Because many slaves were sold into slavery at a young age, they are likely to remember very little about their lives before their experience as slaves. Beloved's search for his past is similar to this, in that it survives through the stories told about his past life. For Beloved, stories from the past reaffirm her short existence and remind her of a time when she received her mother's complete love. As seen on page 69, telling stories has become “a way to nourish her,” to sustain her existence as a ghostly presence. In holding such stories of the past, Beloved was in a sense reaffirming his previous existence and constructing a past on the words spoken by his mother, a process in which a victim of slavery might engage. Closely related to the topic of Beloved's quest because her backstory is the ongoing search for motherly love. In the era of slavery, every African American was treated as property. Even when mothers gave birth to children, they technically didn't even own them, as the owner of the ointment could auction off his children. The idea of ​​having a mother-son relationship was almost non-existent. This connection is one of the strongest emotional bonds in all of nature, even observed in animals. One of the main themes of Beloved concerns such a mother and