WORD: Pass

. To exceed in excellence or worthiness; to surpass in some activity, quality, or degree

3. trans. To exceed or overstep (bounds, limits, rules, etc.); to deviate or digress from; (fig.) to go beyond (one's province, knowledge, etc.). Also intr.: to deviate, stray (obs.).

a. Of a person, or a soul or spirit: to go to one's spiritual destination.

Sarah Jane's one wish in life is to pass as a white person. Neither her mother nor Lora Meredith can understand why she would want to be something that she is not. But Sarah Jane is white, that's what she sees everyday. She doesn't act at all like her mother and if her mother is the meaning of black (in her adolescent mind) than she wants nothing to do with it. She wants to pass, she wants to exceed in excellence and be worthy of humanity, that is whiteness. Sarah Jane wishes to marry her imago and her physcial self, and the only thing keeping her from doing so is the one-drop rule. She refuses to surrend her person to what others think that she is, namely her mother. Her passing is not only to "overstep bounds, limtis, rules" by becoming white, but to pass as a human being in a society that wants to categorize who and what people are and are made to do/be. It just so happens that passing for her means playing her white double.