On a moonless night in the spring of 1851, a young slave makes a bid for freedom with only the North Star to guide him. Jonah Williams, on his eighteenth birthday, flees the South Carolina plantation on which he was born with only a few stolen coins, a knife, and the clothes on his back. No shoes, no map, no clear idea of where to head, except north, hiding during the day and running through the night. Although Jonah eludes the men sent to capture him, the one person who never loses his trail is Angel, a slave girl he meets in North Carolina, a young woman with a remarkably free spirit who sees Jonah as her way to freedom and sets out to follow him.