Author(s): Walter Mosley
Format: Paperback
No. of Pages: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Language: English
Date Published: 2006-11-01
Dimensions: 124.5 x 185.4 x 25.4mm
Publication City/Country: New York, United States
Edition: Reprint
Illustrations: 0

A young slave boy is named and numbered 47 on a nineteenth-century Georgia plantation and encounters the brutality and injustice of the system of slavery.

47 meets a strange being named Tall John who appears to be another slave boy - a runaway. But as 47 comes to realise, John is an extraterrestrial visitor who believes that his destiny is intertwined with the young slave's.

Tall John is a science fiction creation but he is also a reinterpretation of High John the Conqueror - a character taken from old slave myths about a spirit come from Africa to confound the slave masters and (ultimately) to free all slaves.