Never Let Em’ See You Sweat

By: Jazmyne Courtnii Byrd

The night the lights went out, Shaquana Cuttino cried herself to sleep on her kitchen floor. She was a single mother of two girls, one of whom has special needs. She was working two minimum wage jobs, her bills were behind, and her children’s father had just been sentenced to federal prison, leaving her to care for them alone. She came home from work that day to a dark house, and she prayed and talked to God until she fell asleep right there on the floor.

Then she woke up. “I knew I had to make a change,” she says.

That same week, she enrolled at South Carolina State University as a drama major, and she made herself a promise. If she didn’t graduate in four years, she was joining the military.

Drama didn’t last. By her sophomore year, she’d switched to nursing, figuring there was no money in acting and that a nurse could earn a nice salary. It was a mismatch from the start. She doesn’t like math or science, and nursing was full of both. Her grades slid to Cs and Ds, and she was miserable.

The turning point came on a cruise, of all places. She met a man there, and they talked and hung out for most of the trip. During their second conversation, he said something that stopped her cold. “Shaquana, you are an attorney. You are supposed to be an attorney.”

She laughed it off, or tried to. She was a single mom. She couldn’t afford the time or the money for three more years of school after college. His answer was simple. “You do what God called you to do and let Him worry about the rest!”

She didn’t even know what to major in, so he advised her. She went back to campus and switched to political science with a concentration in pre law. She loved the history classes and the political science classes, and she graduated cum laude.

The road from there wasn’t a straight line. After law school at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, it took her six years just to sit for the bar. Life happened in those years. She joined a network marketing company, where she met the man who became her husband and, later, her ex. Together they had two sons. So she was a mother of four and a wife, running a network marketing business and a travel agency, all while the law degree waited.

If you want to know where her grit comes from, she’ll start with God. “He has never left or forsaken me,” she says, “even when I have deserved that he leaves or forsakes me.” Then she’ll tell you about her parents.

Her father, a retired military man and salesman, has always been her best friend. His rule has stuck with her for life. “Never let ’em see you sweat, never let ’em see you cry.” He still says it to her today. She remembers one of her first cases as a new lawyer out on her own. She was representing a friend, and the defendant showed up with three attorneys from one of the biggest law firms around. She was terrified. Her father kept telling her the same thing. “They aren’t smarter than you!” They won.

Her mother gave her the tough love. When Shaquana became a mother at 21, her mom made it clear what she would and wouldn’t do. “I am not watching your kids so you can go party and make more babies. I will keep them while you go to school or work.” Shaquana says she respects her so much for it. It was the push she needed to get it together.

Being a Black attorney carries its own weight. She points to the numbers. According to the American Bar Association, only 4.91 percent of lawyers are Black, even though Black people make up roughly 14 percent of the U.S. population. It also comes with moments that people don’t talk about enough. She was once sitting in a federal courthouse, waiting to represent a defendant in a criminal case. Only attorneys are allowed to have their phones in the courtroom, and she had hers out, going over her notes. A Black bailiff walked over and told her to turn it off. She smiled and said, “I am a lawyer.”

He was instantly apologetic, and she could tell he was genuinely shocked. What he said next, she won’t repeat, but they were kind, encouraging words. They also told her that not many Black women attorneys walk through those doors, and that he was proud of her.

More than once, white attorneys have asked whether she’s really a lawyer and where she got her degree. She’s proud to tell them. She earned it at Southern University Law Center, and she took the same bar they took and passed it the first time, under conditions that would have made them give up. “And then I run circles around those same lawyers in the courtroom.”

Visibility, to her, means responsibility. She gives back to her community in a lot of ways, including pro bono legal work for people who are underserved. Every year since she became an attorney, she’s been on the South Carolina Supreme Court’s Pro Bono Honor Roll, putting in more than 100 hours a year at no charge. She also lets students shadow her on career day, and she’s introduced some of them to key people in the state, including a past mayor of Columbia, a Black man she says did an outstanding job. She wants those kids to know the sky is not the limit.

When it comes to supporting Black owned businesses, she thinks it goes well beyond swiping a card. It starts with talking about the business to the people in your life. “Word of mouth is still one of the strongest forms of advertisement,” she says. It also means handling problems privately whenever you can. She knows as a litigator that some issues do end up in court, but she’s seen too many social media posts that go something like, I try to support Black businesses, but this happened, and that’s why I won’t. We give big corporations chance after chance, she points out, even when the service falls short. Why not give our own smaller businesses the same grace?

Her version of support is taking your complaint to the owner’s ear, not the air. And if the owner won’t fix it, take your business elsewhere without the bashing. So why start her own firm? “I wanted to create freedom for my family.” She wanted ownership over her time, her income, and the legacy she leaves her children. The Cuttino Law Firm gave her a way to build something that reflects her values while standing beside people during some of the hardest moments of their lives.

And she isn’t done. Over the next five years, she sees the firm growing into a larger regional practice with a strong private wealth, business, and legacy planning focus. She wants it to be a platform for community impact and a training ground where Black attorneys can learn, lead, and build careers they’re proud of. “I want the firm to protect more than legal claims,” she says. “I want it to help families, entrepreneurs, and business owners protect what they have built and create legacies that last.”

Not bad for a woman who once cried on her kitchen floor and got up the next morning to change her life.