Dusty Baker brought his new memoir, "Crossroads: A Memoir in Baseball and Life," to Marcus Books in North Oakland on Sunday — the oldest Black-owned independent bookstore in the country, at MLK Jr. Way and 39th, where the tensions the book maps have always been held in the same room.

On Sunday morning, the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and 39th Street in North Oakland was about as close to a crossroads as a corner gets.

Johnnie B. Baker Jr. — Dusty Baker, the Hall of Fame manager — walked into Marcus Books and, by his own account, saw his mother. "When I look around here, I really see my mom," Baker told the packed crowd, according to reporting by the SF Standard. "I see my dad, too. But I really see my mom."

The visit was a stop on Baker's Northern California bookstore tour for his new memoir, "Crossroads: A Memoir in Baseball and Life," co-written with Steve Kettmann and published this month. Oakland Tribune columnist and NBC Sports Bay Area analyst Monte Poole led the conversation; visitors arrived to John Coltrane's "Like Sonny" coming through the shop's speakers.

Marcus Books, at MLK Jr. Way and 39th, is the oldest Black-owned independent bookstore in the country. Julian and Raye Richardson founded it in 1960 — initially as a San Francisco print shop named after the Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey — and it is now run by their daughter Blanche Richardson and granddaughter Cherysee Calhoun. The front window carries a line from Audre Lorde; the walls hold posters and portraits of civil rights leaders. "My grandparents created the store as a place for Black folks to come and learn about themselves," Calhoun told the SF Standard. "It's a bring-some, get-some kind of vibe."

It was an apt address for the memoir. Baker's "Crossroads" charts the same tensions the corner has always absorbed: his father, Johnnie B. Baker Sr., listened to Miles Davis and gravitated toward MLK's vision of reconciliation; his mother Christine hung a picture of Malcolm X on the wall. At 15, Baker wanted to change his name to Dusty X. His father's response, as Baker retold it Sunday, was unambiguous: "I brought you into this world, and I'll take you out of it."

The memoir moves from Baker's childhood in Riverside through segregated minor-league stops in the South to a managing career across five teams — beginning with the Giants in 1993 — and eventually to Cooperstown. Baker called Marcus Books "perhaps the greatest bookstore that I have ever seen."

Poole, the moderator, described Baker's arc as "Forrest Gumpish" — so many places, so many people. At MLK and 39th on a Sunday, one more room to fill.