Beloved by Toni Morrison, through the historical and biographical lens displays the nourishment of being a single parent and how far one would go to show affection to their kin. Sethe in the beginning of story already has a dead child that wasn’t named because she was forced to kill her baby daughter because Sethe didn’t want her new baby to be forced into slavery like her. Just like Sethe, Morrison also raised a child by herself without a presence of a father. Both women, would go out of their ways to make sure their children get to live a happy life because they each what the best for their own child. Unlike Sethe, Morrison didn’t have to worry about being sold into slavery, as well as her child.

After the baby died, Sethe wanted to show how she regrets killing her child by getting a tombstone so the dead baby can actually have some peace. In this part of the story, Sethe doesn’t have any money to buy her daughter’s tombstone. In order to gain her daughter’s tombstone, Sethe made a deal with the engraver buy selling her body for it, “She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible—that for twenty minutes, heard the preacher say at the funeral (and all there was to say, surely engraved on her baby's headstone: Dearly Beloved. But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered” (1.15) What was illustrated in Sethe’s story is the need to show the affection that a mother shows to her first newborn all their lives but since the child had it’s throat slit, Sethe feels really guilty about killing her child that never had a chance to grow up. 

Making a connection from Sethe to Toni Morrison, Morrison experienced racism in the early stages of her life. Unlike her character, Morrison moved to Ohio to escape southern racism and got an education there. Sethe was born into Southern racism as a slave during the early start of slavery with no education. Throughout the book we see the history of slavery popping up in different parts of the story. The message that keeps recurring throughout this novel is the idea of, can slavery be forgiven since even 148 years later this is such a serious issue in America.