When I meet new people here in Chicago where I live, I often feel like I’m in an AA meeting: “Hi. My name is Brian, and I’m a Panhandler. I’ve been southern for 25 years now.” As the supporting yet slightly pitying looks dart back and forth and the polite applause dies down, I have to ask myself, “Will I ever NOT be a southerner?”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t want to be southern. I ask this question as a start to understanding what it means to be southern, what other people seem to know about me when they divine that I’m from the Panhandle of Florida and NOT from Miami, and to discover what it is that is perceived to be so different about the South compared to the rest of the country. 

Thus The Panhandler’s Guide. Through this blog my two partners in intellectual me-search and I will try to expose what it means to be from, and to be in, the Panhandle and the South. We want to tackle this challenge through a mixture of empirical data and good old fashioned unsubstantiated anecdotes from our own lives to help get that “rich description” anthropologists are always going on about. 

You may at this point be wondering about my credentials. Am I the quintessential image of a grits eating, pick-up truck driving, overalls wearing, church going, tobacco picking, banjo playing good old boy? Well, no. But I’m not the opposite, either. In the South I’m not quite Southern enough, but in the rest of the country I’m enough Southern to be typecast as such.

I was born in the Florida Panhandle. My parents moved out of Miami in the late 1970s as refugees from the race riots (like the Arthur McDuffie Riots) towards a more picturesque and simple life, in the fashion of “The Waltons” or “Little House on the Prairie.” They stopped in Tallahassee for a few years before purchasing land in the small town of Live Oak in Suwannee County. In 1980, Suwannee county had 22,287 residents (we’re in the data section now, by the way) and ranked as 46 out of 67 counties by population – meaning 21 counties had even fewer residents. This, dear reader, is a rural area: 33 people per square mile, which is 36 times less dense than Miami and 386 times less dense than the city of Chicago.

My mother was a nurse, and my father began as a school teacher and then ventured into running a series of his own businesses beginning with weaning calves and selling them as mature cows, and then operated a mobile sawmill (jobs which, by the way, were wildly unpleasant for me at the time but great icebreaking stories now). Both enterprises failed to gain fiscal traction, and so we relied almost exclusively on a nurse’s salary until I was finishing high-school, remaining in the mobile home that was originally meant to be temporary. I mention this to allow the reader to place me in class terms: I, unlike seemingly every undecided voter in America, could only aspire to be middle class, and this economic identity colors my view of the world as I work on my Ph.D. at the upper-class private University of Chicago.

And, for any readers who were misled by the title of this blog, the focus of this site is the Florida Panhandle and is about neither the culinary instrument nor destitute beggars.

Not yet, anyway.