Is the data really in the superclass? Nope. At least not in your boiled down example. Since your HandlerMethods is inheriting its new method, the anon array containing _cgi is blessed into HandlerMethods. It should be enough for "sub cgi" to just return $self->{_cgi}. Try this little driver on your example:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Handler;
use Data::Dumper;

$x = HandlerMethods->new();

print Dumper( $x );
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-derby