Elisabeth Samson, Forbidden Bride is a work of fiction based on the true 18th century story of the first black woman to challenge Dutch law forbidding marriage to white in colonial Suriname, South America.

In the 18th century Dutch plantation colony of Suriname, where wealth is measured by the number of slaves one owns, the Free Negress Elisabeth Samson, educated and wealthy owner of several flourishing coffee plantations, wants to marry her true love, a white military lieutenant.

She must overcome strict Dutch laws forbidding marriage between black and white, and defeat the powerful forces of the colonial Governor and the white planters who make up the Court of Justice. Can she triumph over those who call her whore, covet her property, and accuse her of treason?

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the Stichting Surinaams Museum, Paramaribo, Suriname, South America.

PART ONE:

MOFOKORANTI

(GOSSIP AND SLANDER)

CHAPTER 1

Paramaribo, January 1742

I hadn’t meant to tell Carl Otto what vrouw Mauricius and I had overheard through the open window at our new Governor’s reception, but the words tumbled out of my mouth without thought, like bees escaping a smoking hive.

In the candlelight of our second-floor bedroom, where the night sounds of tropical frogs and insects were kept at bay, Carl Otto took me into his arms and tried his best, as always, to reassure me that the past is over. To avoid Carl Otto’s embrace, Pansu, my darling little squirrel monkey, squeaked and scampered from my waist to the back of my shoulders.

Carl Otto’s words after I blurted out “free whore” were little comfort. “They are only soldiers, Betje. Most of them are the dregs of the earth.”

“But the woman─”

“The woman means nothing. Do you know her?”

“I didn’t recognize her voice and in the darkness I didn’t see her face.”

“What can she know?”

“Everything,” I wailed. “Everyone in this colony knows everything.” This was not a little exaggeration. We are less than two thousand, not including slaves, indeed a close community. “I’m tired of being referred to as a whore; I want to be married,” I whispered. “And I want children.”

Against my neck I could feel Carl Otto’s face relax into a smile. “I’m doing my best in the latter department,” he said. Then he pulled back and with one hand turned my face to his. “Betje, my sable darling. You know we can’t marry.”

“Everyone else can marry,” I protested, refusing to acknowledge what I knew to be an unhappy truth. Carl Otto and I would marry this day if circumstances would so arrange themselves. Had flowed in my veins the slightest amount of white blood I could legally marry Carl Otto in the Dutch Reformed Church with the blessings of both God and our colonial government. But such is not the case; nay, since the period of our first Governor General of Suriname, Cornelis van Aerssen, Lord of Sommelsdijk, marriage between a Negro woman and a white man is not allowed.

It is a bitter irony the way our colonial governance regularly makes contradictory decisions. They disapprove of living in concubinage, yet object if a Negress wants to marry a white man. Nay, they even consider living with a man without marrying him to be whorish. Yet white men in this colony have taken Coloured women as concubines for eighty years, which situations are commonly referred to as, “marriage, Suriname style.” That is the strange state in which Carl Otto and I live.

“Do you think vrouw Mauricius noted the remark?” Carl Otto asked.

I buried my face in the warmth where his shoulder met his neck, and my reply was as a moan.

“Tell me exactly what happened, Betje,” he said in a soothing tone.

The tart words flowed with a familiarity all the worse for their truth. I began to relate how the Governor’s wife had remarked upon a painting in the Governor’s palace depicting a plantation home situated atop a rolling green, and how it had been my pleasure to describe the place to her.

This painting happened to be next to a window that opened to an outside gallery. It being after sunset, the shutters of the tall windows in the grand reception hall had been opened to catch the slightest evening breeze, and bare-footed male servants walked about with tall fans of woven palm fronds with which they gently swept the air to keep the mosquitoes (this being the little wet season) away.

Outside the window some military officers and a few ladies, smoking their pipe-bowls, had been conversing.

