Clara at the Door with a Revolver

Gender, race, and politics in late-nineteenth-century Toronto swirl around this riveting true story of the murder of Frank Westwood and the controversial acquittal of the main suspect, Clara Ford – a cross-dressing Black single mother.

Carolyn Whitzman is a writer and researcher who lives in Ottawa. She is the author of Suburb, Slum, Urban Village: Transformations in Parkdale, Toronto 1875–2000. She was living in Parkdale when she stumbled upon Clara Ford’s story and has remained fascinated with it for more than two decades.

Cassandra Drudi:
The city’s seven newspapers in the 1890s were in competition for readership and often exaggerated or even fabricated facts to sell papers – but Whitzman tells the story in shades of grey.

Nathalie Atkinson:
Whitzman … brings to life a spectacular 1894 Toronto true crime case.

Emily Donaldson:
Whitzman’s book...brings to light a unique case in the annals of Canadian criminal history involving one Clara Ford.

Pat St. Germain:
Whitzman does a deep dive to put this three-act tragedy in historical context…the story has been told many times, but not in quite the same way.

Barrington Walker, professor, History, Wilfrid Laurier University:

This book matters because it arrives at a critical juncture in our history: two years after the summer of racial reckoning in North America and in the midst of an assault on critical race theory and histories that is evident in the United States and, perhaps, Canada. But more importantly, it matters because it is the best account of the Clara Ford story that has been published to date.

Afua Cooper, author of The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal:

With an impressive cast of characters and the feel of a detective story, I loved Clara at the Door with a Revolver. This is social history at its best.

George Elliott Clarke, professor of African-Canadian Literature, University of Toronto, and author of J’Accuse…! (Poem Versus Silence):

Carolyn Whitzman’s Clara at the Door with a Revolver is a page-turner whodunit, focusing on the fascinating and intriguing bio of the alleged murderess, a cross-dressing, maybe-bisexual, Black (mixed-race) dancer and seamstress, who backed up her male wardrobe with an ever-ready, phallic-symbol pistol. Whitzman is objective in her research and scrupulous in her analyses (even in speculating about motives, character, relationships, and psychologies). Yet she is also righteously sympathetic to the travails of Clara Ford, a single, Black, working-class mom, subjected to all the racist, sexist, and elitist hypocrisy of Toronto the Good, a Victorian-era bastion of white supremacy, British imperialism, and top-hatted patriarchy. Her tone always casual, her vocabulary always everyday (with her notes and references never allowed to interrupt the narrative), Whitzman reveals the ensconced corruption of the WASP establishment prepared to hang a Black woman for her “murder” of a rich Caucasian, even if he may have raped either herself or her daughter, and/or regardless of whether Clara Ford was actually innocent. That Ford’s self-defense testimony may have saved her from the noose also recovers for the annals of “Black excellence” an “average” woman whose eloquence and poise overcame the empowered prejudices of journalists, judges, and cops.