A Nantucket Tale, "The Adventures of Nancy Gardner Prince," To Become Part Of Sixth-Grade Curriculum At CPS

This spring, Nantucket’s sixth-grade students will be reading a book both by and about a fellow Nantucket resident.

Local historian Frances Karttunen’s graphic narrative, The Adventures of Nancy Gardner Prince, Written by Herself, tells the story of Nancy Gardner Prince, a Black 19th-century Nantucketer.

Prince, who was active in both the women’s suffrage and abolition movements during her life, wrote an autobiography before disappearing from the historical record in the mid-1850s. Karttunen reworked her autobiography into a graphic narrative, and, thanks to a grant from the Nantucket Education Trust, that book will now be taught to sixth-grade students at the Cyrus Peirce Middle School.

“It immediately seemed to me that this was a really good book for a middle school audience,” Karttunen said. “After it took so long to make it a physical reality, the fact that it's going into the school this spring is very gratifying.”

The book will be used as the anchor text in a unit focused on graphic narratives. After reading Karttunen’s book, the students will create their own graphic narratives and memoirs, which will be displayed at the African Meeting House.

“It's just what I'd like to see being done,” Karttunen said. “I hope that it's a big success.”

Students will analyze both the content of the text and the craft behind it. When they do so, they’ll be analyzing Prince’s writing as much as Karttunen’s.

“I don't feel like this is my book,” Karttunen said. “This is Nancy Prince's book. She's the author, and I just helped it along a little bit.”

The book was published with the Nantucket Historical Association, which also created the curriculum that the sixth-grade students’ work will be based on.

The daughter of Black Nantucket whaler Thomas Gardner, Prince was a colleague of prominent women’s suffrage advocate Lucretia Mott, and travelled broadly during her life. She spent time everywhere from St. Petersburg to Jamaica, and Karttunen thinks that this makes her story all the more relevant to Nantucket’s diverse student body.

“We have such a range of backgrounds of students in the school,” Karttunen said. “In this book, we have Eastern European, we have Jamaican, we have the American South, all tied together.”

The graphic narrative is illustrated by John Walsh. Anyone interested in reading a copy themselves can find it at the Atheneum, the Nantucket Historical Association gift shop, or local booksellers Bookworks and Mitchell’s.

“This isn't just a story for Nantucket,” Karttunen said. “It's a story for everybody, and not just middle school students, but people of all ages.”