What It's Like to Panhandle

http://www.alternet.org/economy/what-its-panhandle



If there are secrets to successful begging, ways to stir people's souls, Brenda Johnson swears she doesn't know them.

You might think the sight of her--a woman in her 50s, sitting on a busted rollie bag, hunched from the pack on her back, inches from cars rolling off a freeway--would do the trick.

But no. Perched on a spit of grass at a bustling intersection in south San Jose, Johnson, as she wants to be called, in a threadbare brown kerchief, layers of sweaters and long black skirt, like an extra from Ken Burns’ Dustbowl series, had no luck at all for an hour and a half the other day. No one so much as tossed her a quarter. No one even smiled.

“It’s funny like that,” she said as cars whizzed by. Drivers who had to stop for a red light avoided eye contact. Johnson’s cardboard sign, "Please Help,” under her chest on her lap, made her point, but only one driver, a woman in a Ford Focus, came close. She looked through her purse, frowned, waved empty hands behind her windshield and mouthed: “Sorry.”

“I’ll try again later,” Johnson said, packing it in to head to a nearby encampment where she had been staying. “You never know.”