“Clara at the Door with a Revolver: The Scandalous Black Suspect, the Exemplary White Son, and the Murder That Shocked Toronto” is a non-fiction book about the 1894 murder of Frank Westwood in Toronto and the subsequent trial of accused Clara Ford, a Black single mother, of the crime. It won the 2024 Heritage Toronto Book Award. It was also shortlisted for the 2023 Toronto Book Award and the 2024 Brass Knuckles Award for Non-fiction Crime Books.
Carolyn Whitzman
My name is Carolyn Whitzman. I’m a senior housing researcher and adjunct professor at University of Toronto, School of Cities. Before that, I was a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and before that, I worked for the City of Toronto for 10 years. That’s me.
Daysha Loppie
You’re also an author. There’s a few books that you’ve written.
Whitzman
Sure, I started off my career and research in gender-based violence prevention. My first book was on the Urban Planning role in violence prevention. Then my second book was an international look at what works in gender-based violence prevention. I did my PhD thesis as a mature student and that was published. It was a history of Parkdale in Toronto, and that’s where I first came across the Clara Ford story.
My dissertation was published as a book called Suburb, Slum, Urban Village on about 125 years of housing policy in Parkdale. Yeah, my two most recent books are Clara at the Door with a Revolver, which we’ll be talking about today. Then, last year, I published a book called Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis. So I’m kind of a historian but I also do a lot of public policy.
Loppie
To take it back to the dissertation, was that the first time you pieced together Clara?
Whitzman
I’ll tell you the story of it, Daysha.
Finding Clara
Carolyn Whitzman
There’s a myth about Parkdale that was really noticeable in the housing policies of the ‘70s, the ‘80s and ‘90s – that Parkdale used to be a stable, residential, middle-class suburb, but anyone walking around Parkdale, which is just west of downtown Toronto, would see 19th century industries and small houses. I was interested in looking at what the reality was behind that myth of Parkdale. I started reading newspaper archives around Parkdale. At the Parkdale Library, there was a set of clippings from the beginnings of Parkdale in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s.
I came across a mention – it was from a newspaper in the 1960s that said, “Sometimes rich and poor lived really close to one another. Here’s the example of Clara Ford, who was accused of killing her former neighbor, a rich white young man.”
I went, “Ooh, that sounds like a good story to kind of illustrate my point that there was a lot of diversity and a lot of tension in early Parkdale.” I went and looked up the newspapers that covered the date of the murder and the date of the arrest and the date of the acquittal, and what I read really blew me away.
There was a lot of detail about Clara Ford, and she was the first woman, second person, to testify on her own behalf. Her testimony is there, and then there were a lot of things that made Clara scandalous in the times, for instance, that she sometimes wore men’s clothes. She was accused of having killed Frank while dressed as a man, because Frank had identified a man as his assailant.
That sort of spun off into a whole interesting discourse, not only about racism of the day, but also homophobia of the day. I actually went down this rabbit hole for about six weeks when I was doing my PhD thesis. I wanted to go back and reread that stuff and write about Clara. But soon after my PhD was finished, I moved to Australia for 16 years, and it was just towards the end of my time in Australia when I’d taken early retirement, which was the first time I had felt ready. I had time to go back and look at Clara Ford’s story that was almost 20 years after I had first read about her.
Loppie
Newspapers. Can you clarify if that was a primary source for you? And where were you looking for these newspapers?
Whitzman
Oh, no, no. When I did the deep dive, I went to Toronto Reference Library, where they have microfiche where they have many newspapers. There were seven newspapers at the time, and all of the newspapers were competing against one another. In fact, between 1894 and 1895, one of the newspapers merged – it’s outlined in the book. In 2000, when I first did this research, newspapers weren’t digitized, so it was a lot harder. Fortunately, in 2018 when I went back to things like the Globe and the Star, which, of course, have continued to this day, they had their newspapers digitized. So I could look up the name “Clara Ford.” I could look up “Parkdale,” I could look up, you know, “homosexual,” which was a word that was used the first time in any newspaper because I then looked at other newspaper archives to check the first time that word had been used.
