I looked at a whole bunch of samples...
David Weaver
of african and central and south american woods and pretty much give up.
I don't believe it's a fruitwood - there's no interlocking and no working smoothness, and it's very dusty (like older rosewoods can be - when you plane them or saw them, they work nicely but there's some element of stray dust that gets all over your hands and makes them filthy - this is like that. It turns nicely, but it comes off in two bits - shavings and then a little cloud of rosewood smelling fine dust above the cut (which coats you).
However, I can find no wood that has similar looking pores, no or minimal interlocking, the characteristic rosewood smell and the right density.
It was thrown in the area where rockler had a bunch of cocobolo and other blanks (verawood, etc) back then - the wood type wasn't specified (unusual at that time) and the guy there told me he thought it was cocobolo. It had a couple of cracks in it which is probably why it went to the cheap bin, but was very wet and heavy. Over time, i would use the term that "it got very light" compared to when I bought it, but at 0.77 SG, it's not that light. It's just in between the heavy woods and the more typical woods that we use.
It fractures easily and is perfectly straight grain and dusty, which makes planing it and guessing hardness pretty difficult.
It's not that important what it is, but I hate to give up! I see that the USDA has a free wood identification service if one is willing to wait a month or two to get a response. I may send a small section of it to them (with clear end grain) to see what they say.
Chakte viga, mopane and shedua look relatively similar in pictures, but each one has a description that doesn't match (either SG is way off, or the description says "no characteristic odor" - this piece has the typical rosewood smell, and it's fairly strong. My daughter thinks it smells like food 
She needs more time in the shop so that she learns that it smells like rosewood 
I know it's not dalbergia nigra, so I"m not that concerned about sending it to get tested.
Interesting -I wrote down a few types of wood from looking at all of the samples, and probably the closest in look (out of everything) is Louro Preto.