Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

This is a recording of me singing to my daughter. If you listen closely, you can sometimes hear her in the background. I’m not a professional singer so you will notice flaws in my performance. Luckily, my audience doesn’t seem to mind.

Lara just turned six-months-old; so she still cries a lot. Sometimes, the crying makes sense: she’s tired, she’s hungry, she just saw me laugh too loudly at something Diane said—all good reasons. But sometimes the crying strikes like a tariff from from the Trump administration. Total surprise, zero explanation.

Once these episodes begin, they can be difficult to stop. It’s often a guessing game where the goal is to figure out what she needs. I check the nappy, check if she’s hungry, check if Tom Holland and Zendaya broke up. Nothing.

That’s when it turns to a game of distraction. Sometimes she gets stuck in the emotional valley of fear, frustration, and being French. To stop the crying, I have to pull her out of that valley by redirecting her attention away from the ordeal-of-being and towards something pretty.

That’s why I sing.

I can’t remember how this started. It was probably one of those blurry nights where no one slept because the baby wouldn’t stop crying. I probably walked up and down my apartment a hundred times, baby in my arms, hoping that the next lap would stop the tears. In my delirium, I reached back into my memories, fumbling for something to comfort myself. I was tired, I was adjusting to a new life in a strange/French new country, I was scared of failing as a father. And in that state-of-mind, I found myself humming a tune I hadn’t heard since I was a child: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. The baby stopped crying.

We used to sing this song at school when I was a boy. South African schools are relics of the British Empire. Each Friday we repeated this ritual called “assembly.” All of us, wearing identical uniforms, would file into the school’s main hall, and sit on the floor. Boys on the left. Girls on the right. The principal would make announcements, give out awards, and usually deliver some topical speech. But before all that, they made us sing. There was a fixed list of songs that ranged over Christian hymms, Michael Jackson hits, and Disney ballads. Somewhere in all that mess, was Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

As a child, I didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics or look into what it meant. But as I sung it to Lara, I paid attention. Turns out the song has layers. On the surface, it’s a religious song petitioning God to rescue the singer from this fallen world and deliver them to heaven. After consulting Google, I now know the song was a spiritual composed by slaves in the Antebellum South. So if one looks below the surface, we see a song calling for rescue from slavery and safe delivery to the free states of the North.

When I sang it, I was calling for rescue from something more personal. In the months after Lara was born, I wasn’t in a good place. I’d just given up on my dream of becoming a professor of philosophy; I’d given up the life I’d spent 5 years building in the UK; I’d given up on my pre-baby self and I didn’t yet know my post-baby self. So I sang this song out of hope for better days to come.

I think Lara picked up on that. It doesn’t work 100% of the time, but singing this song is the most reliable way to calm her down. It works so well that I had to record it and send it to Diane so she can use it when I’m not around. Even Lara’s grandma has a copy on her phone she can use when babysitting.

I do sometimes get strange looks from Parisians on the street. It’s like they’ve never seen a grown man serenade a baby before. Weirdos.

Anyway, the irony is I only just discovered that the song has a special connection to my family name. The central imagery of the song is drawn from the biblical prophet Elijah. In addition to being the most heavy-metal of God’s prophets, Elijah’s story ends with him ascending to heaven in a flying chariot of fire. The whole song is a riff on the ending of Elijah’s story.

There’s more irony to be found in the origin of my family name. My father’s side of the family comes from India. Under the British Empire, there was a relocation scheme where Indians could migrate to South Africa. The only condition for the trip was that they serve as indentured servants. This was a limited type of slave contract where they worked without compensation or other freedoms for a number of years. Upon landing in South Africa, they converted to Christianity and took on a biblical name: Elijah.

These points of connection don’t form a straight line. There isn’t some straightforward story or argument here. But there is a web of meaning surrounding this song, a web that touches on nodes of hope, history, freedom, and family.

Now when I sing this song, I don’t have one thing in mind. I don’t have a single message or a single meaning I’m trying to send to Lara. Instead, all the nodes of this web are lighting up my heart at the same time. I’m singing hope, I’m singing freedom, I’m singing childhood, I’m singing family.

I know she can’t fully understand me. She doesn’t have the relevant concepts yet. But maybe there’s a more primitive form of understanding passing between us. Maybe she can feel the meaning even if she can’t yet understand it. I don’t know. But when I see her tears stop and her nose crinkle as she lights up in a toothless smile, I know I’ve been carried home.