Talking Up a Storm

The next thing Kaufman remembers is waking up at North Broward Medical Center with two members of Pompano's Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church praying over her. She saw that as a sign. "I knew instantly that everything was going to be all right," she says. And that she'd start going to church. Often. She asked Hopewell's pastor, Robert C. Stanley, to baptize her.

She was in a wheelchair for eight months after the accident, and she used a walker for 12 weeks after that. It took another year to ditch a sparkly purple cane, which was like a security blanket. "I really wasn't supposed to get up and walk when I did," she says, "and I certainly wasn't supposed to walk as well as I'm walking today."

But Kaufman is tough. She went on the air after the accident with her jaw still wired shut. Most of the scars are now barely visible, thin white lines. "There's nothing but metal in here," she says, tapping her right shin. Then she lifts her right pants leg to reveal a seven-inch depression above the knee. From the thigh down, she says, her right leg is numb. Her motorcycle-riding days are over.

It's a Wednesday evening, and around 200 people have come to Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church for its midweek worship service. There are perhaps five white faces in the sanctuary. Most of the church's members are black.

Bass notes spill from an organ as Willie Smith Jr., the minister of music, asks people to get on their feet and raise their hands if they came to worship the Lord.

Joyce Kaufman is on her tippy-toes, hands lifted high above her head. She's clapping louder than pretty much anybody in the nearby pews. A guitar and tambourine join in, and the volume of the music slowly rises over several minutes. "Amen," Kaufman says. "Hallelujah!" She bends her arms upward at 45-degree angles and pumps both fists. Her eyes are closed, chin tilted toward the ceiling.

The music quickens and builds to a crescendo. Then it abruptly stops. Sporadic praises escape from the mouths of several parishioners, breaking the silence.

"This is just an outward expression of the way I feel tonight," Smith says.

Kaufman murmurs, "Yes, it is." Then: "Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord."

Earlier that day, on the radio, Kaufman was drumming up opposition to the DREAM Act, which would give permanent residency status to alien minors who want to join the military or attend college. Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, had attached the DREAM Act to the 2008 defense appropriations bill. The indication was that the Democrats would approve money for the Iraq War if the Republicans passed the DREAM Act.

Kaufman was peeved. "These creeps use your future as a bargaining tool," she said on the air. Then she urged her listeners to call the senators who hadn't declared which way they'd vote. "Tell them to say 'No to the bad DREAM Act,' " she said. Then she broadcast the Senate hotline number.

It's talk radio activism, but is it Christian to punish teenagers because their parents broke the law? Is it compassionate?

During the program, a woman named Yolanda, from Hollywood, called to thank Kaufman for the information. Yolanda said she was getting all her friends to call senators and urge them to vote for the DREAM Act. That way, once the children got U.S. citizenship, they could sponsor their undocumented parents.

"Now I'm really mad," Kaufman said.

Off the air, in her free time, Kaufman visits lawbreakers every week as part of Hopewell's prison outreach ministry. Forgiveness is out there, for U.S. citizens.

At church on Wednesday night, a woman in the congregation asks everyone to pray for the six black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana, who had been charged with attempted second-degree murder for beating a white student unconscious. The beating followed months of racial tension and fights in Jena after white students hung nooses from a tree at the local high school.

The next day, the "Jena 6" is a topic on the Joyce Kaufman Show. Kaufman's talking points are: A schoolyard beating is just that — not attempted murder; and, any kid who hangs a noose from a tree to intimidate black students deserves to be beat up.

If given the choice of waking up tomorrow white or black, she suggests, most people would prefer to be white. If any listeners disagree, she'd like them to call in and tell her why.