As far as anyone working there knows, Seattle Art Museum has never before brought out the carved ivory elephant tusk that now stands upright, gleaming in its glass case in a small, out-of-the-way gallery on the fourth floor.
The tusk is 18 inches long, in shades of buttered white toast, and carved on it in a spiral is a line of men, women, and babies moving upward around the tusk. They are being marched into slavery at gunpoint.
Each figure is tiny but clear. The carver went into painstaking detail so we can make out who is hungry by his ribs, feel the texture of each head of hair, hear the cough issuing from the man bent over for inspection.
The slaves are African, and so are at least some, if not all, of the guards.
At the top of the spiral, the line culminates in a single man seated with his body folded, head in hands, in grief…
