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 Know your roots. The statement is Yendys Nefer-Atum's motto. She recently had a sign with it hung outside her new business in Crown Heights. The day she did so, she felt like she was giving birth. It was "like the baby was coming," said Nefer-Atum. "I needed to start feeling like I'm a business owner. It's a whole transformation for me."
For Nefer-Atum, a loctician and spiritual healer, knowing your roots means knowing your identity, being true to what you are meant to be at each moment in life. In her case, being a business owner.
But don't call her business a beauty salon and don't use the term "dreadlocks" around her. At the Cowrie Shell Center, Nefer-Atum twists her clients' hair into locks, equal in appearance to dreadlocks but different in significance. When she locks hair, Nefer-Atum, originally from St. Philip, Barbados West Indies, transcends her Caribbean roots and offers her clients a spiritual transformation that knows no nationality
Nefer-Atum's business is "not just a place where grooming takes place. It's a very spiritual process," said Kerliene Johnson, a client since September. "[It's about] 'getting locks and defining who I want to be for the next period of my life."
At the Cowrie Shell Center, clients like Johnson walk into a space filled with the smells of incense and candles hovering over dozens of plants. The plants represent life, said Nefer-Atum. The walls are sky blue, the color of water from a mother's womb. Fabric hangs from the ceiling like clouds. Nefer-Atum, 35, sits her clients in a chair in the back comer, First she asks them what they want to do with their hair and why. After explaining her process, she begins. First come a natural shampoo, herbal conditioning and hot oil treatment. Then she parts her clients' hair and twists it, making little coils using a natural gel. Finally, her clients sit under the dryer for 20 minutes, and when they emerge, they begin a six-month to one-year wait for their hair to permanently lock up in a twist.
Nefer-Atum traces her process back to a Barbadian ritual she experienced as a child, before leaving the country for the U.S. when she was ten, she said, On Sundays, families would gather outdoors, and mothers would wash their children's hair, then use natural oils to shape it into corkscrews and let it air dry, But the ritual included one major step Nefer-Atum excludes. "Somewhere around 5 or 6 0' clock you were sitting on a stool in the kitchen a couple of feet from the stove, and you were staring at this steel comb that your mom was putting into the flame," said Nefer-Atum. "And the palms of your hands were sweating because you were going to have that hot comb with smoke coming off of it going through your scalp."
It was all to make the children have straight hair and look pretty for school, said Nefer- Atum, who believes the practice started during the time of slavery when black slaves comb Caucasian children's hair and then tried to make their own children's hair just as straight.
"So I'm changing up that old ritual, making it less painful. And then you can enjoy having your natural hair," said Nefer-Atum, a woman with light brown, long locks who generously adorns herself with jewelry.
Sixty percent of Nefer-Atum's clients are immigrants from the Caribbean islands, she said. Half of them come because they are tired of using chemical processes to straighten their hair and conform to the Caucasian image of beauty. "The other half are the ones waking up to the culture and spirit because there is something that happens spiritually when locking the hair for a lot of people. And I believe this happens when you are in balance with your diet," said Nefer-Atum. "They start their locks and then they start asking me about changing their diet, cleaning out their body. "
Nefer-Atum promotes a vegetarian diet, heavy on raw vegetables and water. "Don't you realize how strong we were when we were back in the islands?" she said, thinking back to her childhood in the Barbadian countryside. "You were not a child in Barbados or Jamaica or any of these other [Caribbean] places and not having some green bush to drink, some bitter bush, some root that somebody pulled up and chopped up with their mortar and pestle."
But in her search to find the origin of her practices, she looks beyond the Caribbean to ancient Egypt. In a closet in the back of the center, she keeps thick books of Egyptian artwork and references ancient pieces that portray palm rolling, the method used to twist hair. All along her sky blue walls, she has hung tapestries of Egyptian kings and queens who represent divine beauty, balance, sacred space, consciousness and divine wisdom. They serve as meditations for her clients, she said.
"It' a connection of the goddess within me," said Suhaylah Owusu, a 54-year-old fashion . designer from Panama who decided to lead .anatural lifestyle after being diagnosed with breast cancer a decade ago. "It [locking] makes me centered. I'm more focused."
The spiritual element appeals to a variety of people. In fact, Nefer-Atu~ disassociates locking from any particular nation, particularly Jamaica, which-has popularized dreadlocks through Rastafarianism. "Dread is short for dreadful," said Nefer-Atum. "Dread is not something you want associated with your hair."
Yet the connection between Jamaica and locks continues in Brooklyn, which has a heavy Jamaican population. Those that link the two sometimes criticize non-Caribbean people who choose to lock their hair.
"The Jamaicans are very annoyed with me," said Mary Givens, a 48-year-old evangelical minister from Brooklyn who has been a client for four years. "They feel that I am desecrating their religion. "I told the brothers, I said, 'what right do you have to tell me how to do my hair because I wasn't born where you were?'"
For Givens, the experience is spiritual not cultural. "I said no more artificial stuff. No more trying to look like a white girl," said Givens. "For the first time in my life, I want to be who I am. Just that concept alone is very spiritual."
The 'spiritual element' separates the Cowrie Shell Center from other salons in the area that lock hair. Other salons are capitalizing on the fad of wearing locks created by the media through Benetton, McDonald's and Gap commercials, said Nefer-Atum.
"They are not doing it from the same place I'm doing it from because they don't really understand it," said Nefer-Atum. "They see it as a way to make money. It's a divine purpose that I have here," she said.
Click here to more about this story or contact Cowrie Shell Center.
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