I first met Sid in the fall of 1969
at the start of my Freshman Year at Yale. His year-long introductory
anthropology course, ANTHRO 20, came highly recommended, but it was big and I
tended to sit up in the balcony to hear his early afternoon lectures.
When a few of the women in my Freshman class (who were also taking his course)
invited him and Jackie to come over to Vanderbilt Hall for a dinner we would
cook, I joined them (though I honestly don't remember cooking anything myself
that evening). Sid was, of course, friendly but I also saw him as an
intimidating, if admirable, person---and he would be "Mr. Mintz" to
me for years to come, despite his efforts to have me switch to calling him SID
during my Senior year.
That in itself is also a vivid memory
I have. I spent many months during my Senior Year doing fieldwork in New
York (in Washington Heights) under Sid's supervision. I would send him
letters from time to time (when I was in New York and not New Haven). One
day I got an envelope from Sid. I remember opening it but not knowing what to
do with it. It was short, and it pretty much just said: "Dear Ms.
Dominguez, If you insist on calling me Mr. Mintz, I will have to call you Ms.
Dominguez." Of course, it was signed "Sid." But I
was 20 or 21 at the time and could not bring myself to call him "Sid."
I think I proceeded to do what many decades of undergraduate students
have since done with me: I avoided calling him anything at all.
Of course, I also remember his many
acts of kindness, then and there, but also in later years. He edited my
300-350 page Scholar of the House Thesis practically line by line, and I
learned a great deal about writing by noticing what he had done with the
sentences I had in my draft. He got me invited to a conference in San
Juan, Puerto Rico, the spring of my Senior Year. He sat very close to the
front of the room and nodded appreciatively as I gave a paper in that
conference (my first ever). And, on that same trip, he invited me to ride
down with him to Ponce to meet Taso (his long-time dear friend Taso, whom I
thought of as Don Taso). It was an invitation I knew was very special,
even though I was just 21 at the time. And he said nothing (or at least I
remember no rebuke) when I told him and Rich (Price) a year later that I would
stay in graduate school at Yale and not transfer to Johns Hopkins, when they
invited me (and a few others) to leave Yale and move to Hopkins with
them. But I imagine that he was disappointed, nonetheless, and that he
tried for many years not to show it.
Yes, Sid was kind, but he also had
high standards and expectations, for himself as well as for those of us he
spotted as interesting and having potential. This made me ever more
concerned as the years went by. Would Sid approve? I worried. Was I
letting him down? I tried to do my own work and make my own decisions,
but I realize that in the back of my mind I often wondered what he thought or
would think. One day in the 1990s, for example, he asked me if I would
let The Johns Hopkins University Press come out with a new edition of my 1986
book, WHITE BY DEFINITION: SOCIAL CLASSIFICATION IN CREOLE LOUISIANA. It was a
book that Rutgers University Press had published but that at that point existed
only in hard cover. I was deeply touched, and somewhat surprised, because
I wasn't at all sure that he had liked the book. He did, of course,
suggest that I might want to write a new Preface to the book, relating my work
to that of others he thought I should mention or deal with. I said yes,
but wondered how much work he was imagining. Rutgers, however, said no,
and decided to bring out the book in paperback on their own.
A second example was a comment he
made sometime before or just after I ran for President of the AAA. He
didn't say much, as I recall. He did say that his friend, Bill Sturtevant, had
described the Presidential Address he had had to give as an odd thing, a genre
of its own, and I got the impression that Sid thought Bill had found the entire
experience of being AAA President unusual and even difficult. But Sid
said nothing else at the time, if I remember correctly. It was as if he
was warning me that it was not likely to be a particularly enjoyable position.
.
But Sid probably liked choices I made
more than I ever imagined, and it was probably always a good thing that I
feared him at least a bit--or feared his standards--as a scholar and a
teacher. He set the bar for me, and I think he always will.
