of Pacific Island natives called the Bunyoro. They really exist -- I still have a copy of the book I'd skimmed for class. The Bunyoro in the book were loving and unusual: their language had no word for hate. A people invent words for the ideas they have so they can talk and think about them. Thus, the Bunyoro's language revealed a people with no need for the idea of hate.
The day he gave his fake lecture, however, they turned into a highly bloodthirsty tribe. On fake lecture day, you were to set down your pen and enjoy once you'd caught on. Boy, could he spin them! The further into the hour it got, the wilder the lecture became.
Lots of little clues littered fake lecture day. Anyone just along for the ride was well-rewarded.
"The war party set off through the golden fields of succotash," he pontificated.
Seated right in front of his lectern in the designated A row, I burst out laughing. Gripping the sides of the lectern, he leaned down directly over me, piercing me with his eyes, and intoned, "He who laughs, knows what succotash is."
Most of the people around me were now treating his lecture as the stand-up comic routine it clearly was. Except for my friend Rose. She usually sat in the back of the lecture hall and never took notes. On one of his dreaded true-false tests, on which he subtracted the number right from the number wrong, Rose reportedly earned a -44. I had talked her into trying to pass the class by coming to the front, taking notes, etc.
On that day, of all days, she was trying. Rose tried her hardest. She doggedly wrote down EVERY JOKE HE TOLD.
The Bunyoro made banana beer by hollowing out a coconut tree, filling it with peeled bananas, dutifully squashed by the delicate feet of the brides-to-be, (you remember the brides-to-be? Those women stolen from neighboring villages by the war party who encountered the strange vegetation at the start of the hour?) covering the conglomeration with palm fronds, building a fire under it, and leaving it to stew for three days.
The hour was nearly over. "Are you getting this all down, Rose?" he inquired, again peering over the edge of the lectern.
"Could you repeat the ingredients for banana beer?" Rose nearly whispered.
Oh, could he. He ate it up! He changed several ingredients, added a few, and switched all the quantities around, ending up by having it ferment for four days.
Rose wrote right up to the bell. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was fake lecture day. She'd tried so hard. She got her revenge, though. One of the multiple choice questions on the next test was, "How long does it take banana beer to ferment?"
But, just to prove he did have a heart, both three and four days were among the choices.