QUANELL X is a handsome, broad-shouldered man with almond-shaped eyes and a smile made for television. He hits the gym hard to make sure he fills out his handmade suits -- donated by a local haberdashery -- in all the right places.
He is still a tangle of contradictions. A foe of interracial marriage whose ex-wife is half-Asian. A maker of anti-Semitic statements whose lawyer is Jewish. An advocate for black men taking parental responsibility who has fathered children out of wedlock and fallen behind on child-support payments.
But as Quanell X toured his old southeast Houston neighborhood, South Acres, and pointed to the places where his friends died amid dingy apartment houses and decaying postwar shacks, he said his imperfect story gave him authenticity. He described his life as a metamorphosis: Quanell Evans grew up in a killing field, and was set to die in it. Then God touched him, and turned him into Quanell X.
He was born in Los Angeles into a family active in the Nation of Islam. One night his mother, Labeullah Muhammad, found out her husband was sleeping with her best friend. The next morning, "I kissed him and said, 'See you later darling, have a beautiful day,' " she recalled. She grabbed her three boys, including 5-year-old Quanell, and boarded a bus to Houston.
She descended into drugs and left the raising of the children to their grandmother, who cleaned for a Jewish family in a well-to-do part of town -- a servant relationship that Quanell X admits shaped his negative view of Jews. When his mother came around, Quanell X said, she was abusive, an account that was verified by a former neighbor.
By his teens, Quanell X was selling drugs in the street. He was arrested for dealing crack when he was 19, did a brief jail stint and got 10 years' probation. But that was not what woke him up. One afternoon, he was smoking a joint while watching "The Phil Donahue Show" when he was moved by a magnetic guest: Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam.
"I was so mesmerized by what the man was saying that I forgot I had the weed in my hand, and it burned my fingers," Quanell X said. He had never heard a black man stand up to the white establishment with so much verve. He found it empowering.
He gave away his drug stash and in 1990 joined the Nation of Islam, where he quickly gained prominence for his provocative rhetoric. His brash attacks often ridiculed mainstream African American leaders: He called one of them "Reverend Pork Chop" and dismissed others as sycophants sucking up to "white devils" for scraps from their dinner table.
