What does it augur when kidnappings are part of the primal scene of postcolonial nation-building? In this chapter, I explore the emblematic nature of kidnapping in the African diasporan colonial encounter with the conditions of literary culture. I argue that the Middle Passage, as a founding history of forced migration, was strikingly revisited in the liminal and urgent representations of kidnappings in the families of Toussaint Louverture and Henry Christophe during the Haitian Revolution and independence. The chapter begins with a text that is perhaps the closest thing to a French slave narrative in the Haitian revolutionary tradition: the narrative by a former slave named Praxelles representing the kidnapping and death of the eldest son, Ferdinand, of Henry Christophe. It is an eyewitness missive from “black Paris” documenting the downfall of a privileged son of the Haitian Revolution under the defeat of the French in Saint-Domingue. I then move on to the complex narratives of the kidnappings and semi-captive exile of Toussaint Louverture and his immediate familial entourage, which span a period from the Directory to the middle of the nineteenth century. Invoking the work of Benedict Anderson to broach the intrusion of layers of African diasporan and Haitian revolutionary kidnappings into the relationship between novel and nation in the imagining of New World communities, I argue that the history of kidnapping points to a different model of narratives in Haitian revolutionary and early independence history: kidnapped narratives.