She was an 18th century black Surinamese woman worth millions of dollars. But she sought the forbidden: to marry a white man. Why, when she already had so much?<BR>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 had been set free. After all, how could a woman during a period of slavery and institutionalised discrimination have accumulated so much wealth? And why, 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 is set in eighteenth-century Dutch Guiana (Suriname) where is was not unusual for a white man to solicit 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.