“Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home,” I sing as I jiggle my six-week-old baby, hoping that it won’t be another long, sleepless night for the two of us. Leah has colic and my singing and jiggling is part of our nightly routine, my attempt to soothe her. Baths make her cry more, as does swaddling, and I am too sleep deprived to trust myself behind the wheel of the car on this winter night—even if I thought that a drive would put her to sleep. Instead, I walk and rock and jiggle her as I work through my repertoire of songs. 

While my husband and older daughter are asleep upstairs, Leah and I are in the living room. From the window I see two of my neighbours out with their dogs, right on schedule. I have become familiar with the street’s late night routine. The neighbours greet each other as their dogs answer the call of nature, then return to the warmth of their homes. The windows in the houses opposite mine darken one by one, and I know that it is 11pm. The street will be quiet until morning but Leah is still crying, my attempts to calm her futile. I sit in the rocking chair in the corner of the room with Leah in my arms and try another chorus of the song.

“Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac.” Cadillac? I know that is not the correct lyric. As I puzzle over the word switch, I am taken to the south of France in the summer of 1979 when I was sixteen years old.

I was in France that July as part of an exchange, living with a family whose daughter would visit my family in August. My hosts lived in a village just outside of the city of Beziers, close to the Mediterranean sea in the south west of the country. 

One evening my hosts and I attended an outdoor concert in a park in Beziers. The headliner that evening was the great jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. I remember his face puffing out as he played, like he had a potato in each cheek. I was intrigued by his trumpet with the upturned bell—I had never seen an instrument like that before. My ears drank in each note of Dizzy’s virtuoso playing, but I couldn’t keep my eyes on the stage. Instead my vision was drawn upwards to the sky, to the canopy of trees above me, their leaves rippling in the soft wind. Between the branches I glimpsed the stars making their appearance in the heavens. I could almost catch the salty scent of the sea air as the breeze caressed my skin. I let myself get lost in the view above as Dizzy’s jazz rhythms washed over me. 

“Swing Low Sweet Cadillac” drew my eyes back to the stage. Dizzy chose to start his encore by singing instead of playing his trumpet, and gave a twist to the traditional spiritual. Of all the music I heard that night, that is the piece that stayed with me.

In my rocking chair in the corner of the living room I savour the memory of that concert from so long ago, and feel my shoulders drop a little, as my face relaxes into the beginnings of a smile. Out of the window I see that it has started to snow, soft fluffy flakes that take their time settling on the ground. I look down at my baby, finally asleep in my arms. “Swing Low Sweet Leah” I sing softly as I put us both to bed. 

—Mary Gauvreau