"It takes a village to raise a child" is a quote that rings true in the African and African-American community. Starting with one's African roots and transcending to slavery, it was not uncommon for a woman who was not the biological parent of a child to raise him/her as if he/she were her very own child alongside the blood parents. Mamma has been a name that has been coined to fit the role of not only your personal mother in the black community, but also the neighborhood nurturing, female figure whom always seems to have every child's adoration and admiration in her surrounding communal.
             This motherhood by way of fosterage is nonetheless seen in "Beloved" and "A Mercy", by way of characters Nan, Sethe and Lina. The two women serve as the nurturers to lost, young and black girls who do not seem to know their way in an unfair and harsh world. The dependency of Sethe, Beloved and Florens on their foster mothers is one that signifies the deep relationship a woman can have with a child who is not technically considered her own. In both Beloved and A Mercy, the reader can observe a special union established by fostering mothers that is based on love and protection for orphaned girls. The amount of care and love bestowed upon the foster children in the novel signify the depths of the maternal instincts of women, despite the presence, or lack of blood relations.
             Not ironic is it that Sethe serves as a foster parent in her novel simply because she too was raised as a foster child. In "Beloved" one is able to view how the protagonist was herself raised by a communal, slave mother, which was very fitting to the black race during that era. Black mothers were expected to toil in the field, or house of the slave master, thus leaving their children to be cared for by the local caretaker of the black children. For Sethe, she came to know the black woman deemed Nan in the novel as mother, because her biological mother not only was rarely aroun...