A Slave in the family

One of the stories Aunt Maidie would tell me of her mother was of the slave her family owned. They were modest farmers, but owned one man, whom they kept chained up at night out in the barn. God knows what that was like. The barn couldn't have been much (I've seen what was left of the farmhouse and it was no great shakes itself), and it gets cold in Northern Virginia in the winter time. ("The snows of Virginia are deep," as Ashley Wilkes says in Gone with the Wind).
At any rate, like most slaves, he took off as soon as the Union army was near. Most slaves liberated themselves, and did not wait for Mr Lincoln.

I've always felt as if I were related in some strange way. I was told his name and thought that if I could remember it he might really exist in a way he won't now that I have long forgotten it. I visited Aunt Maidie years later when she was dying. I wanted to ask her if she could remember the man my family kept chained in the barn, but there were other matters to discuss. I still don't remember his name.