In this fascinating historical novel, Carolyn V. Hamilton takes us back to the South American country of Suriname in the 1740s and, Elisabeth Samson, a wealthy free black woman whose major ambition and obsession is to marry a Dutch military man, Carl Otto. The author ostensibly bases her story on previous undiscovered diaries of Elisabeth Samson, found when she was a community development volunteer in the capital, Paramaribo.
This device is likely part of the fiction itself, but it does not matter because the author has done her research so well that we are immediately caught up in the politics, customs, and rich tapestry of life in 18th century Suriname.
Traded from the English by the Dutch in 1667, Suriname was one of the most successful plantation colonies in the West Indies. It relied on imported slave labor to raise sugarcane and by the end of the 1700s had over 53,000 inhabitants with the slaves outnumbering whites at about five to one. Some slaves who came over earlier in the colonization period were manumitted when their masters died and were left a bit of property. Their children were born free. Elisabeth Samson was one of these and, by the 1740s, through trade and acquisition, she had expanded her holdings and wealth so that she herself became a slave owner. Her only ambition now was to marry a white man.
However, Dutch law permitted her to marry a black man or even a mulatto but not a white. She sought to change that law. To go further with the plot would be to create a spoiler, so I will forebear.
What made the book compelling to me was the immersion in the landscape, the cuisine, and the social life in Surname. One experiences the inundations of the heavy tropical rains during the wet season, the muddy roads, the brown river overflowing its banks. And then when the storm dies down, the flocks of white herons, parrots and toucans, and the cool richness of the air, and the smell of the earth as the sun comes out and illuminates the green hills. One sits on the veranda drinking madeira wine, or retreats to the coolness of the house to eat a rich meal of pango stew, followed by dessert of mango, sweets, and coffee. In the evening one goes in formal dress to visit a neighboring plantation and dance with others clothed in the latest fashions from Paris or Amsterdam.
But always there is the undercurrent of instability and fear. The slaves are brutalized and often escape. They form “maroon communities” of self-rule in the deep jungle from where they launch sporadic attacks on the isolated plantations and slaughter the white masters and their families. None of this much affects Elisabeth, who is herself a slave owner and seems inured to the brutality inherent in the system and unaware of any moral contradictions. Her major concern is her integration into the white community and attaining permission to marry Carl Otto, her consort. Her determination is admirable but as it turns into an obsession, it is less so. Moreover, the readers’ sympathies are taxed when we see her indifference to the daily suffering of the slaves and the brutal punishments that she herself inflicts on some of her own servants.
This is a complex novel and a unique one. This reader came away with mixed feelings for the main character who is an imperfect yet compelling one. Much more impressive was the total immersion into the life and times of 18th century Suriname during its Golden Age, a time which the author depicts remarkably well.
