King David Harris -- And He Danced

David danced before the LORD with all his might; David was girded with a linen ephod. (2Sa 6:14 NRS)

I am a direct descendant of King David, King David Harris that is. He was my mother’s maternal grandfather. I don’t know a lot about him. When I was a child there was an old one-room shack in the lower field on my Grandparent’s farm, down by a spring and closer to the river. The shack was called “the old kitchen.” There were a couple of pear trees at the shack that seemed to be loaded every year. I absolutely loved the jam my mother would make.  In time I learned the old kitchen had once been adjacent to a beautiful two-story house King David had built for my great-grandmother, “the finest in the county.” But after he died it fell into disrepair and was eventually torn down.

As I heard it, somewhere in his life he developed a weakness for alcohol and when he was drunk he was abusive of my great-grandmother. He died apparently inebriated after a night of heavy drinking. He was by himself when he stopped at a spring for a drink of water on his way home and apparently choked to death.

Like his namesake, my great grandfather was known to shake a leg. My Dad said that he had heard that whenever King David got some spirits in him he was the best buck dancer in the region. My Dad also said that people who knew both him and my grandmother, Maggie Harris O’Quinn, said that when the Holy Spirit came on her she would dance just like her father. He died in 1921, long before I was born. But I was blessed to witness my grandmother dance under the influence of the Spirit. Well into her seventies, she could move like the lead dancer in a River Dance performance, when she felt the Power.  Someday, I shall dance with wild abandonment.