In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison eloquently describes the horrors of slavery, while at the same time delving into the extremes of maternal love. The story revolves around the lives of an escaped slave, Sethe, and her daughter, Denver. However, their home is haunted by the revenant of Sethe's first daughter, Beloved, who Sethe killed twenty-eight days after arriving at her mother-in-law's home after escaping from a plantation. Through the use of symbols, choice of setting, and manipulation of characters, Morrison demonstrates how slavery influenced parent-child relationships and redefined the term maternal love. Morrison uses symbols, such as breastfeeding and color, throughout the novel to state that it is impossible that before Baby Suggs moved to 124, she was born into slavery where her captors called her Jenny. Over the course of her life on the plantations, Baby Suggs had nine children with different men. Sadly, Baby Suggs never met eight of her nine children because they were taken from her. With her ninth child, Baby Suggs doesn't even try to learn his characteristics. He reflects, “The last of his children, who he barely looked at when he was born because it wasn't worth trying to learn characteristics that you'd never see change in adulthood anyway” (139). Morrison uses Baby Suggs to represent motherhood on a plantation. She points out that enslaved mothers could not form bonds with their children because many were taken away in infancy to be enslaved on other plantations. Morrison goes on to use a more poignant example to convey this concept to his readers when Sethe describes her memory of her mother in Denver and Beloved: “She picked me up and carried me behind the smokehouse. Back there she opened her dress in the front, lifted her breasts and pointed underneath them. Right on his rib there was a circle and a cross burned right into the skin” (61). The only way Sethe could recognize her mother from all the other slaves was a branding symbol under her breast. Morrison uses Sethe's memory to appeal strongly to her readers' emotions to accentuate the inability of mothers to form close relationships with their children on the plantations. Through these representations, Morrison aptly communicates the cruelty of the forced separation of families as a result of slavery.