Asleep in Coronation Market is a story about life on the lower rungs of Jamaican social/economic systems, during the mid-1900. It explores Harry's experience as a teenage young man whose single mother left the parish of St. Thomas for England to improve the family’s fortune. He felt abandoned and drifted from the country to the urban Market in Kingston where his mother used to be a higgler. He had unrealistic expectations, that he would at least connect with his mother’s invisible maroon spirit. But stripped bare of everything, including his clothing and emotional response to human interaction, he sunk to the lowest depths of despair.
Two Rastafarian brethren, Joshua and Barracuda rescued and engaged him in reasoning sessions. They exposed him to competing ideologies about freedom and justice; including Garvey’s UNIA, Bustamante’s JLP, Manley’s PNP, Christian movements and Rastafarianism. He in turn, exposed them to his great grandfather’s belief that poor Black people are still in slavery. Their chains now invisible are no longer on their legs, arms and around their waist, but embedded in their brains. Harry eventually inspired the brethren to accept the challenge of extruding the invisible chains of mental slavery from their brains with both historical and contemporary knowledge, in order to usher in a new era of freedom.