I saw Negrita, for the first time, in 2018, on a shelf in Barcelona where I presumed, she had always been. Her name emblazoned on the bottle, “Negrita rhum” was not shy about the history fermenting inside of her. Inviting me in, the rum’s branding alone caught my eye before the full story made itself apparent. Slender and dark, her bottle was brown, blue, red, and yellow. Negrita, the rum’s namesake was indisputably black — her face, a familiar one. When I looked at her, then, I thought for a second that I recognized myself in her image. There I was, a black girl staring at a cooler and mistaking the darkness for my own reflection, mistaking myself for Negrita. But I am not Negrita. I cannot be. Negrita is not a girl so much as she is an amalgamation of colonial ingredients. She is a history of black girlhood distilled by time and brutality. And thus, the story of Negrita does not begin with a girl in an aisle. The story of Negrita starts with a man