AGAINYE and I met in Ibadan, Nigeria, a metropolis of more than two million people in the southwest part of the country, where he was a graduate student in linguistics and I was on a grant researching Nigerian literature.  I knew I was in love when, during a dinner at my house, he recited a poem that he’d jotted down on a scrap of newspaper that ended with the line, “For winter must not steal a kiss.” And then he kissed me.  A few months later, he asked me to go to his village and meet his family for Christmas, and I was thrilled. He said that life there was different, tougher. I told him that I was tough, too. After all, I was from West Texas.  After three days of difficult travel heading east across Nigeria in a series of ramshackle buses and vans, Againye and I, seated atop a rickety motorbike for the final leg of our journey, pulled up in front of his family’s homestead: a dirt clearing surrounded by several free-standing tin-roofed clay buildings. A group rushed out to meet us, led by his mother, a petite woman wrapped in blue cloth, who began rubbing her hands together while lifting her head to the sky and speaking rapidly, giving thanks, I supposed, in her Bette language, for our safe arrival.  Againye’s village stood at the foot of a series of hills that punched up into mountains at the nearby border with Cameroon. In the evenings, we could see small dots of fires made on the slopes by people who’d decided to stay overnight with their yam crop instead of trekking back to the village to sleep.  That first night, Againye and I nestled into each other on the mattress, the only furnishing in his small room, which he had lovingly swept after taking his water bucket back in the palm-leaf enclosure behind the cooking hut.  The next morning, still curled up lazily, I watched as Againye dressed himself in black slacks and a blue button-down shirt that his younger brother had pressed the night before with a coal iron. He was traveling to the hospital an hour away to visit his patron, the man who was paying for his graduate school and who had recently become ill. Before going, he kneeled down and gave me a long kiss, pressing his palm against the side of my face, and said those three words that even the most cynical of us long to hear.  Trim and preppy, Againye looked like one of those idealized husbands in films, usually too straight-laced to be my type but sexy nonetheless, men who lean down to kiss their beautiful wives before leaving for the office. Except I wasn’t sweet and perfect in a lace nightgown on a four-poster bed, but disheveled in a dirty tank top on an air mattress in the middle of Africa. I was happy.  We spent much of the first few days walking in the village. At first, the children were wary of me, staring blankly from doorways, sometimes running away. But eventually they began to follow me in groups, chanting what sounded like, “Speckengyspeckengy.”  When I asked Againye what that meant in Bette, he laughed: “That means nothing in my language. They’re mimicking you.”  In the mornings I watched Againye and his friends playing soccer in front of the dilapidated primary school, a field that would soon be dotted with bovine waste from the annual Christmas cow auction. I loved watching him move. The man had amazing genes: naturally broad shoulders set over a small waist and muscular legs. Quick, lithe, competitive, he challenged the other team with a good-natured roar. In moments like this I felt hypnotized but also uncomfortable — the woman on the sidelines, the white woman objectifying the body of her black man. But what else do lovers do, I thought.  Back at the compound, Againye’s mother was not exactly a warm person — she’d lived a hard life and showed her love through backbreaking labor in the field with the yams or by preparing huge meals in the thatch-covered fire pit. And although her children were put to work pounding yams, fetching water and shelling beans, she wouldn’t allow me to help.  Mary Helen Specht, who lives in Austin, Tex., is working on a book about her experiences in Nigeria.
I was in love with a handsome man with whom I shared a love of books, and I wanted to view that as our singular experience. Yet this was not a simple love affair between two people.