In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison eloquently depicts the horrors of slavery, while simultaneously delving into the extremities of motherly love. The story revolves around the lives of a runaway slave, Sethe, and her daughter, Denver. However, their house is haunted by the revenant of Sethe's first daughter, Beloved, whom Sethe killed twenty-eight days after arriving at her stepmother's house after escaping from a plantation. Through his use of symbols, choice of setting, and manipulation of characters, Morrison demonstrates how slavery affected parent-child relationships and redefined the term maternal love. Morrison uses symbols, such as breastfeeding and color, throughout the novel to argue that it is impossible for Baby Suggs to move to 124, she was born into slavery where her captors called her Jenny. Throughout her life on the plantations, Baby Suggs had nine children with different men. Sadly, Baby Suggs never knew eight of her nine children because they were taken away from her. By the ninth child, Baby Suggs doesn't even try to learn his traits. She reflects: "The last of her children, who she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn't worth it trying to learn characteristics you'd never see change." into adulthood” (139). Morrison uses Baby Suggs to represent motherhood on a plantation. She points out that enslaved mothers could not bond with their children because many were taken away at a young age to be enslaved on other plantations. Morrison goes on to use a more intense example to convey this concept to his readers when Sethe describes her memory of her mother in Denver and Beloved: “She came and picked me up and carried me behind the smoking room. There, she opened the front of her dress, lifted her chest and showed it underneath. Right on his rib there was a circle and a cross burning right into his skin” (61). The only way Sethe could recognize her mother among all the other slaves was a branded symbol under her chest. Morrison uses Sethe's memory to largely appeal to her reader's emotions to emphasize the inability of mothers to form close relationships with their children on the plantations. Through these depictions, Morrison aptly communicates the cruelty of the forced separation of families as a result of slave ownership.