Whitebeard Quotes

The embrace is usually read as pure forgiveness, and the pages around it make it something harder. Squard has driven a sword into him on the strength of a story: that Whitebeard traded the 43 allied captains to Sengoku in exchange for Ace and his own crew. He was told his men would be spared if he stabbed Whitebeard, the fighting seems to bear the story out (pirates shout that the Navy does seem to be attacking only them), and crowds watching on the screens are already repeating that Whitebeard sold out his friends. A father who wanted only to comfort one son could have done it quietly. Whitebeard does it on a battlefield, and within a page he has named the authors, asking whether Akainu told him this and calling Sengoku as cunning as ever. The tenderness is real. It is also the only rebuttal that could work in that moment, because no denial from the accused outweighs a stab wound, and an embrace of the man who inflicted it does. Squard's reply, that he tried to kill him, is the reader's objection spoken aloud, and the answer he gets is a question about who put the idea in his head.

Squard's complaint, made in full on page 12, is not quite the one this answers. The crew he had fought beside for so long was annihilated by Gold Roger himself, he says, and Whitebeard knew he hated the man; what he cannot forgive is being kept in the dark, laughed at when he became friends with Ace, and never told. He should have been told the truth, he shouts. Whitebeard replies to a different charge, whether a son can be blamed for a father, and on that charge he is plainly right and not especially brave. The strongest objection to the line is that it wins the easy argument and leaves the hard one standing. There is an answer, and it sits in Squard's own speech. He became friends with Ace before he knew whose son Ace was, which makes the closing question more than rhetoric: nothing Ace did has changed since that friendship, only a piece of information has. The concealment is not defended on these two pages, and the silence is the honest part. Whitebeard does not pretend the secret was fair. He only refuses to let it make Ace guilty.