Kelley’s Kitchen was no mere restaurant. It was the latest venture from Hilton Kelley, Port Arthur’s leading environmental activist and all-around force of nature. Soul food is not typically a part of the environmental agenda, but Kelley took a holistic approach. “I’m about creating job opportunities,” he said, as I buried my face in okra. “I’m about serving the community. I’m about encouraging young people to get business licenses, to do things that will help them get off the streets. ’Cause these streets will kill you faster than the pollution.”
A tall, ample man in his early fifties, Kelley had an energy that was both generous and pugnacious. Above all, he was a man with hustle. When I first found him, he was sitting at a table working on his laptop while eating lunch; moments later he was outside with a crew of helpers, hauling a pair of heavy wooden stalls to a spot in front of his restaurant. In preparation for the upcoming Mardi Gras parades—the only time of year when central Port Arthur sees some life—Kelley was planning to sell “food and hats and whatnot” to passersby. Moments after that, we were back inside the restaurant and Kelley was pointing out the new dance floor, off to one side. “I love dancing. That’s why I built me a dance floor.” He was an experienced carpenter, and power tools littered the cab of his pickup truck.
But above all, he had devoted himself to picking environmental fights in Port Arthur. His organization, the Community In-power and Development Association, had recently blocked the importation of PCBs from Mexico to a nearby incinerator. It had also fought the Motiva refinery expansion, holding it up and forcing concessions from the company on monitoring and community investment.
Kelley was also working with a group called the Southeast Texas Bucket Brigade, doing grassroots air-quality measurement, in hope of filling the massive gaps in monitoring left by industry and government. The figures available for refinery emissions, one environmental lawyer told me, are based not so much on actual monitoring as on calculations made by the EPA—calculations that can be decades old. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to know exactly what’s drifting out of a refinery in any given week.
“Toxic exposure!” Kelley said. “You’ve got hydrogen sulfide. Benzene, a known carcinogen. Thirteen butadiene. Occasionally, you’ve got explosions that will rattle your windows. Some people are living with storage tanks sixty feet from their backyards. If one of those things went up, it would incinerate everything within a quarter block.” He had strong words for the state regulators—“They have to actually do their jobs!”—as well as for the Environmental Protection Agency, and before I knew it, he had become a one-man poetry slam, performing a piece called “My Toxic Reality,” written after he’d spent a sleepless night listening to his house being rattled by a nearby refinery flare.
In Kelley’s pickup truck, we rode slowly through West Port Arthur, taking what he called his “toxic tour” of the city. Until 1965 or so, he said, segregation meant that African Americans weren’t allowed to live anywhere but the West Side. It was no coincidence that this was the part of town closest to the refineries, hemmed in by Valero and Motiva.
As we drove, Kelley told me his life story with the fluency of someone used to talking to journalists. He grew up in Port Arthur in the 1960s and ’70s, then joined the Navy and ended up in California, where he became an actor and stuntman. In 2000, he came back to Port Arthur for Mardi Gras and was shocked by the poverty and hopelessness he found.
“I would take these little walks,” he said. “And I started wondering, what the hell happened?”
He decided to move back, hoping to find some way to help, and soon found himself focused on the local environment: lobbying for better monitoring and enforcement, and standing by the refinery gates with signs demanding change.
“I thought I’d be here two or three years when I came back,” he told me. “Now it’s been ten years, and I don’t see no end to this environmental fight.”
We drove on, heading along West Seventh Street, the artery running from downtown, through the poor neighborhoods, toward the bridge that crosses the ship channel. “People are just appalled to even drive through here,” Kelley said. “They talk about building another bridge, just so people don’t have to drive down Seventh Street, so they don’t have to go through the West Side.”
He told me it was part of a larger pattern—a conspiracy, even—that threatened to starve West Port Arthur out of existence. “I think a plan was developed,” he said. “A sinister plan. I don’t have any proof, but I’d stand up and say that in front of anybody. You have a community with a thirty-billion-a-year company on one side and a forty-billion-a-year company on the other side, and yet it’s one of the most dilapidated communities in Texas. It don’t add up.”
Driving past the football field of the deserted former high school, Kelly pulled the truck over. He was looking in the rearview mirror. He had done this more than once during the tour, letting people pass us as we crept around the neighborhood.
“Come on, drive around me!” he said. Finally the car passed us. He watched it go.
“I’m real leery about people following me,” he said. “I wouldn’t say
He pointed at a small soft case resting between us on the floor of the cab.
“Oh,” I said. “You mean—”
“That’s right,” and then he was holding it up, a heavy piece of metal that looked very much like a handgun.
The afternoon had taken a turn. “I keep it loaded,” he said. “And one in the chamber.” He said he carried the gun partly because of the crime rate in Port Arthur—but only partly.
“There are some people here who hate my guts,” he said. “They think I’m a troublemaker. That I’m going to make them lose their jobs. But I am not trying to shut the refineries down. I just think they need to abide by the regulations we already have. By the Clean Air Act. And they’re not.”
A phrase like “abide by the Clean Air Act,” I noticed, took on a nice urgency when you waved a loaded .40 caliber around while saying it.
We passed by a storage yard full of components for the Motiva expansion. Kelley was talking about the products that came from the refineries. He knew they were important. He knew we all used them. He was, after all, driving a truck that probably got about fifteen miles to the gallon.
“My campaign has always been, it could be cleaner,” he said. “It could be done safer. Our health could be protected. The companies should open up. Let us know what’s going on. Let us make informed decisions.” We made a pair of right turns onto roads flanked by pipelines.
“In fairness,” he said, “they’re doing a little better.”
He stopped the truck. We had come to the Carver Terrace housing projects, a set of two-story brick buildings facing the Motiva refinery. Kelley pointed down a pathway.
“I was born right in there,” he told me. “First floor.”
He twisted around in his seat and pointed at a small, deserted playground across the street. “That old swing is the one I used,” he said.
Several hundred yards beyond the playground were the storage tanks of the Motiva refinery, and beyond them the refinery itself, a jungle of pipes and towers, steam plumes and winking flares. The breeze carried a rancid aftertaste.
“We would breathe this air,” said Kelley, staring at the refinery. “We used to joke about it. My mother would say, ‘That’s money you smell.’ And we’d say, ‘No, that’s death!’”
“I guess it’s both,” I said.
He sighed. “Yeah. It’s both. But it wasn’t
It was an irony of Kelley’s work. With one breath he called the refineries a “cancer” that needed to be cut out of the city, and with the next he lobbied for their owners to hire more locals.
“Look which way all the traffic’s going,” he said as we passed the gate of the Motiva plant. It was the end of the shift, and all the cars were headed out of town. “These people work here, but they don’t live here.” Kelley wanted jobs for West Port Arthur. If it was going to suffer the refineries’ effects, shouldn’t it also share in the wealth? In an area so dominated by industry, half the point of environmental activism was just to get a piece of the action.
On a bright weekend afternoon, I went for a run. Valero shone in the sun as I approached it at a blistering saunter. Seen like this, with time to look, it was somehow hypnotic in its tangles of silver and rust, its smokestacks and flares and steam plumes. Deep inside its chambers and towers, the entire roster of hydrocarbons was dividing