Having those newspapers digitized was hugely important to me. Newspapers were absolutely a primary source for this kind of discourse. As we know from other work, Black women’s lives are often very obscure, except when they run into trouble with the law and then they appear in newspapers, either appearing in the courts or appearing in court records. But I wanted to know more about Clara. I was interested in Clara, what her life and what led to the circumstances of her being arrested. I used a number of other tools I was using as a historian, primarily street directories.
I was looking for her name every year that I knew she was alive or her mother’s name. I was looking for assessment records. So once I went through the directories, I worked out where she lived or where she lived with her mother. I was able to look up the condition of her home, which was important to me to know how she lived.
She doesn’t appear very much in the census, but I use the census to get a sense of some of the main players and their life circumstances before the case that brought them all together.
Loppie
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about a kind of myth about Parkdale and what it was like to live there. Were there any other myths that maybe you encountered and kind of dispelled or interrogated while doing this archival research?
Whitzman
I am not an expert on racism, but it was pretty obvious when I was reading the newspapers that there were tropes being used, and it was actually like they were tropes that I still recognized. There was the trope that Clara was unusually angry, or that she might have been a jealous lover, or that kind of thing, and that sort of trope of the angry black woman still exists. So I kind of looked up Black women writing about the myth of the angry Black woman. There was another trope that was very much used, including by Clara’s defenders in the 19th century, which is that she was an ignorant girl, even though she was 33 when she was arrested and had two children, she was a girl and that not a woman, and that she was somehow tragic.
Finally, there was just so much— one reporter in particular just went to town with this theory that there didn’t need to be a motive either the sexual assault that Clara in her initial confession, which she later repudiated. She said that the motive was that Frank Westwood had tried to sexually assault her. There was also the assumption that she and Frank were lovers, because even though Frank was 18 and she was 33 —not that that would stop anybody— but just people wanted a simple motive. They didn’t want to talk about the allegations of sexual assault by a white man against a Black woman.
So instead, she was a monster, and how are they going to prove that she was insane or a monster? Well, because she wore men’s clothes, or at least, trousers– she must be a homosexual, and therefore all homosexuals are crazy or monsters. Therefore we don’t need to look for a motive. There’s this sort of Black brute myth which still exists. And also there is the notion that people who don’t have any mainstream sexuality or mainstream gender identity are more likely to be mentally ill.
I did a certain amount of research into those 19th century tropes.
Writing Clara
LoppieThat makes me think about what kind of intervention that you’re making with all of this evidence. It’s one thing to reproduce it. It’s another thing to write a book about it in a way that, I think, interferes with all of these tropes, with what we thought we knew about the past of Toronto. I’m wondering, why write a book about the past?
Whitzman
I think that the past matters a lot. It helps shape the present, and also, as I said towards the end of the book, we treat the past sometimes like it’s another country, but sometimes it’s a very short walk away. Particularly in 2018 when I started writing this book, I saw a lot of resistance.
In 2019 with Black Lives, with Me Too, with some of the questions about the police. Because the whole basis of Clara’s defense is that the police manipulated or forced her into a false confession. How much do we trust the police and their investigatory powers? Yeah, there was a lot of real resonance with today, ripped from the headlines in some ways, and I would dearly love to have Clara Ford do a quick time travel to tell us what she thinks.
Obviously, if you spend a couple of years writing about someone, they become quite real to you. I’d love to have her take on things. Yeah, that would be really cool. And time travel, I guess.
Loppie
How do you tell the story while keeping intact the integrity of the integrity and accuracy of who Clara was? Do the archives play a role?
Whitzman
Particularly because I’m straight and white and cisgender, I felt reluctant. I’m a historian, so I didn’t put emotions or words into Clara’s book. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing that, even if I was comfortable being a fiction writer. And one of my constant laughs, apparently, I have a Wikipedia page now, which is kind of cool. I don’t know who wrote it, but it reads, “Carolyn Whitzman turns to fiction.” I’m like, read the fucking book. I am not a fiction writer.