“...an experimental execution to terrify their companions, and thus to make them return to their duty.”

They were discussing of course the recent punishment of some recaptured runaways: one slave was hanged alive by the iron hook struck through his ribs, another tied and burnt to death by slow fire, and six women broken alive upon the rack. I was only half-listening, perusing the painting in a sense of well-being lulled by good food and wine, when I heard, “...the free Negress, Elisabeth Samson.”

“The free whore, you mean.”

To my bitter realization, it was a woman who had voiced these words. The Governor’s wife had dropped her eyes in embarrassment, for she had clearly heard. The lady had regarded me with a frankly curious look. Along with a slight sense of superiority, had I seen pity in her clear blue eyes?

The company laughed, and I directed vrouw Mauricius away from the painting and the window, wishing I had paid more attention, for when exactly had their conversation changed from the recaptured runaways to me? They could not know that we had overheard. I felt as if the entire room had suddenly become chilled, the candlelight grown cold and brittle.

Across the room Carl Otto chatted amicably with our new Governor. With my hand at vrouw Mauricius’ elbow, nearly shoving her before me, I moved trance-like in their direction. The many greetings we received along the way suddenly sounded shallow and worthless. No matter how many slaves I own, nor how much property I buy, nor how well-cut is my habit, when I least expect them cruel words sprout like weeds in the garden of my soul.

And then Carl Otto, my husband─for that is how I think of him though he is white and we are not legally married─smiled at me, and the Governor himself with a slight bow welcomed my presence. His lady then complimented my satin stomacher, which bore many more studded jewels than her own. Normally this would have pleased me, but the words free whore still resounded in my ear.

Pleasantries had been exchanged, and Carl Otto, as a prominent Society lieutenant, had the honor to serve His Excellency his first glass of the rum here produced. Shortly thereafter I was relieved when Carl Otto begged leave to depart.

* * *

Not a planter’s wife would have missed for the world the opportunity afforded this evening to meet and appraise His Excellency’s lady, whose given name is also Elisabeth. But of course, she is white and I am black-skinned and therein lies all the difference that anyone would at first glance note. Her gown of claret-coloured velvet was exquisitely trimmed with a fine gold Belgian lace which, I expect, reflects the latest French fashion for our fair sex.

Oh, how the Governor’s palace was set out for the evening! The black servants had spent the entire day just polishing the mirrors with their gilded frames. A thousand and one candle flames on double chandeliers contributed greatly to the warmth and glitter of the reception. Dinner was served on Japan china, and the facets of each crystal goblet were alive with dancing points of light. Seven kinds of meats, including venison, were served along with fowl, and the sweet white anumara fish of the Suriname River. Pasties were plentiful on every table and there was a welcome abundance of Porter and Madeira, and our own fine Sranan rum, making me proud of the abundance our little colony presented.

In the right drawing room, light musical effects were accomplished by the players of the flutes, clavicin, cello and violins. A bright Vivaldi violin fantasy of cheery expression had the most merry effect on our company. Even the staunch faces of the white Dutchmen in the grand portraits adorning the walls seemed to smile down upon us.

All served as a perfect, dazzling stage for the plantation owners, powerful players in our Colony’s various little political dramas. Mostly Hollanders, French Huguenots, Swiss or Germans, they respect my wealth, yet still call me “whore.”

The Chartered Society of Suriname, that august group of Amsterdam merchants and politicians which has managed our businesses...and therefore our lives...for the past sixty years, has honored us with Johan Jacob Mauricius as our new Governor. Oh, we welcomed him in grand style. Of course, he will have to share his power with our own Court of Policy, made up of white sugar planters who periodically rave and scrabble over what is best for us all.

Thanks to the many pipe-bowls which were being enjoyed at the Governor’s reception, a gentle haze softened the glittering edges. I myself had enjoyed the fine Virginia tobacco—admittedly better than our own—that is exceedingly plentiful here. I would have found the evening perfect had not the charming discourse been interrupted by this most distressing incident in front of vrouw Mauricius.

