Sula’s Butterflies, Janie’s Pear Tree and Celie’s Wildflowers
A literary bedroom inspired by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston
A Peek Inside My Bedroom
My bedroom used to be the dining room. It had the best views of the ocean, and one day I decided that was reason enough to swap the spaces entirely — turning the dining room into a cozy, dark, boutique-style bedroom, and transforming my former bedroom into a maker studio.
I wanted the bedroom to feel like a secret. A small boutique hotel suite — quiet, intimate, and a little dramatic. A space for nesting, reading, lounging, napping, dreaming, and staring out at the water. There’s no door, just curtains, so it feels tucked away but still open to the light.
The Paint
The paint is from Clare Paint, a Black-owned, women-led company, in the shade Goodnight Moon. I built everything else around that feeling — soft, dark, moody. A Black girl sanctuary. The color does something particular in different lights: in the morning, it feels deep and still, at night, it feels like velvet. It was the first decision, and it made every other decision easier.
I did most of the construction work myself with my chop saw and brad nailer — the board-and-batten molding, the bulletin board, the general bones of the room. But the wallpaper is what the room is really about. That took something different. That took sitting with books.
Designing The Wallpaper
I designed the wallpaper myself, using Midjourney and inspired by traditional chinoiserie but reimagined entirely through the imagery and language of three novels: Sula by Toni Morrison, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
These three writers were in conversation with one another across decades, all tracing the inner lives of Black women with fierce tenderness. It felt right that their imagery should live together here, in the room where I am most myself.
The butterflies come from Sula. In the novel, Ajax releases them in Sula’s bedroom, a scene that is at once an act of love and abandonment — beauty and loss held in the same moment. I wanted that complexity on my walls. A reminder that beautiful things can contain difficult truths, and that a woman can be fully known and still not held.
The pear tree comes from Their Eyes Were Watching God. It is Janie’s first understanding of desire — she watches bees move through the blossoms and feels, for the first time, the stirring of what her life could be. Translating it into the wallpaper meant sitting with that passage until I understood not just what it described, but what it felt like. The tree isn’t decorative. It’s an awakening. That had to come through in the shape of the branches and the pears.
The purple wildflowers come from The Color Purple — from Shug, who tells Celie that it pisses God off when you walk past the color purple in a field and don’t notice it. It’s a theology of attention, of presence, of refusing to let the world’s beauty go unremarked. I think about that every morning.
Waking Up
Every morning I open my eyes to Janie’s pear tree, Shug and Celie’s wildflowers, Sula’s butterflies — characters and symbols that have lived in me since I first read those books decades ago. It’s a wonderful thing to sleep inside these stories.
From the window, I can see the sky and the ocean. The room is dark but never heavy. It feels like the inside of something meaningful — a thought, a dream, a book you return to again and again because it keeps giving you something new.
I built this room to be a sanctuary. But what I didn’t fully expect was how much it would feel like a conversation — with these writers, with these women, with some quieter, more certain version of myself.
It gives me so much joy and gratitude to wake up here every morning.
Thank you for sharing Dara! Your room looks amazing! The novels you drew inspiration from for the wallpaper sound so good to read too.
Love your bedroom! That window seat is the best!