How an Elaborate, Hand-Carved Work of African Art Ended Up on Vashon Island, Washington

I met Dave and Serena when they were Peace Corps volunteers serving in Tanzania, East Africa. They had been married for several years, and had been in Africa a little over a year, when they decided to commission a bed.

The region where we were living is famous for its elaborate and distinctly African carvings, most iconically of pitch-black ebony, which polishes to a stone-like sheen. There is a style of carving called umoja, or unity, where a single branch of wood the size of a wiffle ball bat is carved into an interlacing human pyramid of tiny figures: father with rake in hand supporting mother winnowing grain supporting grandmother on her can who supports another family member or family. Perhaps as many as twenty separate figures holding hands, standing on each other's hands or heads or backs, form a sort of scaffolding: the carving is mostly empty space when it is finished, with every bit of wood that does not comprise a head or a torso or a stick-thin limb chiseled away. Each piece is a testament to the patience and skill of the artist; a single mis-tapped chisel can ruin an entire piece.

A typical piece incorporating ten to twenty interlocked figures sells for about a dollar a figure.

Dave and Serena decided that their bed frame would be carved in the style of umoja pieces, writ large in the form of four over-sized posters supporting a king sized mattress (they would ship the bed frame back to the U.S., where they bought a mattress set.) Both headboard and footboard would feature multiple panels, into each of which would be inset a teardrop- shaped canvas painting of an African scene by a local artist who ran a waterfront studio/art gallery.

Dave and Serena consulted a friend as to the construction of the actual bed frame, and it was decided that no 'townie' artist would do for the carving; more authentic (and, I suspect, cheaper) work could be gotten out in the remote mud hut villages several hours from the nearest town. This talent scout obtained thirty dollars from Dave and Serena as a sort of scouting fee cum expense account and hopped the next bus away from civilization.

I happened to be present when the scout returned from his mission. He recounted his adventure, clearly proud of his negotiating skills.

"I knew what village has the reputation for the best carving," he said, "but I didn't know anyone there. So when I got off the bus, I found the closest pombe hut. I knew everyone was thinking, 'This man is from the town and he knows nothing.' I put all of the money you had given me on the table and said, 'How much pombe will this buy me?' I knew that it would be about sixty small bottles. They brought them all to me -- several days worth of sales for such a small village! -- and I lined them up in neat rows on the table in front of me: a whole table full of liquor! The girl who brought them asked, 'What will you do now?' I replied, 'Now I will drink.'"

"I knew what would happen. It is very rude to pass a man drinking at the pombe hut -- even a stranger-- without greeting him. And it is very rude for the one who is drinking not to invite his greeter to join him. Well, thirty bottles of pombe is a lot to drink. I think that before I was done, the entire town had joined me at that pombe hut, and we were all the best of friends. It was only then that I told them, 'I have come to have a bed made for two very good friends of mine. Surely you can help me find some very talented carvers?'"

At the time, I marvelled at the indirectness and diplomacy of the scout's negotiation, and it struck me as quintessentially African. A littler older now, I wonder how unique it is to conduct business as if it were friendship, to use small gifts and alcohol as social lubricants, to curry favor with the intermediaries rather than directly approaching the key players. Perhaps I had not lived enough to experience much of that in my own country.

The bed gradually came together, and was shipped home along with a shipping container full of gifts and several crates of African beer (Tusker, Kilimanjaro, Safari... the joke was that they were all identical save for the injection of varying amounts of grain alcohol.) I first saw the bed, fully assembled and strewn with African print throw pillows, about a year later. We had all gathered, about two dozen returned Peace Corps volunteers, at Dave and Serena's place on tiny Vashon Island to retrieve the items we had shipped, reminisce our versions of the foods we had learned to love --- greasy chapati fry-bread; roasted goat kebabs, rice and beans with a tomato-onion-lime juice concoction called kachumbari, and of course the beer, saved for this occasion.

I learned shortly thereafter that Dave and Serena had gotten a divorce. We hadn't spoken in a while, and our e-mail correspondence had sort of dried up. They were the first friends my own age who had gotten divorced -- that was supposed to happen to neighbors or your friends' parents or your aunt, not your friends. I didn't know what to do with that: I felt like someone had died, about someone had: "Dave 'n' Serena" with the elided 'and' in between their names. In retrospect, it felt like something that was happening to me, not them: I have divorced friends now. I don't usually think that way. I still think about that bed, built for two, built with care and attention to detail. Surely a couple that could conceive and create such a thing, ship it halfway around the world and display it so proudly could find a way to make a marriage work.

Man supports woman, mother supports son, brother supports sister. But sometimes unity is shattered and we're left with ebony splinters, glistening like shards of night.