* * *

The foot-boy entered our bedroom and I removed myself from Carl Otto’s arms. Carl Otto sat down on the edge of the mahogany four-poster bed and leaned back on his elbows, one foot on the floor and one extended so that his jackboots could be removed.

“I like this new governor,” he said.

I couldn’t help but smile. “Of course you do. You’re both German, both from the county Cleve.” Pansu hopped from my shoulder onto the bed to examine Carl Otto’s coat pockets, hoping to discover a treat of fruit or sugar candy. He chittered in protest when I picked him up to cuddle his soft grayish-gold fur against my cheek.

“No, it’s more than that,” Carl Otto insisted. He sat up and the foot-boy took his jackboots out of the room to be polished before they were put away. “I believe he has some good ideas on how to manage the Maroon situation.”

That French word for runaway, marronage, has given everyday discourse a name for the offending slaves, Africans mostly from the coast of Guinea or Creoles born in the Colony who have for a hundred years plagued plantation production by regular desertion.

“The Maroons have always posed the biggest threat to the colony,” I said, feeling an odd sense of relief that the subject had been changed from my unpleasant eavesdrop at the Governor’s reception to something over which I felt I had power.

The mere mention of Maroons may cause most any planter to glance with unease over his shoulder. From established villages hidden well into the forest, they attack plantations seeking firearms, tools, and women. I crossed the room to place Pansu in his cage bed for the night.

“I’m glad you put that monkey away before he had a chance to tear at my wig again.” Carl Otto removed his white wig of rolled curls, revealing hair the colour of the sand at Galibi, cut close to his head. “His Excellency has a master plan,” he said. “He says there are only two ways to overcome the problem.”

“Hopefully they are new ways. The present ones don’t seem to be working all that well.”

“His Excellency acknowledges that. He says we could destroy them in one fell swoop, but a campaign of such magnitude would be impossibly expensive. He wants to set them against each other, by making peace with them, one group at a time. Do you think I should order a wig that’s slightly shorter?”

“Well. That is a new idea.”

“The wig or setting the Maroons against each other?”

I sat down on the bed next to him so that he could unlace the back of my stomacher. “I know Kwasiba should do it, but she’s downstairs and I like it when you do it. Making peace with the Maroons, one group at a time...how do you expect the Court of Policy will think about such a peace-making plan?”

“I think he’ll have a hard time selling the idea. The planters will be afraid it’ll encourage even more of their Africans to run away. There’s too much contact as it is between Maroons and the family members they leave behind on their owner’s plantation.” He made an exasperated sound. “I fear I’ve made a knot of this lace.”

“Take your time. The knot will work out if you relax a little.”

I agree with Carl Otto’s view of the Governor’s forth-coming difficulty selling his idea to the plantation owners of the Court of Policy. So far, at my coffee plantations on the Hoer-Helena Kreek, I have been extremely lucky not to have a problem with marronage. This may be because Toevlught and Welgemoed are not on the Cottica River, closer to the coast, or up the Suriname River past Joden Savanne─the Jew’s savanna─where many of the largest Maroon villages are hidden. Also perhaps because I make it a point of good business to keep my properties well-fed, their families together, and avoid ill-use of their bodies beyond what is normal in the course of their quotidian duties. Still, like any responsible planter, I’m aware of the threat posed by marronage.

“Mauricius seems aristocratic enough to garner some supporters among our nouveau-riche planters,” Carl Otto said. “And he’s made a good impression on the Jews, even though none of them will ever be appointed to high government or elected to the Court of Policy.”

The Jews, mostly Portuguese, keep themselves generally segregated from other people, except when it comes to parties and politics. The Jews have always enjoyed much freedom as well as the ear of His Excellency, the Governor. As evidenced by the number of them who had been in attendance this evening, I expect that will be no different with our new Governor Mauricius.

