Little Charles wound up with a different name somehow: Love. In the 1870 census, he is Charles Holland, but in the 1880 census, he is a seventeen-year-old laborer named Charles Love. Whether this change took place because he really did have a father with the delightfully pleonastic name of Phil Love, as his not-entirely-credible death certificate will claim many decades on, or because he liked the word and what it connoted, is unknown. His brother, Richard, also took a different name, but that of Percy. It seems that in the first two decades after the war, some black teenagers turned to their parents and said, in essence, we don’t want the master’s name, you keep it.
At first, Love was marked down as mulatto, like his mother, but in 1900 he became black. There’s nothing especially rare about these adjustments and settlements in the race-designation column. Census moles grow used to them. The tendency is almost always away from complexity, with the miscegenational middle-ground most threatening. The census becomes a rod to drive it out. In place of a vital and sizable population of Ms—mulattos, mestizos, mustees, mixed, multiples, etc.—there would now be only NBCs, negroes, blacks, and coloreds. Except for those pale enough to pass, who silently turn white.
C. N. Love is different. Race may have been more fluid back then, but Love was a salamander. Through the decades in Houston, he was listed as mulatto, and then as black, and then as mulatto, and then as black, and then as negro or colored. We were baffled at first by the unusual pattern until coming across a note in a 1972 University of Texas dissertation by Charles William Grose. The note describes Love’s physical appearance: “a tall, slender albino.” After which certain facts align. His poor eyesight, for example. He was reportedly forced “to hold an instrument” (in the sense of a document) “within six inches of his eyes” in order “to read at all.”
It becomes possible (and enjoyable) to imagine a succession of white Texas census-takers trying to make sense of C. N. Love. He was a black albino, one of those human beings who had so fascinated Thomas Jefferson a century before. Jefferson had known some black albinos among his neighbors’ slaves (Love’s Virginia ancestors?) and describes their bodies in Notes on the State of Virginia with a sensual intensity that almost suggests he had issues with persons neither wholly white nor black. Their skin was “of a pallid cadaverous white,” he wrote, “untinged with red” (though sometimes “freckled”). Their hair was “white, short, coarse, and curled.” Jefferson deemed them “uncommonly shrewd, quick in their apprehensions and in reply,” but noticed that their eyes were “in a perpetual tremulous vibration, very weak, and much affected by the sun.” And yet, he added, “they see better in the night than we do.”*