At St. Michael’s, small graves sit in view of Home Depot. The triangular cemetery rests in the middle of a highway interchange, bounded on all three sides by humming roads that cordon its hills off from a sunbaked world of outlet stores and cheap motels. In the children’s section, headstones press up against the fence and sit crooked on ground disturbed by tree roots. The dead are mourned in different languages. Our baby died 1951. Unser liebes kind May–June 1937. Nuestro inolvidable hijo 1933–1937. Across a small path are the cemetery’s two most famous residents: the composer Scott Joplin and the inventor Granville T. Woods. Both black men working around the turn of the century, they died impoverished despite their success and were buried in unmarked graves—Woods in a coffin shared with two infants and another adult, Joplin with another adult man and a teenage girl—where they lay in anonymity until the historian and collector Middleton Harris had plaques placed over their burial sites in the 1970s. David L. Head, a historian, author, and former …