On June 19, Juneteenth, Chattanooga Sister Cities and Barking Legs Theater invited the community to the premiere of our Cultural Cross Ties collaboration between our Sister City Accra, Ghana and Chattanooga. The event featured the online collaboration among artists from Accra and Chattanooga with a focus on the integral role of food within both cultures. Attendees were treated to traditional Ghanaian foods including the delicious jollof.
One of the highlights of the evening was the beautiful poem written and read by our VP for Accra, Kanika Jones, which wove together this special CCT collaboration and how incredibly meaningful it was to have the premiere on Juneteenth. Honestly, this poem took everyone’s breath away!!
Juneteenth: The Taste of Return
Before the chains learned our names,
before ships tried to rename the wind,
we were already a people of rivers and rhythm,
of mathematics carved into memory,
of kingdoms that spoke in gold and astronomy.
Africa remembers.
She remembers how the scholars of Timbuktu gathered knowledge like rainwater.
She remembers the ironworkers who taught fire to bend,
the architects who raised stone cities beneath desert skies,
the healers who knew the language of roots long before laboratories arrived.
And still, across an ocean salted by grief,
memory survived.
It hid itself in recipes.
Jollof carried stories in its steam.
Okra whispered ancestral instructions from pot to pot.
Black-eyed peas sat at tables like old grandmothers,
refusing to let a people forget abundance.
Rice remembered the hands that knew its secrets.
Yams refused to become strangers.
The food knew.
The food watched us become Black in America
while remaining African in our bones.
Gumbo became a gathering place.
Collard greens stretched their leafy arms across generations.
Peanut stew crossed waters and changed accents,
yet still recognized its reflection.
And on Juneteenth, the food speaks.
The sweet potato pies sing of survival.
The cornbread tells stories of making something from little.
The fellowship gives rise to those who cried and prayed for liberation. before freedom learned how to pronounce their names.
Today the drum and the dinner table sit side by side.
Accra greets Chattanooga.
Ghana embraces America.
Chattanooga nods toward Labadi .
The Atlantic no longer divides what spirit has connected.
We are descendants of builders.
Of the creators of kingdoms.
Of inventors of systems, medicines, languages, and trade routes.
Of women who carried nations on their backs and men who planted futures in difficult soil.
Juneteenth is not simply a date.
It is a reunion.
A long-awaited meal where history pulls up a chair,
where Africa and her scattered children break bread together,
where every recipe becomes a map,
every drumbeat becomes a compass,
and every liberated breath becomes a prayer.
Today, freedom tastes like home.
And somewhere between the jollof and the greens,
between the laughter and the libation,
between the continent and the diaspora,
God smiles
because the seed survived the storm,
the root remembered the tree,
and the children have found their way back to one another.
