The Free Negress Elisabeth

She was an eighteen-century black Surinamese woman worth millions of dollars. But she sought the forbidden: to marry a white man. Why, when she had so much?
Elisabeth Samson's immense wealth puzzled many early historians who concluded that it could only have been the result of an inheritance from a master with whom she had lived and by whom she bad been set free. After all, how could a woman during a period of slavery and institutionalized discrimination have accumulated so much wealth? And why, when then, was she so eager to marry a white man in a time when whites established their own rules and standards for all?
The novel, translated from Dutch into English by Brian Doyle, is set in the eighteen-century Dutch Guiana (Surinam) where it was not unusual for a white man to solicite black women. Instead, we remain intrigued with this mysterious, fascinating, and intelligent black woman's dream of marrying a white man, in defiance of all norms and conventions, to gain the acceptance she craves in Dutch colonial society.