“Impressing the Jews is a significant beginning,” I said. Jewish representatives by custom visit the Governor on the eve of an election to inquire as to which candidate His Excellency favors, and cast their votes accordingly.

The knot in my laces had been worked free and I leaned forward to shrug out of the studded velvet garment that had flattened my breasts and narrowed my waist.

“Indeed, they know how to curry favor, and they know it’s in their best interest to support the Governor.” Carl Otto’s hands were gentle as he kneaded the muscles of my bare back. His voice softened and he leaned forward to place a kiss on the skin below my neckline. “Ah, Betje, my sable beauty...you were so incredibly fortunate to be spared the lash. I was mad with despair when the sentence was handed down.”

A second reminder this evening of unpleasant events that occurred six years past when I was just twenty-one. Having been born free and raised in a comfortable Waterkant mansion, I had been then quite naïve to the ways of the world.

* * *

Much later I lay awake in the big four-poster, listening to the night clatter of small creatures in the foliage outside the house. Beside me, Carl Otto’s breath, coming as it was from his open mouth in soft inhales and exhales, was as reassuring as a heartbeat.

I thought again about the stinging words that had so ruined this beautiful evening, and how different everything would be if Carl Otto and I could marry, like my older sister, Maria, a Mulatto, married to the Dutch planter Frederik Coenraad Bosse.

Such fond memories I have of their wedding, the first Christian wedding I had ever attended. I was twelve and excited beyond words. The ceremony was to be held in the Dutch Reformed Church, the place of my Christian baptism two years earlier.

In the house on Waterkant, with its front porch view of the wide, brown Suriname River, the air was charged with the bustle of wedding preparations. When the dressmaker came upstairs to put the finishing touches on Maria’s yellow wedding dress, my wide eyes watched every movement with a cat-like stare. I was sure that the way the lace of the sleeves fell from Maria’s bare shoulders to meet the drapes of the ample satin skirt must resemble the most beautiful jungle waterfall I had ever imagined.

Twenty-seven-year-old Maria had been married before, at fourteen, to another white planter, the Swiss Pierre Mivela. That was the year before I was born. Ten years later he was murdered during a slave uprising on his plantation, Salzhalen. That is how Maria came to own both Salzhalen, a sugar plantation of more than 400 hectares on the Kabbeskreek, and the large three-story Waterkant house where I had lived as long as I could remember. Pierre Mivela had been kind enough to his wife’s little Negro half-sister, and I had thought our world ended when Pierre was murdered by those marauding heathens.

The Dutch Reformed church was alight with heavy wax candles, even though it was the middle of the day. It was breathtaking to see Maria, on this day so well-adorned, stand to make her vows with her new white husband. It was truly a fantasy to inspire any impressionable young girl to dream, and I was no exception. Every move Maria made was as my own would be, when my turn came. Her smile was that of a confident, willing bride, not a bride given in terms of family business, as is sometimes the case.

Maria was given away by our oldest brother, the free Mulatto Charloo, who had been manumitted along with Maria and our mother in 1713. As a Mulatto and no longer a slave, Maria was free to marry legally in the Christian Church. But I digress... I was saying that Maria’s wedding to Frederick Coenraad Bosse most impressed me. My youthful imagination was alive with girlish love─rich dresses, magical candlelight, and the presence of all my family, including our mother, Mariana.

I saw her sitting in a front row with a dark-skinned man I didn’t know. After the service, as everyone spilled from the church in excited groups, I ran to her. I wanted to throw my arms around her, but I was already twelve then, as I have mentioned, and knew proper restraint.

Yet this did not prevent me from asking her, “M’ma, when will you come to see me?”

She stopped to stare at me, one hand raised to her bosom as if she had just run from the market and was out of breath. Her dark eyes regarded me with a strange distance.