The newspapers included a lot of dialogue. That was part of the way they did news in those days. They stuck in a lot of quotes from people who knew Clara, from people who knew Frank Westwood. Do I think those are 100 percent accurate? Absolutely not. Many of the characters have to have been lying because they contradict one another. I don’t know the extent to which Clara spoke in a dialect that had a lot of “ain’t” and I suspect that at least some of it is how they expected Black women to talk.
I’m always a tiny bit cautious. But having said that, and in the book, I kind of go, “Keep in mind, this is not Clara Ford speaking.” This is someone saying that they heard what Clara Ford said, or that they’re saying what Clara Ford told them. A lot of the book is dialogue, simply because I’m repeating the dialogue that’s in the newspaper. Clearly, she didn’t drink blood every morning. There is no evidence that she was a socialist orator, or was a professional boxer.
It tells a really interesting story about when she was arrested with a pair of pants. People go to these places in their imagination to these places where she becomes a socialist orator, or a trumpet player, or a drum player. Or, a woman who just goes around with a knife or a gun all the time, threatening people.
Loppie
I think that’s the tight rope that is always being walked– taking creative leisure, speculation, and putting the facts on the table and context to the facts. Where are these suggestions of who she was coming from?
Whitzman
When she gave testimony on her behalf, she was trying to make the audience laugh, and she may have said or did some things that were exaggerated in order to get them on her side. She succeeded. She was acquitted. I want to pay respect to the fact that she made some very brave choices, including dressing up as a man and or pretending to be a man. Possibly her gender identity, his or their gender identity was masculine. We can never know that.
Loppie
I think that’s what’s so beautiful about the book; that agency is located in a recounting of a Black woman’s life in Toronto.
Whitzman
My biggest thrill right now is that I talked to a podcast run by two American historians called What’s Her Name, and two producers based in England heard it. They’re turning Clara at the Door into a musical in England.
I kept on saying, what’s resonant to you about this? I mean, one of the producers is mixed race, and the person who’s now writing the play is a Black actress named Susan Wokoma, and the musician who’s writing, because it’s a musical, is also a Black woman named Ayanna Witter Johnson. I’m like, “I’m so glad that you’re as interested.”
LoppieFor people who do feel that spark of research – what should we know? Is there something about mindset that we should have going into the research?
Whitzman
Oh, golly, sure. I kept on asking myself questions and then trying to answer them. When I read a newspaper article about seduction, I was like, what is meant by seduction? What does that mean? Or I read about the theatres and the vaudeville company that Clara ended up joining, then think ‘I’d like to know more about the history of Black theatre’.
I’d say it’s good to have an outline, absolutely. I did have an outline, but it’s also really good to go off on little side quests to try to fill in the world around your person, because you’ll find some details.
I wanted the details. I wanted to know. I wanted to round it out. You know, what would she eat? What was she like? What were her clothes like?
You may be frustrated, I guess what I’m saying, about the paucity, or there just not being that much information available, but then you try to find out things around them so that you can kind of get a clearer picture.
Loppie
What I’m hearing is, sometimes the unknown, all the questions, can be intimidating. But that’s probably where the fun is— finding what is intriguing.
Whitzman
You’ll never know as much as you want to know. You just have to embrace that never being able to know everything, never being able to say this was a good person, this was a bad person, and just sort of try to find out as much as you can. All I can say is, I had a lot of fun doing it.
About the interviewee
Dr. Carolyn Whitzman is a housing and social policy researcher. She is an Adjunct Professor and Senior Housing Researcher at University of Toronto’s School of Cities, undertaking research on scaling up affordable and non market housing supply. She has worked as an expert advisor to UBC’s Housing Assessment Resource Tools (HART) project, which developed standardized best practices for analyzing housing needs, using government land for non market housing, and nonmarket property acquisition, all of which has influenced federal policy.
She is the author or co-author of over 80 book chapters, articles, and reports, on issues related to the right to the city. She was a Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne (2003-2019) and a Senior Policy Planner at the City of Toronto (1989-99). She has provided expertise to national, state/provincial and local governments, UN Women, UN Habitat, and private or non-profit organizations.