Swan Songs for Jezebel, or Leda Returns Home in Black Swan

This chapter takes up the directive in Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Black Swan to “imagine Leda black.” It discusses the Greek myth of Leda and Zeus in the writings of Yeats, Rilke, and Toomer as a palimpsestic springboard to confrontthis new coloring where myth overlays myth as Jezebel recasts Leda as lascivious and insatiable, masking a history of Black girls’ and women’s sexualization and assault. Placing Black Swan in conversation with the “Leda poems” of Lucille Clifton, the chapter contends that in these poems, Leda is a revenant resurrected from a cruel and unusual social death and considers what is at stake for the Black girls and women she represents.