“Pikin Elisabeth, joe kon so bigi,” she said, speaking to me as she always did in Sranan Tongo. In truth, I hadn’t seen my mother in nearly a year, but I didn’t think I had grown that much. When I was younger she used to visit the house on Waterkant more often, and I had questioned her so many times that now she often ignored me. Anyway, I knew the answer.

Now here my mother stood, to me a perfect vision of a Catholic Negro Madonna. Her black hair formed a beauteous globe of gray streaked ringlets. The girl in me longed to touch her dress, embroidered with flowers and adorned here and there with a few gold spangles. As she regarded me she fingered a medallion on a gold chain around her neck. A shawl of fine Indian muslin draped her shoulders, and she carried in one delicate hand a beaver hat, the crown trimmed round with silver, a gift from her new son-in-law for the occasion.

“Will you dine with us today, M’ma?”

“Aye, Elisabeth. I will see you at meneer Bosse’s. Run along now.”

Only later, riding in the carriage from the church to the house, did I think that there was plenty of room and she could have ridden with us.

To console myself, I thought of the stories I’d been told of how my mother came to Suriname. When the planter Jon von Susteren moved from St. Christoffer in the Dutch West Indies to Suriname sometime around 1703, he brought his pretty young slave concubine, Nanoe, with him. She had already birthed a son and a daughter by him, Charloo and Maria. Her master had promised my mother that she and their two mulatto children would have their freedom upon his death. Indeed, he kept his promise and the instructions for their manumission were in his last will and testament. Luckily for my mother, the children were already baptized and von Susteren’s widow, as his executor, had been duty-bound to carry out his provisions. After her manumission Nanoe changed her name to Mariana. New names for new lives, I suppose would be the reason for this action that seems to have become a tradition for so many slaves.

Mariana bore three more children before my free birth in 1715. Not a year later my father, the free Negro Sam, disappeared and was presumed to have been murdered in the jungle. Maria, at sixteen already two years married to Pierre Mivela, removed me from my whimpering mother’s arms. Mariana, crazed by Sam’s fate and consumed by winti spirits so that she knew not what was happening around her, relaxed her arms and thus gave me up. It was almost a year later when she arrived with her wits about her at Maria’s house to inquire after me.

Though Maria had welcomed her visit she made it very clear to my mother that I would remain where I was, to be raised by Maria’s hand and with the opportunity to be educated by Maria’s white husband. Maria had no children and had easily come to think of me as her own. Mariana had gone away without objection. I never hated her for that, indeed on the day of Maria’s wedding to meneer Bosse it had been impossible to consider any unkind thoughts.

It was a perfect day with a blue sky stuffed with white clouds, the beginning of the dry season. As we rode through streets lined with fragrant orange and tamarind trees, the air itself was a veritable perfume and I was still in a dazzle from the thrill of the wedding.

When we rounded the corner at Waterkant, we were met with a sudden putrid wind blowing from the direction of the waterside fort, Zeelandia. At the base of one of the bastions of the fort were staked the remains of a black man who had been broken on the rack and disemboweled while he was still alive, then beheaded and quartered. In the heat of this beautiful afternoon, his rotting parts seemed to shimmer and dance in the distance as if they were still alive.

Charloo said, “The vultures are having their own feast,” and removed his hat in respect for the ’kra, or soul, of the mutilated black man.

As we hurried into the house where all was light and merriment and sweets and wine, I gave a silent thanks to the grace of the Christian God that I had been born free and fortunately spared from the harsh realities of a life in slavery in the Colony.

I thought of my mother and realized she has never spoken of her life on St. Christoffer with the Dutchman von Susteren. I realized how very little I truly knew about the woman who gave me birth─what hardships, discouragements, joys or hopes she may have had before her manumission by the hand of von Susteren’s widow. There is much I would like to ask her, but how to approach such sensitive, private subjects?

Acute was the disappointment I felt when my mother after all did not appear that day for the marriage dinner at the home of Maria and Frederick Coenraad Bosse.

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